Embodied Praxis 2025: Interoception

There has long been a Grand Canyon-sized gap between conceptual insight and the real-life, visceral experience of change. This gap exists in the field of embodiment, too, where the exciting frontiers of neuroscience, social sciences, and philosophy can result in us knowing more about our bodies than we do about how to exist in our bodies.

To mark the Gregorian New Year, I’d like to offer you a series of embodied “bridges” to close that gap between insight and change.

For the next several weeks, sandwiched in between my usual offerings, I’ll be sending along a series of inquiries and practices for each of the senses (and in some cases, applications—like PTSD) of embodiment.

These offerings are designed to put flesh on the bones of your body’s inner senses, and to illuminate the openings they make available to us in both individual and collective ways.

We’ll begin today with interoception.

What Interoception is + Why It Matters

In its scientific sense, interoception refers to our ability to receive, interpret, respond to, and regulate the body’s internal signals.

Experientially, you can also think of it as inner perception, or mindfulness of the body.

On an “atomic” level, interoception encompasses a wide range of sensations, including:

• cardiovascular, such as heartbeat

• gastrointestinal, including from the esophagus, stomach, small intestine, and colon (these are also part of our enteric nervous system, aka our “second brain”)

• distention of the abdomen, bladder, or rectum

• hunger, thirst, and fullness

• sensations of breath, including shortness of breath, or “air hunger”

• temperature (warmth or coolness)

• pricking pain or burning pain

• itch, shudder, or tickle

• vasomotor flushing (aka hot flashes)

• muscular sensations, e.g. tension, soreness, and isometric or dynamic exercise

• bone bruising, fracture, joint ache

• nausea or cramps or illness

• headache + migraine

• fatigue, including chronic fatigue

• sensual touch, also referred to as social or affective (emotional) touch

• sexual arousal, touch, and orgasm

• wine-tasting (in sommeliers)

• acute or systemic inflammation and inflammatory metabolites

If you’d like to read more about interoception, consider this article.

Beyond the list of sensations above, there are also elements of interoception that make a difference to our health and well-being.

The scale most used by researchers to measure interoception, the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) has eight subscales.

To my mind, the one with the most implications for emotional and social health is body trust.

On the three-item subscale, respondents rate their agreement with the statements, “I am at home in my body,” “I feel my body is a safe place,’ and “I trust my body sensations.”

At a broad brushstrokes level, body trust supports personal growth, autonomy, and sense of purpose.

On a specific level, it shows the highest correlation with psychological well-being of all the MAIA scales. The lower the level of body trust people have, the more likely they are to have mild, moderate, or severe depression. Lower scores are associated with eating disorders, suicidality, childhood trauma, and workplace performance, while higher scores correlate with better emotion regulation strategies.

Body trust even acts as a buffer for the negative effects of discrimination.

Interoception + Emotional Health

Many studies link interoception with emotional regulation. In general, people with low levels of interoception (seen in depression, eating disorders, substance abuse, and chronic pain) also experience difficulty in understanding and identifying sensations and emotional states. In contrast, in anxiety people often perceive sensations accurately, but tend to catastrophize the meaning of these sensations. (An increase in heart rate, for example, means not that you’re excited, but that you might be having a heart attack.)

If you’d like to read more about interoception and emotional health, consider this article.

Sensations are the origins of our emotions. This means that every emotion began as a sensation—and we can reverse-engineer from the emotion back to its foundational sensation and build the capacity to incubate and metabolize it.

This means that in times of sadness, fear, anger, or other difficult emotions, leaning in to sensations can develop both sensory and emotional resilience.

Interoception in Its Social Context

At first glance, interoception might seem like a personal endeavor.

And yet, our body is part of a web of connective tissue that includes other bodies and our larger social body as a whole.

The emerging field of social interoception explores the way social factors influence personal embodiment, and how the experience we have in our bodies affects our social world in return.

For example, oppression directly targets interoception by creating unsafe environments, forcing us to scan the environment for threats, and to use valuable neural, cognitive, and emotional resources for emotional regulation and threat detection. This is true of race-based traumatic stress (RBTS).

It is also true for other forms of oppression: People in female, LGBTQ+ bodies, and disabled people experience greater social challenges to their interoception.

In many areas of the world right now, particularly in the U.S. where I currently live, dominant cultural groups have organized to limit knowledge of our complex, traumatic cultural history, and to roll back our rights to make decisions about our bodies. The resulting lack of safety can divert our attention toward scanning the world around us for signs of danger, which is a healthy response to oppression. And that makes it difficult to turn our awareness toward the inner state of our bodies.

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Below, you’ll find a simple practice to help you revive (and also assess) your interoceptive powers, followed by several nodes of inquiry designed to help you “track” the state and status of these powers.

Practice: The Embodied Check-In

In this practice, we’re not trying to change our internal states, but to observe and be present with them instead.

You’ll learn to tune in to a variety of sensations, emotions, and experiences in your body, as well as the relationship you have with these experiences. You’ll also cultivate the ability to observe these experiences as they change from one moment to the next.

You can also employ the Check-In before and after any embodied practice to help determine it’s “therapeutic impact,” which is to say, how that practice makes you feel.

