What do we mean by Embodied Interoception?
Elizabeth Andes-Bell
“We develop the ability to self-calm, ease pain and move through difficult feelings.”
Embodiment has many levels but, at it’s most basic it means you’re fully here, in your body and available.
You’re not in two places at once: distracted, multi-tasking, thinking about how you’re going to respond, worried about something else, numb to your feelings, constantly seeking and overwhelmed by your environment.
You are also not fixed, not holding a rigid position in your body or mind, not running a control script.
When you’re embodied you feel your authentic power and presence as fluid and emergent. You are here as the vital phenomenon of you, in your creative power, participating in shaping the moment.
Interoception is a feeling sense of your experience inside and outside of you.
It’s an inner connection that can take you from sensing body feelings like pressure, flowing and opening to a sense of internal support, intuition and even knowing yourself as the movements of the sea and sky.
It’s also a kinesthetic sensing and a crucial feedback loop of the world around you.
It enables you to constantly adjust to changing circumstances and to shape and reshape yourself instantly for your safety.
Based on our sense of touch, it is our most fundamental tool for survival.
Why is this important now?
Without interoception you lose your sense of embodiment, your sense of self.
You also lose your ability to swiftly respond and adapt to changes that can assure your survival.
We live in a fractured world. As many of us are waking up to (and healing) the depths of trauma endured.
We are witness to more uncertainty and global crises than we could ever have imagined.
Old structures we once thought were forever are crumbling.
Time has sped up and space has collapsed. We are constantly bombarded with tweets, comments and untruths.
Too much information flies in and out of our lives in seconds. Our privacy is gone.
We lose our basic sense of our inner body life because it’s almost too much to feel. We lose our sense of our outer body reality because we’re buried in our screens.
Coping by numbing, medicating, blaming, compartmentalizing and creating places in our bodies and psyches where we are simply absent from ourselves isn’t working.
Alienation from our inner-self pervades our bodies, relationships and environment.
It comes at a terrible cost to our power, to our well-being, and to our ability create and grow.
How do we not lose ourselves?
We need to find safe spaces within us, in the aliveness of our bodies and in our inherent power to evolve ourselves to be able to contain the scope of what’s needed from us now.We begin by learning to rediscover body sensation and distinguish it from emotions. We develop the ability to self-calm, ease pain and move through difficult feelings. Our self-sense expands to knowing ourselves as Presence, as life-ongoing and as our primordial unity with all life.
“You are here as the vital phenomenon of you, in your creative power, participating in shaping the moment.”
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