Interoception: Random Access Wellness Generator 001

“What’s your favorite thing about Naropa?”

The aspiring somatic psychologist closed her eyes, placed her hands on her abdomen and “went in,” as we say. She opened her eyes dreamily.

“My pelvic floor.”

I was interviewing a fellow student for a fluff piece in our Buddhist-inspired college’s student newspaper. Her answer was no joke. Interoception, or what we then called “body awareness,” was the secret curriculum of my own course of study. Dance, music, and the core practices of the world’s religions all rest on this foundation. Intensifying my body awareness through yoga and meditation was revelatory and healing in ways that are hard to verbalize. These days we have evidence-based reasons to believe in the benefits of embodiment. I remain a firm adherent to this fully secular, learnable skill. What a lucky break that the Random Access Wellness Generator has picked it for our first topic.

You can get a sense of your current level of interoceptive ability by trying to detect your own heartbeat. This is how researchers measure the skill. Why are researchers studying interoception? Because it at the very basis of our sense of self. It informs our understanding of neurodiversity. It has implications for trauma healing and the treatment of mental health issues such as eating disorders. For a deep dive on this last topic, I love psychologist Susan Sands’ case for body awareness as an empowerment strategy for aging women. Her thorough bibliography will keep you in reading material for a good long while, but you’ll be putting The Inside Story down to stretch or run or meditate before you get that far.

Interoception is the hard science behind the hard-to-pin-down third pillar of the Wim Hof Method. “Mind” is not just having the willpower to be cold or hold your breath a long time. Breath and Cold are meant to be accompanied by a strong, meditative focus on your internal state. Wim says that, above all else, you must “follow your feeling.” He means this in a literal way. You will feel more and more able to adapt and apply his method, or any other, as you become an expert in your own sense of inhabiting a physical body.

Anything you do for your wellbeing can be enhanced by interoception. Meditation, for example, is often mistaken for a mental thing. My favorite meditation instruction of all time, received from the Western female teacher Lama Yeshe Wangmo, is “Body like a mountain; breath like waves; mind like sky.” Here my body is the solid ground receiving the waves, with the mind and its thought clouds arrayed above. Anchoring my awareness in my bodily sensations brings me “back to the seat” like nothing else.

You might, when you wrap up your next meeting or task, try stopping for a minute to feel your heart beating. The next time you exercise, you might focus on the pure physical sensations of your activity, the sense of your breathing, the blood in your ears. You might remember that all of our mental and emotional activity springs from this unlikely concatenation of interdependent systems called a body. Now you are stacking interoception with the benefits of awe. Aren’t we amazing?

What will the Random Access Wellness Generator generate next? I hope you drop by next Friday to find out. And if you have an interoception story to tell or a question about body awareness, I would love to see it in the comments. May you be well, and very well.