Pick any position your body feels drawn to in this moment: You can do this standing. You can sit in a chair. You can lie on your abdomen. And you can lie on your back with your knees bent, with one hand on your heart and the other on your abdomen.

Soften your eyes, so that your outer sense of vision (exteroception) begins to turn inward. You can also close your eyes if you wish.

Begin to breathe in and out through your nose.

Explore the following inquiries:

Am I in my body in this moment? That is to say, is my awareness present in my body? Is it trained on something in the world around me? Missing in action? Halfway between in and out? At first, it’s not always easy to know if awareness is rooted in your body. Yet over time and with practice, when you ask this question, you’ll grow more aware of what it feels like to occupy your body, and what it feels like when you’re having a mini (or big) out-of-body experience.

Next, let’s observe the depth, rate, and location of the breath. Does the breath feel shallow, as though it’s mostly active in the nose or upper chest? Is the belly moving with the breath? Does the breath feel slow and deep, or a little on the rapid side? Rapid breathing can signal nervous system overdrive. Slower breathing indicates rest-and-digest mode, which is conducive to being present in your body.

Can you feel the sensations of your breath? Where do you feel your breath most strongly—in your abdomen, your chest, or both? Does your breath feel cool, warm, or hot?

Notice the speed of the mind. Are thoughts moving fast, as though they’re channel surfing from one to the next—or are they on repeat, as though they’re stuck on one channel? Is a story or narrative arising about an experience that’s been on your mind? Are you critiquing yourself, and cataloguing your flaws—or doing so with someone else? These can be indicators that the mind is ruminating, or beginning to construct a story that may take us further from body experience.

Do you feel areas of discomfort—or ease—in your muscles and connective tissue? Which come to awareness first? If you’d like a little structure here, check in with your feet, and notice any areas of tightness, soreness, or discomfort. How move upward, taking inventory of your legs and then your hips and lower pelvis. Note any tension in your abdomen, which is home to your “belly brain.” Tension here can change your gut microbiome and increase levels of anxiety. Move to your spine, breathing up and down its length a few times. And now the head and neck: What’s happening in these areas?

Notice the level of energy in your body. Is it low, normal, or high? Noticing energy level helps you recognize when you are depleted and need rest and self-care.

Bring awareness to your emotions: Do you feel sadness, anger, or anxiety? If so, do they feel like yours? Do they seem like “emotional leftovers,” related to an interaction you’ve recently had?

What is the quality of your self-to-body relationship—the tone with which you’re approaching your body—in this moment? (You might feel critical of your body, as though it isn’t functioning the way it “should”—or disconnected, as though there’s estrangement between you and your body. Or perhaps you feel apprehensive, a little afraid. Or neutral. Curious. Or excited and compassionate, as though reuniting with a friend.)

Is anything happening in your body with respect to the relationships you have with others? Have you been incubating emotions, or even sensations (say, pain or tightness) that mirror the inner experience of someone close to you—say, a parent, partner, or child? If that’s the case, simply noticing can lower the “stickiness” of this experience, the degree to which it takes up residence in your body.

Take a few rounds of breath to notice anything else that feels salient to the landscape of your body in this moment.

When the Check-In feels complete to your body, you can slowly return to sitting or standing. You can open your eyes or allow them to become more active.

Feel free to write down in your journal anything from this check-in that feels notable to you.

The Body Inquiry: Tracking Interoception

The following are several nodes of inquiry that you can employ throughout the year as you consider your relationship with the inner landscape of your body. Feel free to modify, and to add your own.

1. What comes up when I bring attention to sensations in my body? Is there a sense of “I can’t do this?” or an insecurity about what I’m “supposed” to be feeling?

2. Which areas of interoception come easily to me, and which areas seem to draw a blank? Are there any nodes of investigation that seem to bump up my heart rate and cause an uptick in anxiety? And if they do, how does my body guide me to respond?

3. When I encounter difficult emotional experiences, can I take time to breathe and check in with my body to see what lies “underneath” those experiences?

4. When I feel a sensation or emotion that threatens the status quo (of my own life or of a relationship), do I trust in that sensation and use it as a form of guidance? Am I tempted to censor or cancel it out entirely? Can I hear the action that a sensation might ask of me? Can I follow through on that action?

5. What is the “tone” or quality of my exploration of inner body experience? Do I feel aversion, as though I’m forcing myself to undertake a dreaded work assignment? Am I curious? How often do I find myself going into “auto pilot” mode? What is it like when I approach body experience with curiosity? Compassion? Each of these relationship qualities is part of cultivating a relationship with the body and its experience, and most of us will spend time in each orientation.

6. How can I bring interoception into other activities, such as movement, my relationships, and using my body intelligence to contribute to my medical care?

7. In social situations, if someone tells me that I’ve hurt them in some way, what arises inside my body? Even when my nervous system is activated, can I also reserve a little space to remain aware of what gets evoked in me when I receive difficult interpersonal or social feedback? If I’m feeling (or acting) defensive, can I drill down to what lies underneath that—for example, shame or even, a fear of being abandoned?

That’s it! Please drop a comment below and share any discoveries you’ve made.

Happy New Year.

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