Jacob writes,

What is something you learned lately that you didn’t know when you were younger? As an intuitive personality, if you can give an example of a sensory skill it would be helpful.

Sensory skill! That’s a good q. There’s probably a lot of that, much of which wasn’t so clear or interesting when I was younger. Here’s one thing that comes to mind.

It’s been very fun and helpful to figure out just the right way to move my body to do things I couldn’t do before, or solve problems.

Here are some examples:

Example 1. Precision Study for Pain Management

For example, when my shoulder was injured recently, I couldn’t move my hand from the keyboard to the mouse without extreme pain.

So normally I’d move the mouse, or buy a trackpad keyboard or something.

But I decided to try different body positions and movements.

I figured out that I could invert my palm, turning the thumb down and to the outside, and there was no pain at all while doing this movement! Weird.

Then I kept trying that with other painful situations, and found even more of those. In one case I could wiggle my finger tips a bit and completely unlock my shoulder.

Example 2: Tricks and Techniques

Just today, I spent a half hour writing down just the right finger and hand motions and angles for opening, lighting, and closing my Zippo lighter.

I mostly use this lighter for 1) fidget toy and 2) sealing frayed ends of paracord lanyards or rope.

And really, if I’m fidgeting with this in the first place, I also want to learn some cool ways to use it. So that was a lot of fun.

Example 3: Fixes to Other Problems

Finally, I was pruning a tree with this interchangeable saw I have. But it kept dropping blades. I’d start to saw, and then the blade would pull right out of the handle.

My first reaction: I got a piece of junk of course, I hate this saw, UGH, probably better to get ONE saw that does ONE job!!!

But then I thought about it and decided: I’ll watch myself using it, lightly at first.

So I get a kind of comfortable setting for my hand going, it’s feeling nice. THEN I notice…

My thumb rests on the side screw while I’m sawing…then gradually loosens the blade-tightening screw by slowly turning it to the left!

Conclusion

These are the types of things that I frankly ignored or didn’t care about when I heard them from others, in the past.

But these days they are a lot of fun and they build confidence.

I also used to google this kind of thing a lot. Why solve it yourself when others already have? The problem with that is, if you find a fitting answer, you still get others’ techniques, others’ ideas, and you aren’t able to build up or strengthen your access to introverted perception & judgement functionality, for example. It’s also a risk to your creativity, to say nothing of your access to your sensory side. (As an introvert, it’s very helpful to pretty much own and fully-leverage your introverted side, to the extent you can)

In most cases it helps me to plan for some extra patience—at least multiple sessions—and space out the learning a bit. In other cases it helps to write things down and save notes for later.

I hope that helps, Jacob—and anyone else out there who might find some extra-precise body studies helpful.

Filed in: Sensation /40/ | Se /25/ | Control /112/ | Si /19/