Waldorf Matters … The Senses
Ms Brenda Newton is our Eurythmy Therapist at Elmfield. In our weekly blog series about key aspects of Steiner Waldorf education, Brenda discusses the importance of the senses in our understanding of self.
“The Senses are seen as ‘physiological capacities of organisms that provide data for perception’ ”
Pediaopolis states that there are only five senses that are traditionally recognised: those of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. Although the capacity to detect other stimuli not governed by the above mentioned senses is there, temperature (warmth), proprioception (movement) and balance, only a few of these can be categorised as separate senses in and of themselves.
Steiner went further than anybody had done before him and developed the thought that mankind had twelve sense organs. He divided them into three areas:
The lower sense organs
These are those that are internal sense organs related to the physical body; the senses of touch, of life/wellbeing, of movement and of balance.
The middle sense organs
These are the organs related to the interweaving between ourselves and the external world around us such as smell, taste, sight, and temperature.
The higher sense organs
These organs are immaterial, connected to the spiritual world; Steiner named these as hearing, the perception of speech, thought, and the ego, the sense of the ‘I’ of the other.
As the science of space travel has found out, the lower physical senses particularly appear to be dependent on the gravitational forces of earth. The four higher senses, however, are perceptions gained through the development of the lower sense organs, but are capacities of a non-physical nature that we see in others around us.
Whereas the middle senses find their bases between those two polarities, within the feeling realm; observations made by them arouse feelings.
It has become apparent to me from Steiner writings that as the foundation of each lower bodily sense is developed and the basis for the higher senses laid down, a process of polarisation between internalisation into myself and a conscious recognition and relationship to the other outside of me is created.
The foundational structure of the process of internalisation, the development of the senses, is laid down in childhood to early adulthood.
In Steiner education, this can be seen from the Nursery and Kindergarten years up: how the learning in the young child is initially through movement, balance and touch in play, the development of wellbeing in the regular rhythm of the day.
The daily shared food and the appropriate dressing of clothes throughout the session which helps us to build up and keep an inner warmth: a place of comfort within our bodies in which we are happy to reside.
The process of internalisation begins and continues as they enter into the Main School where the taste, sight, smells within their feeling life in the discovery of the world further afield from themselves widens through the subject of their Main Lessons.
Children then reach the Upper School where the development of the spiritual senses of hearing, the perception of the word/speech, perception of thought and the perception of the ego, the ‘I’ arise; the conscious recognition and relationship to the other person outside of me, is now ripen to take out into the world when they leave.
As Van Gelder points out, the importance of cultivating your senses
Sensory perception... forms the basis of your relationship with yourself, your surroundings, and the people around you