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Sensory Words
This list of sensory words can be used to describe your inner experience. Using neutral sensory words to describe what you feel removes the judgements (positive as well as negative) that are often implied when using more abstract words, such as “joyful”, “down”, “excited”, “sad”, to describe your inner experience.
The list can also be used to practice Eugene Gendlin’s focusing as it provides vocabulary that can help describe the often vague and inarticulate felt sense.
To learn more about how to use neutral sensory words for personal/spiritual development, you can have a look at:
Disengaging from inner criticism – 15 pahts of liberation (book)
Disengaging from inner criticism (online course)
Write a comment if your favourite sensory word is missing from the list
Hi
A few more to consider:
Touch/Texture: granular, grainy, uneven, rigid, bendy, yielding, boiling, scalding, frozen
Size: slender, huge, enormous, cavernous, infinite, gigantic, microscopic.
Vision: murky
Colours: magenta, violet, indigo (the last two because much used as rainbow and chakra colours)
Smell: malodorous, stinky/stinking. Comment: nidorous exists but I have never heard/seen it used. I would put flowery in smell not vision.
I don’t recognise the application of taste to the following: balmy (= warm weather) bristly (usually texture), bumpy (usually texture), chilly (usually temperature = texture).
Thumbing does not apply to sound as far as I know and steno is not a smell. Both words are rare.
Isn’t the English language rich? this has been great fun, thanks.
deep, open, spacious, could go in size or vision
touch/texture
watery, metallic, effervescent, bubbly
held?, weightless, suspended, unimpeded
droplet, globule
movement
effulging, burgeoning, washing, flowing, undulating, flooding, shimmying, rushing, flushing , wafting, quivering. settling, condensing?(the sense of mist settling on something)
size
big, vast,
sound
some adjectives to go with the sounds: precise, clear, sonorous, bassy, muted, muffled, intense, melodic, guttural, continuous, high, undulating, distant, near, to my left, right , in front behind, other locations
clank, clang, melody, tone, warbling
maybe the thumbing (not a sound word I know) could be thrumming?
I get curious about neutrality here as some sounds seem to express affect, I wouldn’t know how to describe the quality of a tone which felt poignant without using the word poignant, or the quality of the tone which has an urgency, or purity etc.. thats just something interesting .. like a minor tone seems intrinsically to have some affect.
tingle is a sensation(as far as I know), but tinkle would be a good replacement
colour
pearly, claret,
perhaps some distinctions: moonlight silver as well as metallic silver : baby blue, electric blue, dark blue Metallic gold, or sunset gold , baby pink, hot pink,
vision
glimmering, luminous
smell
To my mind reeking and sickly are not neutral
could have specific scents: rose, honeysuckle, mint, liquorice, shit, piss, snot, rubber
taste
sherbet, liquorice, mint, lemon, orange, zingy, blackcurrant
as I read this I wonder whether mouth-feel is its own class of sensation, with smooth(different when drunk than touched), mellifluous, melty, oily, evaporating like alcohol, creamy, like snow, like sorbet, like nectar
all good words but my favorite sensory word isn’t there try and guess what it is?
microscopic
oiuoiu
Sorry I didn’t think it would go through