Embodiment without interoception

Spend enough time in therapy spaces (from pop psychology Instagram to your own clinician's office) and you'll probably hear some version of advice to "get out of your head and into your body." The idea makes sense since many folks resonate with spending so much time and energy thinking that they lose touch with what they're feeling physically. They may find that learning to notice their muscle tension, breath patterns, and internal sensations that point to emotions they're feeling can be incredible valuable. That means they were capable of doing so all along; they're sensory system wasn't a variable in their disconnection from these bodily experiences, but rather they just needed to be prompted to shift their attention. Great!

However, upon noticing myself cringe when my own provider suggested I explore what makes me feel "embodied" recently, I wondered if there is room to expand the very narrow definition of "embodiment" I've been handed. Every embodiment practice I've encountered assumes that if I pay attention to my body, I'll eventually experience it as a source of comfort, wisdom, pleasure, or gratitude.

If you, like me, are someone whose response to the prompt "Notice your body" is "What about it??" first know that this does not indicate anything about your interest in or ability to connect with yourself, nor does it mean you're being negative or oppositional, as you might've been misperceived in the past. It just means that you don't know what you're supposed to be noticing, how to go about doing so, or if it's even possible for you.

Embodiment has become synonymous with interoception. Interoception is our ability to perceive signals coming from inside the body. Hunger, thirst, a racing heart, butterflies in your stomach, muscle tension, needing to use the bathroom, feeling hot or cold, and many emotional sensations all rely (at least in part) on interoceptive awareness. Interoception is an internal sensory system.

Just like the external senses–sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing–some of us are more or less sensitive to internal sensory cues, meaning we register, are bothered by, and take action in response to interoceptive signals at different levels. Those who have very precise, heightened awareness of even very slight interoceptive cues are considered hyper-sensitive; these are folks who are more likely to have health-related anxiety because every process working just as it should is felt, and it's tough to differentiate a sensation that indicates a problem from one that's neutral. Those who don't notice what's going on in their bodies, either at all or until the sensation reaches a very high intensity, are considered hypo-sensitive. Many hypo-sensitive people report realizing we're only hungry once we've gone so long without eating that we're starving; noticing we're anxious only after we've snapped at someone; or recognizing we're exhausted only after we crash. Autism and ADHD often involve being at either extreme in one or all sensory systems, whereas neuronormativity assumes the typical experience is somewhere in the middle.

If most conversation about embodiment begins with "notice your internal sensations," it's easy to conclude that interoceptive hypo-sensitivity, or low interoceptive awareness, means you're simply...bad at embodiment, but I don't think that's fair to say. It's incomplete. I think we've just confused one pathway into embodiment with embodiment itself.

We have eight sensory systems, so why would there be just one path to embodiment? Most of us learned about only those five senses in elementary school because they're simple to demonstrate. You see the sky is blue; we're looking at the same sky, and we can agree. But these are not the only ways our bodies gather information.

In addition to interoception informing us about what's happening inside our bodies, we also have systems that tell us where our body is in space (proprioception) and how we're moving and balancing (vestibular system). None of these systems is "more embodied" than any other. They're just different ways of experiencing life through a body. If interoception isn't your strongest channel, perhaps it's reasonable that starting every embodiment exercise there is inaccessible.

Sometimes, if we're lucky, meditation prompts throw us interoceptive hypo-sensitive folks a bone and give explicit instructions about what to notice in our bodies rather than assuming we know which aspects matter: posture, breathing, heartbeat, the pressure of the chair or the sensation of our feet on the floor. But even then, it still assumes I can notice those things if I try; that I simply haven't thought to until invited to do so.

