THE SENSORY DOORWAY
Right now, as you read these words, your senses are already at work. Light is reaching your eyes. Air is touching your skin. Sounds — near and far — are arriving. You don't have to do anything to make this happen. The senses are always open, always receiving, always here.
What if this — this ordinary, ever-present sensory aliveness — is the most direct doorway you have to something extraordinary?
The Essence Way begins with a simple recognition: the same senses that help us navigate the practical world are also instruments of a deeper knowing. When we slow down enough to actually meet what our senses are receiving — the warmth of a cup in our hands, the quality of light in a room, the taste of something fresh from the garden — we begin to notice something more than information. We notice qualities. Spaciousness. Aliveness. Clarity. Warmth. A sense of wholeness that has nothing to do with our circumstances and everything to do with what's actually here.
These are what I call essence qualities — and the senses are how we find our way to them.
My Journey Through the Senses
I didn't arrive at this awareness through study. I arrived through my body, through years of walking in my valley, through gardening, through cooking, through slowly learning to be present to what was actually around me.
For a long time, I hated the wind.
Living in a valley in New Zealand, wind was a constant companion I didn't want. It swirled my hair, hurt my eyes, and overwhelmed my already overwhelmed nervous system. I fantasised about living somewhere calm and still — somewhere the wind couldn't reach me.
But something was quietly shifting. As I slowed down — through long walks in the valley, through the repetitive rhythm of gardening, through simply being present to what was around me — my senses began to open in a new way. I started noticing qualities in my experience that I had no name for yet: a spaciousness in the deep blue sky, an vibrancy in the birdsong, the aliveness of my feet massaging the earth. Without knowing it, I was beginning to come home to my own essential nature — and as I did, my capacity to meet what was here began to change.
Then one day, turning to walk home on a meadowtation, I noticed it was blustery — and I wasn't bothered. In fact, I was enjoying it. The swift fresh air softly caressed my skin as it blew firmly into my face and body. I paused to breathe it in deeply. The dynamic movement of nature was actually bringing life force to me.
From that day on, I didn't seek to live somewhere with no wind. Something had shifted — not in the wind, but in me. As I continued my journey in this way I became the still space for the wind to swirl and blow as much as it liked.
Looking back, I could see that my rejection of the wind had mirrored a deeper disconnection — from my essence, the aliveness that moves through all things. As I embodied more of my own essential nature, I was embodying the wind. The very thing I had pushed away became a teacher.
This is what the sensory doorway does. It doesn't ask you to add something to your experience. It invites you to stop pushing away what's already here — and to discover that what's here is far more than you thought.
How This Works:
Two Directions Through the Same Door
The sensory doorway serves people coming from very different places, and it brings something needed to each.
We all develop a relationship with our senses early on — and like any relationship, it can take on a particular quality. Some of us become anxiously attached to sensory experience: here everything can become amplified — we feel everything intensely, notice everything, are flooded by beauty and overwhelmed by noise and unable to regulate how much is coming in. The senses are too close, too much — and yet deeply needed. We swing between craving sensory richness and needing to shut it all out. Others develop a more avoidant relationship: here the senses recede into the background, the body becomes something below the neck that does its job, and whole dimensions of experience go unnoticed — not because they're absent, but because we've learned to live at a comfortable distance from them. We can even swing between an amplified version of the two.
Most of us lean one way or the other to various degrees. Both are ways of not quite being at home in our embodied experience. And the sensory doorway meets both, opening the door to something new.
If you're someone whose senses tend to be amplified
If you feel a lot, notice a lot, and sometimes find it all too much — this path isn't about managing that intensity or affirming it. It's about cultivating something underneath it: a ground of presence from which sensation can be met differently. Through gentle, nature-based practices — slowing down, spending time in the natural world, following your curiosities, noticing what you're drawn to — a new relationship with your senses begins to form. Not louder, not quieter, but more spacious. More grounded. More yours.
If you're someone who has lived mostly from the mind:
If you orient toward concepts, analysis, planning, achieving — this path isn't about forcing you to feel more. It's about gently following what you are drawn to and noticing what shows up in your senses around this. You may be surprised to discover how much richness is available in the taste of your morning coffee, in the quality of light at a particular hour, in the feeling of your feet on the earth. Through simple, embodied practices, a whole dimension of experience that's been waiting quietly in the background begins to come alive.
