The forgotten art of interoception

Our doorway to the inner world

Image by Ronald Cuyan on Unsplash

We were born connected to the whole of our sensory and somatic world – our emotions, our impulses, our hunger, and our need for soothing.

If you’ve spent any time around a baby you will see this. Hunger, pain, aloneness, fear, heat, cold. Internal cues are felt and communicated immediately. No filter.

Somewhere in our upbringing most of us lost touch with this primal language.

Society seduced us into the territory of our heads and taught us that this is where life happens.

We learned to shape ourselves to the needs of our external world and the people around us. We learned that this was the recipe for safety, belonging, and success.

We learned that our bodies are little more than a vehicle to carry around our mind and our personality. An annoying vehicle at that. One that doesn’t always function as we wish. One that has glitches and breakdowns and a ‘mind’ of its own. We learned to see our bodies as inherently flawed and to try to fix and manipulate them to our will.

School taught us to resist our urges for movement, be a good student, sit still, and absorb information with our intellect.

Screens taught us to exist in a world outside of ourselves.

Trauma, stress, and overwhelm taught us that our emotional experience can be too much to process, so we learned to check out, numb, and escape our bodies. This helped us for a time to cope and adapt to a world not suited to our needs.

For many of us, this became a lifelong pattern. We learned to live at a distance from our bodies, disconnected, out of touch, and in battle with our physiology. Privileging the mind and the intellect above all else, as good Westernised citizens.

And then we wonder why our bodies get sick.

Sickness might show up as physical illness, it might show up as anxiety, depression, or a raft of emotional struggles, and it might show up as exhaustion, distraction, or a sense of not being able to manage the tasks that the world prescribes for us.

We may just throw pills and surgeries and various ‘fixes’ at the problem from the outside looking in. But if we’re lucky, the sickness and the struggle may also lead us down a deeper healing path, where we begin to relearn the primal language of the body, where we learn to form a partnership with our physiology, to recognise the innate wisdom that it holds, and the language that it speaks of sensation, symptoms, emotion, and energy.

If we’re really lucky, we learn this before we become sick.

This is interoception.

Interoception is the scientific word for the cues we receive from inside our body, while exteroception describes the cues we receive from our external environment.

Interoception is how our body communicates to us that we’re hungry, via a gurgling in the gut, rather than our mind telling us ‘It’s time for dinner’.

Interoception is how we can come to know the state of our nervous system, and the flow of emotions through our internal field. Not through thinking ‘I’m sad’ or ‘I’m scared’ but through sensing the heavy weight in our chest, or the fluttery feeling in our gut.

Interoception is the language of instinct and intuition. It’s how we know something is ‘off’ in our environment before our thinking mind can run through and analyse all the information, or our rational mind can talk us out of it.

And it’s a key part of how we heal.

The journeys I take with people in the therapy room often include venturing into the realm of embodiment. Meeting our moment-by-moment experience as it is unfolding, and slowly, gradually, learning to reconnect to the language of sensation. Learning to refuse nothing, and to meet whatever arises with gentleness, curiosity, presence, and compassion. This is where alchemy happens.

It’s not always an easy journey. Not only because what we meet can be hard to sit with, but also because the very act of tuning into interoceptive cues can feel alien and inaccessible. As I ask people to notice what’s happening in the body, many times their gaze travels upwards, as they search their thoughts for the answer. We need to train the awareness to travel downwards, as if taking the internal elevator from the thinking mind down into the felt sense of the body. Swimming in the soup of sensation.

It often helps to dip a toe in the water first. We might start with a more accessible sensation, perhaps fingers and feet, perhaps where the body makes contact with external surfaces. Or we might start with what’s most obvious, like sensations of pain or discomfort. From there, we can slowly, over time, train the awareness to notice increasingly subtle sensation. Over time the body does not need to shout so loudly to get our attention. It’s a journey that requires patience and persistence. It requires slowing down, getting quiet, listening closely. As therapists, we can support the process by staying in close connection with our own body field, which helps to support mirroring.

Experiencing our body from the inside, means becoming attuned to sensation, emotion, and our internal hum of aliveness. We start to notice how we're holding our body in space, where we're holding tension, how the breath is flowing, what is happening in our nervous system and our emotions - not from thinking about these things, but from sensing them from the inside. We start to live inside our body, instead of just inside our head.

Over my years in the therapist’s chair, I have noticed more and more that the big shifts that happen for people often don’t happen simply at the level of the mind. Talking therapy is highly valuable in making sense of our struggles and developing insight into our patterns, but understanding alone does not always translate into change. To bring change alive, to move and release emotion, to build new patterns and possibilities, it helps enormously to experience life through the body.

In the body resides our intuition, our gut instincts, our emotions, and our primal pathways of experience. In the body resides our capacity for pleasure and joy.

If we live at a distance from our body, we live at a distance from intimacy, connection, and life itself. We live at a distance from our truth. And we live at a distance from our innate healing capacity.

With thanks to

Dr Jo

, whose comments on my previous post sparked the seeds of ideas for this piece. I deeply value all of your comments and insights and would love to hear what today’s piece has sparked for you, and what is your relationship to your internal world?

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