M5 : Lesson 2: Somatic Awareness: Neuroception, Interoception and more
Interoception and healthy/regulated insular cortex activity are key components of self-regulation.
Our prefrontal brain and limbic processing centers make decisions of action based on this incoming data from the insula. We improve this insula-limbic-prefrontal feedback loop through somatic awareness practices. We have already been doing these insular building practices with the first tool: “awareness- be here” practices. In this module, we take this practice into the body a bit more using somatic exercises.
I touched on this topic in Module 2 Live Q&A Part 1. Please review that teaching if you missed or forgot about it as it will help you understand why taking the time to do these practices are important.
Transcript
Cematic’s lesson 2. Sematic Awareness and perception. Sematic perception terminology. There are 4 terms I’d like you to become familiar with and they kind of sound the same. The first term is neuroception.
Which is defined by Stephen Gorgeous as the innate ability of the nervous system to detect cues of safety, danger, and life threat. Your nervous system is always deciding, am I safe? So sometimes our mind might think we’re safe, but our body might disagree because it has picked up some cue of danger. Now in order to help you become aware of these queues of danger or threat that your body might habitually be picking up, we need to become aware of what’s happening inside of our body. And we do that through developing our interception abilities.
Interception is Being able to feel all the feels inside of us. How do I feel in this moment? Becoming aware of your body sensations and emotions. We’ll go more into this in a moment. The third term is external reception.
This is sensory awareness of the stimuli outside of our body versus inside of our body as we just learn with Interoception. Lastly, there is propioception. This is the ability to sense your body in space as it’s related to gravity. For example, are you sitting upright or are you lying down right now? How can you tell?
That’s your sense of proprioception. It’s also what gives us our sense of balance. Now this just kinda shows how the body is always perceiving safety or threat in our environment. And our nervous system has our neuroception and our external perception to pick up cues of am I okay right now? There’s a lot of stimuli coming into the body at all times that were often unconscious sometimes our brain has associated with threat or our nervous system has associated with threat.
And so we might need to reprogram the body mind that things that thought was a threat like chemicals in the environment or cold air or the sun is actually okay. I want to talk more about introsception. This one is an important principle to understand that we’re going to be focusing on a lot in module 5. This again is our ability to feel our body. Are you aware of your body’s needs?
This is one of the functions of something known as our insular cortex in our brain. And if it’s not functioning properly, sometimes we have reduced awareness of our needs. You see, your brain is constantly paying attention to all sorts of things like your heart rate, your breathing, your body temperature, it’s getting information from organs, And in addition to that, it’s also paying attention to our needs if it’s functioning properly. So our needs might be, do I need to pee? Am I thirsty?
Am I too hot? Am I too cold? Am I tired? Are you feeling your needs? Are you paying attention to that?
Or are you getting more signals of danger and other things? That’s not allowing you to find your true needs. This is why we’re gonna use practices today to improve our internal reception because we need to feel our body’s true needs. The next piece of this is do you feel like you are in your body? Meaning, This is your sense of ownership.
Is this even my body? Sometimes if there’s an issue with this insular cortex that helps us with our interoception, we can often feel out of body. We can even feel like part of our body is wooden or it’s like, not real, like a prosthetic sometimes. So that might mean that you have an issue with your sense of embodiment. And again, these practices are all gonna help you to improve that.
Sometimes, however, we might be hyper aware of our body, and it’s an overdrive, and we feel every little thing. That’s also a skewed perception of your interoceptive capacity. So we also need to modulate and regulate that. Is your body reacting as if you’re in danger even though right now you mentally know you’re okay? Sometimes there’s a disconnect where you’re like, well, I feel calm in my brain, but my body is tight and in like a fight, flight response.
That disconnect is another issue that we’ll be working with. We are using the awareness, pattern, interrupt, and be here practice, as well as the AB, part of ABC, to help us improve our interoception. So you’ve actually been working on this all along. And we’re gonna do more practices in this module. Now be aware that it might feel alarming when you first become aware of your body at first, especially if you’ve had a lot of suppressed stress sensations or unconscious emotions.
Sometimes, as we start to pay attention to our body, we can trigger a stress response further Because as we become aware, initially, we might misperceive what we’re feeling as dangerous. So as we do these practices, we’re gonna learn to do this in a curious, loving, observer way. This is why I often do not teach some of these exercises at the beginning because we first need to get in the habit of realizing our body is stuck in our chronic stress free spots, and we don’t have to believe everything we feel, but we do need to feel what’s going on inside of us to repattern and reprocess those feelings. Interoception practices help us to build our primal trust. As you gain more capacity to feel all the feels and still find perspective that you are indeed safe right now in your environment and that your body is not in the danger that it thinks it’s in, you will begin to wire in the innate okayness The feeling of I am okay just like we discussed in that original diagram in module 1, we have to find our okayness to turn on our self healing.
