Building a vocabulary of interoceptive texture
With the launch of our new autonomics clinic, I’ve spent a lot of time this past week facilitating individual sessions with clients. One of the things I’ve been noticing is how often folks are searching for words to describe sensation.
Sensation is the primal language of the deep nervous system. The autonomic nervous system communicates with us - makes itself known - through the language of sensation1. Sensation is only available in the present moment. Its depth, texture, and nuance provide the dynamic living map of how our ANS is navigating our moment-to-moment experience.
Although obvious at some level, it bears repeating that the only time in which we can locate sensation is in the present moment, and the only place we can experience sensation is in the body. So contact with sensation– which is contact with the living texture of the ANS - requires us to be embodied and in the present moment. Simply attending to sensation anchors us in the body and in the now.
Most modern people don’t have deep moment-to-moment contact with sensation because they are not living in their bodies: they are living in their thoughts. And never was a thought born that was oriented towards the present moment: we think in the direction of the future or the past. So one of the common reasons people don’t access sensation is because they are in the channel of thinking. The other reason(s) are that 1) if we are stressed out, what we are feeling in the body doesn’t feel good, and 2) if we have accumulated shutdown (or are residing in a baseline of shutdown), we lose access to interoception by definition. (Shutdown states down-regulate interoception).
Because of this, the living map of sensation arising in our bodies, experienced as a continuity/discontinuity is also a cartography of our archived allostatic load. The place where transformation happens is when we are in contact with this language of sensation. Yet many people have trouble locating, sensing, and describing sensations.
At a basic level, a body sensation is either going to be expanding, contracting, or not changing shape. It will have an edge or contour or boundary or shape. The edge might be clear or fuzzy. Sensation has density, it has direction. It has texture and attributes. There exists an entire language of sensation in the living body.
As a clinical/ therapeutic support, we’ve made a poster of interoceptive textures. Useful for anyone working with the autonomic nervous system, as well as anyone interested in more closely tracking interoceptive experience to increase your autonomic fluency.
And emotion and movement and gesture and posture and facial expression and eye gaze and tuning of the middle ear and turning of the head and neck, and motor movements and arching of the spine, and curvature of the neck and balance of the head on the neck and breathing and capillary dilation and bloodflow and perfusing neurochemistry…