Reconnecting with Our Human Mother Tongue

I’ve always been fascinated by languages. Not just because they help us to communicate with others, but also because each language offers a new way of seeing and understanding the world. Every language opens a window to a different kind of wisdom and perspective.
And for many years now, I’ve been thinking a lot about another kind of language. One that we all share, but many of us have forgotten how to speak. I call it our human mother tongue, the language of our senses. And like many endangered dialects, it is slowly fading away from our homogeneous technology-filled lives.

Yet before we learn to speak in words, we speak in sensations. We understand safety, danger, love and discomfort long before we can name them. A baby knows they are safe and loved through the touch of skin against skin, the pulse of a heartbeat, the melody of a voice. The world speak to us and our bodies understand. But over time, many of us have unlearned this language. We’ve become unfamiliar with the vocabulary of our own bodies, unable to recognize when we’re tired, tense, angry or at peace. Numbness and disconnection have gradually become our new lexicon.

In my work, whether with individuals or groups, I gently invite people to pay attention again to their bodily sensations. And through this they often come to realise how stress they are or discover that the sea has been a nurturing presence in their life. They express their surprise at these discoveries, like a whole part of their life has suddenly been unveiled and made accessible. 

To be human is to move from sensation to feeling, from feeling to thought, and from thought to word. But when we lose touch with our first language, our senses, it becomes harder to know what we need or to trust what we feel. It becomes difficult to understand the world around us. It becomes challenging to remember our place in the living world and to experience aliveness and belonging.