Tracking our Senses
The art of tracking is usually associated with stalking and hunting animals and is a foundational skill of our ancient ancestors, in times before animals were domesticated and farmed. Whilst it remains useful for us to learn the marks and signs that animals leave in the land as they go about their daily lives, one of the key skills of the tracker is sensory awareness, which is a skill that has relevance for everyone in the modern world.
Ancestral Skills
There is a long history within Western thought of viewing humans as being separate from the rest of the natural world. To our hunter-gatherer ancestors this would seem ridiculous. That we are part of nature is evident from our physiology and behaviour as animals, from our dependence on the air we breathe, the plants we eat, the water that we drink.
For between 95-99.5% of human existence, depending on where on the planet you live, we have been hunter-gatherers. Farming is a very recent development. While we take it for granted today that we can obtain whatever food we want, from wherever in the world, this isn’t how we have evolved on the planet and it’s not sustainable for our future ability to live.
For most of our existence, we humans have lived amongst the animals, plants, fish, invertebrates and fungi – all those beings who make up the fabric of the Earth, as kin. We have depended on each other, not just for our survival but to enable each other to thrive. Studies on hunter-gatherers have shown that it requires an average of 3-5 hours a day to forage and hunt food, leaving the rest of the time for socialising, creating, dreaming and resting. Compare that to the average working day of a modern human.
To be a tracker
To live as a hunter-gatherer is to be a tracker. It’s more than knowing the signs and tracks of the beings you wish to hunt, it’s about a deep awareness and understanding of the environment in which you live; the weather, the seasons, the movement and changing behaviour of the beings that live in the land with you.
To be a tracker is about knowing and trusting your senses. It’s about knowing your body and the signals s/he makes to tell you about your relationship with your environment. To be a tracker necessitates learning how your body communicates, and this is something that many modern people struggle with.
Concrete jungle
Whilst most people today don’t live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle or live surrounded by animal predators, learning the art of tracking remains relevant for life in a town or city, largely due to the benefit of developing sensory awareness.
Many years ago, in my late teens, I lived a street life in a large conurbation. It was a difficult time but my survival depended on developing skills which are central to who we are as a species; a deep understanding of our physical and psychic senses. I could walk on a street in a rough part of town in the early hours and feel confident of my safety. This wasn’t because of street kudos or psychic power. It was just because I knew how to avoid walking into a dangerous situation and how to disappear if one appeared unexpectedly.
These are skills we all have, though we are not taught to remember them nowadays. It’s about being intuitively aware of your body and the signals s/he gives you about your environment.
Being in your body
Unfortunately, many people struggle to feel their body and live partially dissociated from them, meaning they struggle to feel emotions and even physical sensations within their bodies. This is largely due to unprocessed, unhealed trauma that they have experienced in their body, which then becomes stuck and triggered every time a similar sensation appears in their body. To avoid the pain of the trigger, people subconsciously distance themselves from feeling the physical sensations, leading to a general numbness in their bodies. In my work as a shamanic healer, I see this a lot.
Learning how to track and stalk your feelings and physical sensations is one of the key ways of healing trauma. It is also one of the key skills we need to develop to keep ourselves safe. I learned this on the streets but it’s something our ancient ancestors also knew and lived, because it enables us to live in deep awareness of all that is happening around and within us and to enable that deep connection with others. This is what life is about.
Psychic senses
The senses I am referring to are both the physical senses and the psychic senses, the latter of which tend to be neglected. The reasons for this are complicated and revolve around our modern perception of spiritualism, witchcraft and magic. These terms have become demonised in our culture, with the wounds of the witch trials deep within our ancestral psyche. They have also become belittled with scientific rationalism defying the existence of psychic senses and spirit at all.
As a child, my psychic senses were strong, yet I learned to numb them as I grew up. Despite the validation of my family, I quickly learned that the wider culture did not accept what I saw and felt so easily and I became terrified that I would be locked up as “mad”. I am grateful that the world we live in now has become more tolerant and that I can practice as a “shaman”, though I still find hostility and incredulity commonplace.
Psychic senses enable us to be aware of our own spirit bodies and that of the beings around us, of the emotions and sometimes the thoughts of others around us and of possibilities in the future. These are all skills we all have, though nowadays it may take time to remember and trust them. When you learn to develop these skills, you can live much more intuitively, adapting your behaviour to fit the environment where you find yourself, or leaving when needed.
When added to a deep awareness of our physical senses, psychic senses enable us to live as nature intended us to live – as whole beings fully embedded within our environment.
Developing sensory awareness
Learning how to feel and listen to your body is the best way to start developing sensory awareness. How are your emotions linked to physical sensations and how do these change with different experiences during the day?
I often suggest people start by tuning into their belly, as this can be a good indicator of how we are generally feeling. Feeling nausea or sickness when you walk into a room, for instance, can tell us much about how we might be feeling in that situation. Similarly, if you struggle to feel anything in your belly, this could tell you that something is stuck.
Bringing your awareness to different physical sensations in your body, and what emotions are connected with these senses, is a form of tracking yourself. Try this in different situations – visiting friends and family, walking in a wood or a busy street, going to the shops.
The key to the practice is being aware of what is going on in your body – your physical sensations and emotions. Which means you need to practice mindfulness or, getting out of your head and into your body. This takes time and practice but we all need to start somewhere.
The more you bring your awareness into your body, the deeper connection you will create with your senses, both physical and psychic. Once you start feeling the messages your body has to tell you about how you might be feeling walking into different environments, you can start to explore what your senses are telling you about these environments.
In many ways this is all about developing your intuition, alongside a heightened awareness of what you can see and hear and smell and so on. Really bringing your attention into the present moment, turning off your screen or pushing beyond your thoughts, giving yourself permission to really feel what is going on in your body. These are the keys to understanding both yourself and your environment.
Developing sensory awareness is about tracking your sensory experience of life. Learning to work with the practice enables you to stalk your own feelings and triggers and how they impact others. Take it gently at first and learn to trust what your body says - it never lies.
Don’t forget, the reason we are all here is because our hunter-gatherer ancestors survived. The art of trusting what they experienced through their senses was the key to their survival, something we would do well to remember today.
© Samara Lewis, April 2025