Have you ever had an intuitive hunch or a “gut feeling” in your body so strong you just couldn’t ignore it?
It may be a red-flag sense that something isn’t right with someone, or it may be a subtle feeling that a new person we meet will be playing an important role in our lives.
More often than not, these kind of deeply rooted gut feelings turn out to be correct. They are part of a whole other universe of perception, which is being increasingly acknowledged as an important component of our perceptual faculties.
It’s just that in a world dominated by concepts and cognitive learning, we are never taught to pay attention to this level of experience.
Also known as interoception, this is a faculty of awareness linked to our ability to perceive physical sensations that communicate important information about what’s going on in our body.
And, increasingly, interoceptive awareness has been linked to our ability to process and regulate emotions. Researchers now believe that lack of interoceptive awareness is linked to emotional disorders like depression, PTSD, addiction, and more.
In both psychotherapy and neuroscience, an increasing number of researchers are reconsidering the role of the body in emotional well-being and health, pointing to its central role in emotional experience and regulation.
This has been the life’s work of Cynthia Price, body-psychotherapist and founder of the Mindful Body Awareness technique for building interoceptive awareness.
In this free download, Cynthia talks about her pioneering work developing the Mindful Body Awareness approach as way to help clients access their emotional experience and develop a deeper connection with their felt experience.
Cynthia Price developed MABT over 20 years in her practice as a bodyworker and body-psychotherapist in which she worked extensively with individuals who were disconnected from their bodies due to stress, trauma, and pain.
“With body disconnection people are typically not fully aware of their feelings, the links between physical and emotional sensations, and how to engage in self-care and regulation in response to stress and emotional triggers,” notes Cynthia.
The Mindful Body Awareness approach was developed to enhance people’s capacity to attend to and process somatic awareness and experiences.
Cynthia talks about the keys to learning to pay attention to the body as a means to access emotional experience as it emerges as sensations in the body, rather than as mental constructs.
To facilitate interoceptive awareness in ourselves and our students, Cynthia says present-moment awareness of internal sensations is key.
“It’s about how we use our words to guide our students’ awareness. And maybe, if you’re someone who uses touch to help individual students in the class, you can put a hand on part of the body and encourage them to bring their attention into that place in their bodies. There are lots of little ways to support self-awareness.”
Developing interoception takes patience, but it has wide-reaching benefits for our physical and emotional health. To learn more about the method Cynthia pioneered for building interoceptive awareness and how it can impact our health and well-being, click on the “Enroll Now” button on this page to access the full free download video.
You might be also interested in Cynthia Price’s course: Connecting to Your Wisdom Body: Yoga as a Gateway to Interoception and Embodied Living.
