Sensazione:
Life Is a Cabaret — So Enjoy!
You experience the world through your senses. Developing your senses of sight, touch, taste, and smell is a fun, amazing adventure.
Bring Your Descriptions to Life
If you find that your notebook descriptions are wan and boring, work on increasing their sensuality. For example:
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- What did you smell at the coffee shop? (The new Mocha Kenya, chocolate brioche fresh from the oven . . .)
- What did you hear, or overhear, at the restaurant? (The couple four tables over bickering about the organic beef versus the free-range chicken, the elderly gentleman holding forth about the Brown’s Port . . .)
A Feast For Your Eyes
Sensual. Sensitive. Sensational. To think like Leonardo, you need to refine your senses. When your senses of vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell are heightened, you’ll know you’re waking up to the world around you and the world that Leonardo embraced so fully.
In this lesson, you’ll develop techniques to help you to refine your senses. Start with your sense of sight, enhance your hearing via the world of music, and develop your senses of touch, smell, and taste via aromatherapy and cooking.
“Why bother?” you might be wondering. After all, you want to think like Leonardo, right? In order to think like Leonardo, you’ll need to do what Leonardo did — remember Curiosità and Dimostrazione? Onward!
Do You See? Become an Effective Witness
When was the last time you really looked at what was happening around you? When you went for your morning walk? Or the last time you went on vacation?
By now, your notebook should be as much a part of you as your cell phone or your beeper. Take a moment to leaf through your notebook to check how you’ve used your sight. How many descriptions can you find?
Most people, unless they’re trained like police officers, are inadequate witnesses to the world around them. Training yourself to become more observant just takes a little practice. You can start training yourself today by doing these three simple exercises:
- Describe at least three scenes (such as a coffee shop, the park where you have lunch, and your office) in your notebook.
- Select an item from nature to draw in your visual notebook (a flower, a leaf, a stone).
- Choose a stranger, someone you’ve seen for just a moment or two. Then describe the person in a hundred words in your notebook. You can also make a brief sketch of him or her in your visual notebook.
Why not pick one or two of your favorite descriptions and share them on the Message Board?
Drawing As a Way to See
If you haven’t started the Beginner’s Da Vinci Drawing Course on page 262 of How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, do it now. The exercises are easy, and they build on each other.
If you’re hesitant, tell yourself that you’ll give the course just 10 minutes a day for one week. At the end of the week, you’ll have spent 70 minutes on the course, and chances are, you’ll find that it’s so much fun and you’ve learned so much about yourself that you’ll want to continue.
Upside-Down Drawing
Did you enjoy the Upside-Down Drawing exercise in the Beginner’s Da Vinci Drawing Course? Amazing, isn’t it? Now find a favorite photograph and do an upside-down drawing of it. Then turn it right side up, and shade it, or color it.
On the next page, we’ll start stimulating your sense of sound with music.
The Music of Hildegard von Bingen
To learn more about Hildegard von Bingen and her music, visit the Web site of Hildegard Publishing Company (http://www.hildegard.com), a music publisher that was established to honor this amazing woman.
Finding Your World of Music
Read: “Learn the Major Movements of Western Music” on pages 114-119 of How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci. It’s an overview of the great periods of world music and forms an ideal outline for your own investigations. Take your notebook to the music store. If you don’t take notes, you’ll forget what you liked or what you didn’t like, and you may never again find that CD of medieval Spanish dances you loved so much. Enjoy your musical feast.
Music for Your Spirit
Most people live in a noisy world. Many of us cope by shutting sound out, rather than inviting sound in. Music is a brilliant creativity aid, however, and developing your hearing is an essential part of learning to think like Leonardo. In addition, many claims have been made about the healing power of music. Music therapists, for example, treat everything from relationship problems to stress. The Royal Children’s Hospital in Brisbane, Australia uses music therapy to help children who are recovering from surgery, as well as children who are suffering from chronic illnesses like cancer.
You can investigate the healing powers of music for yourself. The next time you suffer from a tension headache, why not reach for a CD for some musical therapy instead of heading for the medicine cabinet? What a great use for Dimostrazione! If you decide to use music for healing, take careful notes on your experience and please share your discoveries on the Message Board.
