At a certain point in everyone's life, we are all called back inside ourselves. As a baby, toddler, or child, we live with respect to our outer senses — taste, touch, see, hear and smell. We explore and get to know the world this way. As we grow older and continue exploring the world, we may begin to get lost in the outer world, losing touch with the inner senses.

Then “life” puts something in your way — an event, a failure, a loss — that will put you in touch with your inner life — and it's probably going to be a pain. Pain is the fastest way to bring you in. Every time there is a pain, you have the choice to ignore it, cover it up, or you have the opportunity to let it transform you. And this means living in a world of the inner senses. It involves exploring the inner body.

Now it's time for us to turn our exploration inward. Give attention to the inside and cultivate our inner senses.

1. Inner Feeling

Like Eckhart Tolle instructed in his influential book,A New Earth, begin by bringing awareness to your hands and try to feel the aliveness within them. Become sensitive to the feeling of aliveness within the hands. Once you have been inside your hands, you've begun exploring the inside of the body. Go up the arms. Try to go inside the chest. The upper back. Move around the whole body, doing a body scan meditation on investigating how the inside of your body feels. You can always come back to the hands, heart, feet, or solar plexus — some of the places we can feel the most.

You can incorporate this inner feeling throughout your day. As you walk, try to feel the inside of your feet. As you type, explore the inside of your fingers. As you love and give, feel the inside of your heart. As you work or debate, check in with the solar plexus. One meditation a day, with the intention of touching your inner life with the feeling your inner body, will always align you with your spirit.

Cultivating inner feeling also helps to honor pain when we need to. And to acknowledge joy! Inner feeling will always give us the strength and ability to walk through anxiety, fear, and other harmful emotions while allowing us to appreciate the positive ones.

2. Inner Seeing

This next sense has to happen while meditating because it requires that you close your eyes. Over time, you might get so good at inner seeing that it occurs naturally. When this happens, you know that your third eye has become so strong that it can show images to you while you are living and being active in the outer world. At first, probably, you'll need to strengthen the third eye in meditation, in active practice.

Try This Practice:

1. Close your eyes and see whatever thoughts or images are running through your head. You may only see lights, bright spots, darkness or images. That's an excellent starting point. Keep an eye on everything in your mind.

2. Move your inner sight into the body, also using your sense of inner feeling to touch and look at each part of your body, peering into what the body holds. We can actively use these senses to proactive about what you want to see in your mind. Imagine what you want. Create the picture in your mind as explicitly as you'd like. Once you start seeing your mind's images, you can enact the imagination to generate the images you'd like to see.

3. Soon you'll be able to use your imagination with your eyes open again. The imagination is one of our most beautiful, magical gifts. Imagination is inner seeing and has the power the affect the other two inner senses, affecting your body in a fabulous, uplifting way.

3. Inner Hearing

Like the others, over time and with meditation practice, you'll be able to practice inner listening through your waking day and night. Listening to the inner body is a little bit more advanced. The body will always require that you touch it first, using inner feeling. Mostly, when it comes to the body, you are listening for emotions that will relay a false belief or pain.

Try This Practice:

1. Close your eyes and bring attention to the insides of your ears. Follow the ears into the head and keep the awareness there, as though your awareness in those two places were microphones for your thoughts, hooked to a speaker that communicates directly to you at all times. Become wholly still and quiet. Focus your listening as sharply as possible to the thoughts and beliefs going through your mind.

2. When listening to the body, you'll most likely need to move your awareness into one of the chakras, like the throat, heart, solar plexus, belly and pelvic floor. You'll start to see how all the inner senses work together as the outer senses do.

3. Then there's the listening that's spiritual. And that's when you're quiet within, and you hear something that is not your mind or body. It feels like it came from on high. You'll know these statements because they're always bits of positive inspiration or out-of-the-blue necessary information or insight.

Insight does not happen to those who aren't listening entirely, but this isn't your goal. Your purpose is to become acquainted with your inner world, cleaning it and enjoying it. That should be your ultimate goal: curiosity, exploration, and discovery of the spiritual senses.

Liza Jones, yoga instructor, nutritionist, writer

Liza Jones is an experienced yoga instructor, certified nutrition consultant, and writer who is passionate about helping the world raise their vibration by aligning the body and mind. Through her lifestyle blog, Soul Rises, she provides the tools needed to create the deepest, most beautiful, soulful life through yoga, mindfulness and meditation practices, and holistic nutrition. Check out Liza out at https://soulrises.com/.