Touch your nose- go on I dare you! :)

Rogieyogibear
Jul 6, 2015
4 min read

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." You are a great spirit! Live that way.

I told Father Frederick I wanted to know God, to have an experience of Ultimate Truth. Father Frederick is a big man, you know. He's got a bushy black beard, craggy skin, piercing eyes, still wears his monk's robes. He looked at me in this half-mocking, half compassionate way, and told me that this was very very good, that its right to know God. But before you can know God, he said, you have to remember to touch your nose."

" 'I'm sorry?' I stammered. "'What you say about God is a very big thing,' Father Frederick insisted. 'Perhaps it's possible for you, perhaps not. But let's start with something smaller. Lets see what IS possible.' " Father Frederick said that every day at exactly 10 o'clock in the morning and 3 o'clock in the afternoon to touch my nose.

Do this every day for a week, Father Frederick said. No earlier, no later. That was all. "To make a long story short I found that I was so caught up in my daily routines that I didn't have the presence of mind to do this seemingly little task-- touch my nose. I'd remember maybe an hour late one day, an hour early the next. Some days I didn't remember at all. Or I'd do it in the morning then forget in the afternoon. Not a single day went by that I ever got it right. So here I was talking about making the efforts to know God, and I wasn't aware enough to touch my nose. It was at this point that I started to realise how caught up I am in my habit systems. I realised what change really means, how hard it is to make it happen. It's difficult enough to make spiritual efforts, I thought. But it's even harder to REMEMBER TO MAKE the efforts! (“Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” – Robert Collier) Excerpt from The Five Stages of the Soul by Harry.R Moody& David Carroll

Just some things to think about for your yoga or spiritual practices. And when you are thinking about doing your Tapas and your yoga practice. Sometimes we can get caught up too much on 'I need to do headstand' or that fancy new move I seen someone doing in class , that we forget to just start with the simple things like doing a sun salutation every day or a couple of minutes of meditation or even touching your nose. :)

A cool we exercise you can try which is related to this topic. Enjoy.

The Body: Your Body in Your Mind's Eye Can you take a sip of water from a cup with your eyes closed? Will you spill the water all over yourself? Of course not! For most of us, this is a routine task that we don't even have to think about. But how can you do this? Without vision, you can't see the cup, or your hand propelling the water to your mouth, yet you don't usually pour the water down your shirt or in your ears. Try this simple experiment to learn more about how you form mental images of your body's position in space, independent of vision. To Do and Notice During this exploration, it's very important for you to keep your eyes closed the entire time, work quickly, and carefully observe how your body responds. So for the best experience, either read all of the instructions before beginning or have a friend read them to you while you do the activity.

Close your eyes and raise both hands above your head. Keep the fingers of your left hand totally still (no wiggling!). Touch the tip of your right index finger to the tip of your nose, then quickly use the same finger to try to touch the tip of your left thumb. Keep your left hand still. Even if you "miss," go on quickly to the next step. Again touch your right index finger to the tip of your nose and immediately use the same finger to try to touch the tip of your left index finger. Repeat the process three more times, each time trying to touch a different finger on your left hand. Keep track of how many times you succeed in touching the tip of the correct finger. How successful were you at finding each fingertip? Did your performance improve with time? Now repeat the activity, but this time gently wiggle the fingers of the hand you hold in the air. Are you more successful in touching the designated fingertip? Most people are surprised to find out that they have a difficult time touching their fingertips precisely—they come close but don't make contact. Success usually improves when the fingers of the target hand are wiggled slightly. What's Going On? Even with your eyes closed, you have a sense of body position—where your arms and legs are, what direction you turn your head. This sense of body position comes primarily from information sent to your brain by proprioceptors, tiny sensors in your muscles, tendons, joints, and inner ear.

Proprioceptors detect stretching, elongation, and other changes; this information is used by your brain to create an unconscious picture of your body and its parts in three-dimensional space. Since most of us are highly dependent on visual cues for judging distances and positions, proprioception alone is not enough to give our brains the finely detailed information needed to touch a distant body part with great accuracy. Wiggling the fingers of the target hand increases the success rate of finding the fingers because it causes elongations, contractions, and tension changes that are detected by the proprioceptors there. With this additional information, the brain is better able to picture the location of the target hand in space.