You can also use music therapy as a stress reliever before a major event, such as a job interview or a presentation before a new client. Simply choose music that has a pulse of about 60 beats per minute. This shifts your consciousness to an alpha brain wave pattern, which relaxes you. It also gives you easier access to the creative center in your right brain. Classical baroque music has a pulse of 60 beats a minute, as does a lot of New Age and ambient music.
The World of Music
Michael Gelb’s outline of the Major Movements of Western Music (pages 114-119 of the course text) gives you a great jumping-off point for exploration of musical eras with which you may be unfamiliar. All eras contain treasures. For example, I first heard about the work of Hildegard von Bingen in a gardening catalog, and now I play her music whenever I feel uninspired. These compositions work wonderfully for me: experiment to find your own musical heroes and heroines.
If you’re drawn to indigenous music (tribal drumming is evocative for visualization), investigate the music of India, Argentina, and Africa. Remember that your musical taste is as personal as your taste for food, and just because a friend raves about a style of music, it doesn’t mean it’s for you. On the other hand, do try listening to a new style of music at least three times to give it a chance to become familiar to your ears; you may find that familiarity breeds fondness.
Aldous Huxley said . . .
“No man, however civilized, can listen for very long to African drumming, or Indian chanting, or Welsh hymn singing, and retain intact his critical and self-conscious personality.”
More on Visual Journaling
Visual Journaling is a lot of fun, even for novice artists (or confirmed non-artists). For an introduction to this fascinating field, read: Visual Journaling: Going Deeper Than Words, by Barbara Ganim and Susan Fox. This book is a treasure; it helps you to release stress and anger and get in touch with your feelings and is especially recommended for trauma survivors.
More Music, and Silence
Music soothes, energizes, and heals — and every home needs a Musical First Aid Kit. Go through your musical library and compile your own kit. These are the CDs or tapes that you play regularly, in order to:
- Relax after a chaotic drive home from work
- Cheer you up after a disappointment
- Eliminate the sense of tension after a quarrel with your partner
- In some way change your mood, or the mood in your home
If you like the idea of this kit, then think about developing other kits, either for yourself, or as gifts for others. You can compile musical kits for:
- Study
- Meditation
- Writing in your journal
- Sketching and painting
- Working on a hobby
Visual Journal to Music
Choose a tape or CD, and lay out your drawing materials. Then as the music plays, begin to draw. Let your hand move across the paper, without thinking too much about what you’re drawing.
This process is useful if you’re trying to make a decision or need an inspiration to help you to proceed on a project. Working with images helps you to access your right brain. (See Lesson 6: Arte/Scienza.)
Here’s the process:
- Ask a question, and write it in your notebook (Examples: Why am I so angry with X? What can I do to increase my finances?)
- Lay out your drawing materials and switch on your music of choice
- Set a time limit (Examples: three minutes, five minutes, the duration of one song)
- Draw/sketch/doodle
- Ask yourself what the drawing means, and write down the answer
Frequently the answer won’t come immediately; it takes time to arrive from your right brain. Be aware of insights that may come in the following days.
Shhhh! Not a Word — For an Entire Day
What would it be like not to speak for an entire day? If you haven’t tried practicing the art of silence, start off with half a day, or just a couple of hours of silence.
Tell other family members what you’re doing, or choose a day when you’ll be alone.
You’ll be amazed at how much your hearing is enhanced after your period of silence. If you enjoy it, then practice regularly. Make notes of what you experience in your notebook. Share your insights on silence on the Message Board.
We’re moving on to Touch, Taste, and Smell on the next page. Mmmmm . . .
Why Learn to Cook?
Cooking is meditative therapy. If you’re a cook, you know that nothing calms you like preparing a huge pot of vegetable soup, which is wonderful to have simmering right through a long winter’s afternoon. Within 10 minutes of beginning to chop onions, potatoes, carrots, parsley, turnips, and pumpkin, you may very well find that you anger, jealousy, depression or whatever mood is bedeviling you will vanish. Plus — you get to eat your therapy!
Tough Assignment, But Someone’s Got to Do It . . .
On pages 129-131 of How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, author Michael Gelb shows you how to explore the principles of Sensazione by conducting comparative taste tests of food and wine. Use the techniques outlined here to sample and savor different types of chocolate, vanilla ice cream, olive oil, mushrooms, grapes, beer, bottled water, or wine. Let Curiosità and Dimostrazione be your guides, and remember — it’s homework!
