This article is based on the opening talk for the Sensory Awareness Conference at Mt. Madonna Center, Watsonville, CA, held in October 2006.

What is Sensory Awareness? I am using this question as a title for my opening talk to this conference, realizing very well that I cannot really give an answer but rather I want to use it as a tool for an exploration in what I see as important about our work at this time. If you explore this question, you will find different “answers” as I am finding different answers at different times. Asking questions is a crucial tool in our work. They help us to explore life – and ourselves, which, of course, are not two separate things. You will notice that in the course of my exploration today I will often talk about one thing and then jump to its opposite. In preparing my talk, these polarities kept calling for my attention.

A curious and confusing dichotomy runs (through) our lives. I call myself an “individual”, a whole that cannot be divided, even though this organism I call “I” houses countless tiny organisms, bacteria, etc., without which I would not be me. I am this whole only in the context of a web of life inside and out, in which countless “individuals” are inseparably interwoven. Life as we know it manifests in individual organisms - from the tiniest bacteria, to redwood trees, to the elaborate organisms we call humans, all interlinked as we share this planet that gave birth to us.