To continue to help build our interception, we will be doing orienting practices and somatic tracking and we’re going to help our body perceive safety even with symptoms. We’re going to learn on how to cover more of your body’s needs, and improve your connection to your internal guidance system. Which means to connect you to your gut instinct. In addition to the practices you’ll learn here in module 5, Please know we have other resources that are really important that you look through. For example, in our video library, we have a somatic section with videos by Michelle Palmer, who’s a physical therapist who teaches wonderful classes to help you with Interoception.
We also have live biweekly somatic classes that you can join, and we have live brain, body, neural reset classes that you can also join all to help you with these practices. So please be sure to check all of this out in addition to this module. I want to speak to what can happen as we start to build more somatic awareness with our body and improve our internal reception. Sometimes we can get a lot of new sensations, and sometimes we can feel like this is bad because some of our sensations might be painful. Like, you might notice more stomach pain.
Sometimes we can get aware of even our organs that with all sorts of weird sensations. I know that happened to me. I felt like I could feel my kidney and liver and my ovaries and all sorts of things. So know that that’s part of your brain and your body coming back online and relaying information. And sometimes you’ll get signals that you really don’t need to be paying a tension to, but it’s just part of that whole process coming back online.
Some of us are actually way too wired into our body and feel everything, and we’re so used to perceiving it as a threat that we keep getting signals from our body of every little thing. So if that’s you, you’re also gonna need to practice to Feel these feelings and not perceive them as a threat. Even though you might feel weird squeezes and tightening in different sensations, So this whole process is about regulating, sometimes feeling more, sometimes recognizing what we’re feeling we don’t need to be paying attention to, and it’s not a threat. So the other thing that can happen is when we start getting in touch with our body, some of our trapped unconscious or subconscious emotions can start to bubble up to the surface. It starts to be released, which is a good thing, but you might feel feelings of grief or anger or shame that just kind of flood you from time to time.
Now, this is where you need to use your tools to keep rewiring your response of safety and recognizing it’s okay to feel these feelings, they can move through me. And we’ll work on this a lot more in the level 2 program, but know that this might start happening it’s normal and it’s actually a good thing because that’s a lot of energy that your nervous system has been using to suppress. And when you don’t have to use all your energy to suppress emotions and feelings anymore, it frees up your vital force. So celebrate when you’re getting these waves of emotion. Try to express them in a healthy way.
You can ask on the forum for support about this or speak to a mentor if you’re needing some help with this process, but it is a good thing. Next, let’s go over some somatic awareness principles. 1st, we are developing resources and establishing a toolkit so that you can restore a sense of safety when you’re feeling stress. For example, taking this course is a resource and a toolkit, having a mentor, a coach, or a therapist that’s also helpful Getting your body into a safe, supportive environment. Getting your basic needs met is probably the most important first step.
So if you’re truly in some type of threatening situation, it is really, I’d say difficult to fully self regulate. So do your best to change your environment to be in a place of safety and support. Now, you need to be responsible to gather your favorite regulation tools that resonate with you and take the time to practice them throughout the day. Ask yourself, what are my favorite tools? Make a list of these things.
What activities bring me back to my true self? So if you have to, maybe pause the video right here and make a list Put it somewhere where you can see it. I know we’ve been working on this a little bit as we go along, but this is important. What are my favorite tools and activities that I can resource myself with. These lists were so helpful to me when I was in overwhelm and I couldn’t think of anything to do.
I put these lists on my refrigerator, in my bedroom, and I referred to them. This is your responsibility to build your toolkit. Another important principle of somatic awareness is somatic orienting. Which is becoming aware of your body and your environment. We’ve actually been doing a bit of this all along.
Awareness practices help us to improve our introsception like we just talked about. It helps us to address what something known as implicit memories which means it’s stored energy and experiences that are below our conscious perception that we need to deal with Servicing practices help us to create a perception of safety, connection, and resourcefulness. This teaches the body the difference between past memories that might be emerging versus the present moment situation. This is how we teach the body. Oh, that feeling, that was then, and this is now and we might feel the sensation that might be uncomfortable.
And yet, I’m inherently okay right now. So this helps us to move energy through our body by feeling our feels and becoming present to the non threat in the current environment. And third, emerging back into life with somatic embodiment What does that mean? Again, feeling all the feels, having tools to use, having the capacity to handle the bumps while living your life. This is where we have integrated a lot of our stress patterning, where we know we can handle what might happen in our physical body even if uncomfortable experiences occur.
14:25Because at this stage, we know how to work with our brain and our nervous system. Next up is lesson 3, where we’ll learn some new tools, specifically on somatic orienting. See you there.