“I’m not sure what you mean… I can’t tell you what’s happening in my body.”
That was Natalie’s first response when she came to me for coaching to figure out what she wanted to do instead of having others tell her what was best for her.
Like so many she had a difficult time accessing her body’s wisdom. Listening to others dictate what she should do only confused her more. But she didn’t know what else to do.
Natalie, like so many of us who can’t make sense of our inner experience will instead go to our brains, reporting what’s happening in conceptual terms.
Natalie did the same—at first.
What she wanted was to be able to make sense of her life by being more embodied.
Natalie had read enough to know the value of trusting her body.
She wanted to link together her felt experience with her brain, allowing psychological meaning to arise as wisdom.
In psychological terms, she wasn’t interoceptively aware, not able to integrate the constant flow of data from sensations throughout the body, traveling up into the brain’s insula.
That stream merges with other streams of information (thoughts, memories, sensory data like smell, sound, taste…) to give us the data points, “this is how I feel.”
We may not be attuned to our awareness all the time.
It’s more likely we are interoceptively aware on a spectrum – nevertheless we can deliberately cultivate our capacity giving us a felt sense of who we are, attuned to ourselves, accessing our own wellspring of creativity and wisdom.
As Natalie became more aware of her interoceptive signaling she found herself feeling steadier, knowing what signals to listen to inside.
More importantly she started accessing a sense of being guided from within, she spent less time agonizing and had more time to savor her life.
And that is what most important in the work I do with people:
- discerning what decisions are sound, what messages to listen to
- being able to more skillfully deal with our emotions
- connect to ourselves and others with more empathy
- and giving us the ability to respond more resiliently to challenges and setbacks.
Working with people over the last couple decades I realized there are a few steps we need for embodiment to happen.
- Slow down
- Pause
- Shift attention from outside to inside
- Drop from our heads to our hearts – sensing our experience
As I’ve been looking for what can help us in that process I’ve discovered the research on how movements effect and enhance our thinking.
This area of research is called embodied cognition.
Fascinating research points out how hand gestures deepens our understanding of abstract concepts like understand cell division and how human chromosomes pair up, the spindle dissolving and unwinding.
Whether or not we dive into the research we’ll benefit from opening up our capacity to discriminate what information we want to may attention to and how much our conscious minds can process.
So much of the information gathering happens non-consciously.
This is a good thing!
Our bodies apprehend and store what we perceive around us and how it affects us internally. Most of the time this process happens submerged below conscious awareness freeing up working memory for other uses.
A number of months ago I suggested an experiment to Natalie.
That opened up a huge positive door for her.
It’s why I decided to share that - and other practices with you, to find more ways to bring our body’s intelligence to the fore. Watch your inbox for something special that is coming up!