Exploring Touch, Taste, and Smell
The easiest way to explore your senses of touch, taste, and smell is through aromatherapy and, of course, via the humble art of cooking. Cooking is an art that allows you to work on all your senses at one time.
Aromas to Boost Your IQ
Aromatherapy’s essential oils work directly on your brain and can enhance your confidence, self-esteem, and sense of well being. They may even boost your IQ. If you haven’t experimented with essential oils, give them a try.
Which oil is for you? We’re all different, and an oil that may work brilliantly on your partner or friend may have the opposite effect on you. Remember: Dimostrazione.
You can use the oils in various ways: in the bath, diluted with a carrier oil like almond or olive oil if you want to use them on your skin, or by warming them in a burner (the oils aren’t actually burned; they’re added to a small amount of water, which is then warmed so that the oils evaporate).
The simplest way to use an oil is to add a drop or two to a paper tissue and place it on your desk. Enjoy the subtle wafts you’ll get from the scent and pay attention to the response it creates in your mind and body.
Specific Oils for Specific Purposes:
| Oil’s Purpose |
Type of Oil |
| memory enhancement | basil |
| lemon | |
| rosemary | |
| ginger | |
| alertness | juniper |
| pine | |
| peppermint | |
| black pepper | |
| eucalyptus | |
| grapefruit | |
| lime | |
| self-esteem | sandalwood |
| bergamot | |
| ylang ylang | |
| rose geranium | |
| rose | |
| jasmine | |
| cedarwood |
What’s Your Favorite Essential Oil?
Let’s discuss aromatherapy and oil blends on the Message Board. Got a favorite oil or oil blend you’d like to share with fellow students? What response in you does the oil create?
Cooking Your Way to an Enhanced Sense of Touch, Taste, and Smell
So many people make the declaration that they cannot cook simply because they fear making something that doesn’t taste “right.” The purpose of this lesson is to instill the value of Dimostrazione in you, so it’s high time that all of you with kitchen phobias challenge those fears and start cooking. You may find, ultimately, that cooking just isn’t something you enjoy, but you can’t arrive at that decision without trying it simply for the sensory experience it offers.
The fastest way to learn to cook is to take a course. If you can’t find a course locally, learn from a book, or from a DVD or CD. Expect to make a few mistakes as you learn, and remember Dimostrazione — it’s not a mistake; it’s an experiment.
The recipe below is an incredibly simple one with major taste payoffs. Pasta is an almost impossible food to go wrong with: you can add any number of vegetables, spices, or cheeses to it and you’re almost guaranteed to end up with something edible, if not just interesting or even delicious.
Remember when you cook to use the best possible ingredients you can afford. The cost of Parmeggiano Reggiano cheese (the mother of all Parmesan cheeses), for example, makes for a very different (and very worthwhile) taste experience than its processed cousin in a shaker can. Additionally, fresh herbs and vegetables will add a dimension to your food that canned or dried ones lack. Experiment . . . this is your Dimostrazione!
See how simple that is? You’ll be amazed at the flavors you can create by combining a few, fresh ingredients in a bowl. There’s lots of room to experiment. Drop by the Message Board and tell us how your cooking Dimostrazione goes.
Got a favorite recipe? Why not share it with fellow students on the Message Board?
Moving Forward
You’ll move on to the mysterious, smoky world of Sfumato in our next lesson, where you’ll begin to become comfortable with ambiguity and develop your intuition.
Please take a few minutes to look over the assignment and this week’s quiz. All of your work should have you progressing nicely on your path toward da Vincian living. Are you noticing any changes in your approach to life? Compare notes with your fellow students on the Message Board.
Assignment : Sensazione: Cook like Leonardo da Vinci
Read from page 72 onwards of The How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci Workbook, and choose one of the recipes to make and enjoy. If you don’t have much time, choose one of the Antipasti recipes.
And don’t forget to make the pasta recipe from the lesson. Shopping for the ingredients, if you don’t already have them in your house, will make for a delightful sensory Dimostrazione.
To prepare for the next lesson, read pages 143-150 in How to Think Like Leonardo Vinci, and do the Sfumato Self-Assessment on page 151.