What if embodiment is actually about the different ways we relate to having a body, rather than about directing our attention inward? Internal sensation is certainly one mechanism (the one therapy talks about the most), but below are a few alternative pathways to embodiment. They aren't a hierarchy or points along a spectrum; they're just items on a menu you can choose from, or you can incorporate all into your personal conceptualization of your body:

The body as an interface

Think about petting a dog. You might experience the dog's fur as soft. You might feel affection toward the dog. You might notice how calming the interaction is. None of that requires thinking, "Wow, my skin is receiving tactile input," and yet your body is still central to the experience. It's simply functioning as the interface through which the experience happens. The same is true when you listen to music, solve a puzzle, hug a loved one, or eat your favorite food. Your attention may rest on the experience rather than your body, but your body hasn't disappeared; it's become a bridge between you and the world.

The body as a participant

I have always struggled with the idea of my body as a source of pleasure that was handed to me by self-help books and eating disorder treatment, as though I could replace body dissatisfaction with body pleasure if I just gave my body credit I was unfairly withholding from it. That didn't fit my experience. It's possible that because movement and sex, two activities most commonly pointed to as conduits for somatic self-care, did not bring me such pleasure as an exercise-intolerant asexual person, I learned to look outward for pleasure, learned that pleasure is something that I can make happen to my body, not something it produces itself.

The hammock I swing in? That's pleasurable. The sunshine I bask in? Pleasurable. The dog I cuddle with? He's pleasurable. My body seemed more like a necessary ingredient than the source of the pleasure.

I realized eventually that pleasure doesn't belong entirely to the body or entirely to the environment but rather emerges from the interaction between them. The warmth of the sun isn't pleasurable without a nervous system capable of sensing warmth. A functioning nervous system doesn't create sunshine on its own. The experience exists because both are participating.

The bodymind

An assumption hidden inside the advice to "get out of your head" is that thinking and embodiment are opposites. But your brain is part of your body! Thinking isn't something that happens outside your body; it's something bodies do. This doesn't mean every thought is embodied in the therapeutic sense. People can and do use analysis to distance themselves from difficult experiences, but analysis can also bring us closer to them. Sometimes the moment of finally finding words for an experience is the moment we understand ourselves most deeply. For those of us who naturally process the world through language, systems, or pattern recognition, conceptual clarity may be part of how the bodymind (coined by Margaret Price) regulates itself. Instead of assessing embodiment based on whether you're thinking, can you ask whether your thinking is helping you understand your lived experience or helping you avoid it?

Broadening the definition of embodiment

Paradoxically, we need to get more specific in order to make embodiment something more people can access. The specificity is in the questions we're asking. Rather than "What do you feel in your body?" or "Where do you feel that in your body?" we can ask:

• In what ways does your body allow you to interact with the world?

• What kinds of experiences become possible because you have a body?

• How does your environment change your experience?

• What conditions have to come together for something to feel good?

• How does understanding your experiences change the way you move through the world?

Notice that none of these questions requires strong interoceptive awareness, but they do require a relationship with your body. It's just a different one than therapy usually assumes.

If we define embodiment by awareness of internal sensations, many of us will always feel like we're failing. If we define embodiment as recognizing that every experience emerges through a bodymind interacting with an environment, suddenly there are many ways to be embodied; many channels through which we understand our experiences and thus ourselves.

Some people recognize they're overwhelmed because they notice a racing heart or a knot in their stomach. Others recognize they're overwhelmed because they suddenly can't tolerate background noise or the tags in their shirt. Some realize they're hungry because they feel hunger in their body. Others realize they're hungry because food suddenly sounds appealing, they become unusually irritable, or they notice they haven't been able to focus for the last hour. Some people connect with their bodies through movement, noticing how different activities change the way they feel physically. Others connect with their bodies by noticing patterns (e.g. "I enjoy sitting outside more when it's about 70 degrees, brightly lit grocery stores exhaust me, I write better after I've eaten lunch, and everything feels harder if I'm wearing the wrong fabric"). They may not feel those changes unfolding in their bodies moment-to-moment, but they become experts in the conditions under which their bodymind functions best.

None of these pathways is inherently more embodied than another. They're each a different way of learning how your body exists in relationship with the world.