Meeting Report for 2nd May, Sensory Acuity with John Cassidy-Rice. John had put together a programme of games for us to explore each of our senses and work on making them more acute, or for some of us more cute! Robert Dilts from his Encyclopedia of NLP defines Sensory Acuity as:- "The ability to make refined sensory observations." Calibration:- "to do with noticing and recognising subtle cues and behavioural expressions associated with different thoughts and internal states." John started by offering us all food. Well a Californian Raisin actually. He invited us to feel it in our fingers and we indulged in a round of puns pondering on the raisin for this, wondering if it would be a fruitful experience, an opportunity to map our currant reality, some people started to wine and others were left graping for words, until we were allowed to put the raisin in our mouths and experience the difference. The point of all this was to bring us fully into the moment to notice our senses in action (2 words) to enhance the experience of eating the raisin. Do we move through life filtering out many sensations? How can we learn to bypass our filters and live more in the moment? As we stand with our feet slightly apart can we imagine we are stood on top of the world? Now not a lot of people know that our bodies contain 650 muscles, 30 of them in our face. Or that four fifths of everything we know reaches the brain through the eyes, or that smell is 10,000 times more acute than taste. But what we discovered in the next game was how much our conscious mind interferes with our intuition as we attempted to guess which hand the coin was in, and catch the dropped note between our fingers. Before the break we engaged in a dance of rapport and many of us experienced the synergy of moving in tune with another person. After the break we moved on to explore our Auditory acuity. How can we notice the difference in someone's experience just by listening? John had us sitting back to back but not touching to isolate our hearing from sight and feelings. Even so some reported that they "felt" the difference. Of course our skin not only acts as an eliminative organ but also as a drum resonating to our own vibration and capable of picking up changes in other vibrations. So maybe we don't just hear through our ears! Finally we moved on to John's version of Grandmother's footsteps. Once again many of us found our conscious mind intefering in the process of identification. Or we used some of our other senses of smell or hearing or peripheral vision, to help our poor kinesthetic sense make a better decision about who was creeping up behind us. We had a good evening with much laughter, but what was the point? I expected to be better at all the games John had devised than I actually was. This was based on my assumption that I have good sensory acuity. As a therapist I still believe that is the case. As me being in the NOW and noticing its impact on me I'm not so sure. Being totally present and aware for someone else is a good place to be for a Therapist. When off duty I now intend to use these skills to enjoy my present moments more fully. The feedback forms are full of new learnings that others made too. Thank you John for taking one of the basics of NLP and making it so useful. Return to NLP-South main site