Both directions lead to the same place: a secure, grounded, trusting relationship with our own embodied experience — what you might call being truly at home in the body. And from that ground, something new becomes possible. The senses begin to reveal qualities — spaciousness, clarity, aliveness, warmth, wholeness — that were always here but couldn't be perceived from either intensity or distance. This is essence recognition, and it's available to everyone, through the senses we already have.
For either path, this approach grounds us in our bodies in a balanced and necessary way — providing the foundation from which to come into our wholeness more fully. The body becomes a home rather than a problem to solve.
You are an explorer..
Your mission is to document and observe the world around you as if you’ve never seen it before.
Take notes. Collect things you find on your travels. Document your findings. Notice patterns. Copy. Trace. Focus on one thing at a time. Record what you are drawn to.
— Keri Smith
The Explorer's Wiring
I want to say something personal here, because it matters for how this work came into being and who it might particularly serve.
I am what researchers would call neurodivergent — somewhere in the territory of dyscalculia, dyslexia, and the broader neurodivergent spectrum. For most of my life, this meant I was the person who struggled in school, who couldn't keep numbers in order, who refused to read sheet music but could play piano by ear. I was the one who, when looking at a page of text, would notice the ripples of white space between the words rather than the words themselves.
What I didn't know then — what the research is only recently catching up with — is that this kind of brain is wired for something specific. Researchers at Cambridge have described it as a specialization in exploration: the capacity to perceive holistically, to grasp wholes rather than parts, to see patterns and connections that sequential thinking misses.
When I worked as a prop-maker for film, my hands knew what to do before my mind caught up. When I designed spaces, I could feel what a room needed. When I cook I don't need a recipe. I go with what looks and feels right. I have an uncanny knack for choosing the perfect-sized container for leftover food.
These aren't trivial things. They're expressions of a perceptual style that grasps wholes — that sees the finished object, senses the right proportion, feels the atmosphere of a space — before it can name what it knows in sequential, analytical terms.
And here's what I've come to understand: this same perceptual wiring is what allowed my awakening experience to happen the way it did. My pivotal moments weren't conceptual insights that arrived through logic. They were direct sensory recognitions — suddenly perceiving the wholeness of what was already here. The alive quality of everything. The spaciousness that was both what I was and what I was perceiving.
I needed my own experience before I could begin to understand what others had been pointing to. No amount of reading or hearing about it beforehand had landed — yet I doubt I had even come across anything like this before. But the moment I saw it — through my senses, through my body, through this holistic perceiving that my brain does naturally — I could never unsee it.
I share this because if your brain works this way too — if you've always felt a bit out of step with the linear, sequential, number-driven world — your way of perceiving may be exactly what's needed for this kind of recognition. The capacity that made school hard might be the capacity that makes essence recognition natural.
And if your brain doesn't work this way — if you're more naturally sequential and analytical — then working with someone who perceives holistically can open a doorway you might not find on your own. Not because there's anything wrong with how you think, but because the senses speak a different language than the mind, and sometimes you need a translator. Just as I needed extra help learning to read and write.
An Invitation
The sensory doorway isn't a technique to master. It's an orientation to practice — and then to forget you're practising, because it becomes simply how you meet life.
It might begin with something as simple as really tasting your next cup of tea. Not thinking about tasting it. Tasting it. Noticing what qualities are present — not just "hot" and "bitter" but something more subtle. A warmth that isn't just temperature. A sense of deep comfort and the qualities of that. A moment of wholeness where you and the tea and the tasting are not three separate things.
And if coming to your senses feels like a lot, know that you can begin with the senses that have some natural spaciousness built in. Sight and hearing reach outward — you can look at the quality of light in a room or listen to birdsong without it asking too much of you. Start there. The body will invite you closer in its own time.
From here, it opens. Into your garden. Into your cooking. Into how you see a landscape or meet another person. Into how you hold your own inner life with more spaciousness and tenderness.
The senses have always been open. The doorway has always been here. The invitation is simply to walk through.
Explore Essential Beauty — on beauty as a primary doorway to essence:
Explore The Senses in the Wisdom Traditions — on how diverse traditions have honoured sensory knowing:
Learn about Essence Companionship — if you'd like support on this journey
Return to About the Essence Way
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