The Prism Perspective: Your 19 senses👃🏼👁️👂🏼👅

Hi Friends

About twenty years ago, I went to a dance‑teacher seminar and came home with jazz‑hands. I had a stack of books, a handful of quirky musical instruments, and enough lesson plans to fuel a small nation of preschoolers. Creativity was abundant. Actual reading… less so. Most of those books sat untouched for a solid two years.

Then one day, the universe nudged me toward Smart Moves by Carla Hannaford. This was right around the time we were just beginning to use the phrase “nervous system” at Transformations Studio to explain what we were doing and why it worked.

I remember walking into work, holding the book open like a treasure map, saying, “Look! There’s a whole chapter on the sympathetic nervous system!”

In hindsight, it’s hilarious. A chapter. As if that was the whole story. But back then, nobody was talking about the nervous system, except in the context of something else. That tiny chapter felt like a revelation.

And honestly, it was the beginning of everything that came next.

That book led me to Awakening the Child Heart, also by Carla Hannaford. One of the great nuggets in that book was about our senses. Back then, the movement community mostly nodded toward the five senses everyone already knows: sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. If we were feeling extra nerdy, we might toss in proprioception.

When you look at that list, of course you already knew those as “the senses.” Nothing surprising there.

And when I ask you to put your attention on two points of location, you might notice that I often slip and tell you to sense those locations. Sensing is an unconscious activity. Maybe the language doesn’t matter too much, because either way, sensory stuff starts happening. You don’t get to choose what kind of information uploads—your system decides that part. What we can know is that the body changes. Something in that incoming data carried enough meaning for your brain to reorganize how you’re holding and moving yourself.

That list of senses also hints at what we don’t get direct sensory information about. Take weight, for example. How do you know a pound is a pound? Only through experience. Otherwise, you’re mostly interpreting weight as “more” or “less” based on other sensory inputs—like contact pressure.

My favorite homework assignment for clients? Go for a walk. Outside. Look at the list and see how many different senses get tickled when you do that. What are you waiting for? The spring flowers are waiting for you 🌷

Onwards, Amy

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Content is this email is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice or a replacement for therapy. This is, unapologetically, Amy’s soapbox. If something here struck a nerve, chances are you helped spark it—so own your part. The musings won’t last forever, but while they do, consider them an invitation to reflect, laugh, or squirm a little.