The Importance of Cultivating Interoceptive Awareness
Yesterday, the moment I placed my hands on my client’s chest, I felt a wave of grief move through my own body—not my grief, but hers. I sometimes shy away from talking about my sensitivity or what it’s like when I’m working with a client as a somatic practitioner because I fear someone will think I’m crazy, or even worse, that it is true and I am crazy. In a world of science and rationality, one that I have considered myself soundly a part of since my teenage years at a math and science boarding school, saying something like “when touching someone’s stomach, I can feel their anger” will at best stir up incredulous looks and at worst get my experience discounted on the spot. Sometimes my experience is even more uncanny: a full sentence forming in my mind the second before a client says it, or a visual image rising moments before it’s described to me. While the words and pictures remain rarer, when consciously attuned to others, the depth of what I feel can astound me.
Feeling is a sense that can be cultivated. I am using the word “feeling” loosely as it encompasses many meanings. As an active process, I’m talking about interoceptive awareness, and as something experienced within the body, I’m talking about affect: the predecessor to emotions, the sensation that rises up before it’s classified and named. The more you take photos, the more you notice beauty in your surroundings. And as I can personally attest to since moving to Berlin two years ago, the more you listen to electronic music, the more you distinguish between layers of sound and their timing, and the more you develop sonic taste. The same holds true for cultivating inner sensing. Through five years of somatic therapeutic practices, first as a client and now as a practitioner, I’ve developed my ability to feel. I’ve learned to notice subtlety and nuance in my own bodyscape and to discern my affective experience. While people’s starting points vary dramatically, anyone can cultivate this sense.
Sensitivity is the ability to distinguish subtle differences in quality and perceive experience with more granularity. When it comes to other senses, the merits of their development are clear: develop your ear to become a more skilled music producer, refine your taste palate to become a better chef. But why cultivate your interoceptive sensitivity, your ability to map your own terrain so you can feel even the most subtle changes, flows, and waves of affect as they ebb and flow through the bodymind?
Answering this question is a challenge. Words might not even get me there because the answer lies in the body, which has a language that can only ever be partially translated into spoken words. The first part of the answer might apply to cultivating any sense, and why it is worthy to focus attention on sensations and sensory experience in general. Our brains are fundamentally prediction machines. Rather than passively receiving sensory data, they’re constantly generating predictions about what we’ll experience next, then comparing incoming signals against those predictions. We only become consciously aware of the mismatches—the prediction errors. This starts in infancy, when we’re bombarded with sensory information that would overwhelm us without some organizing principle. Over time, our brains learn patterns shaped by survival needs, social learning, emotional experiences, and countless repetitions. These learned patterns become the lens through which we filter everything we perceive. And the brain prioritizes efficiency over accuracy: it’s metabolically cheaper to rely on predictions than to process every sensation from scratch.
This predictive processing creates distance from direct experience. We live life as we expect it rather than as it unfolds. By focusing attention on sensations, I argue, we wedge open our filtration systems, “take the blinders off,” and move closer to a more raw, unfiltered reality—a goal of many spiritual practices. Instead of glazing over details our brains and bodies have categorized as unimportant in the past, we encounter what is more directly. That said, we can never fully escape prediction—even our most direct experiences are shaped by expectation. What changes is the balance: we can learn to weigh incoming sensations more heavily than our predictions about them.
And here’s what makes interoceptive sensitivity particularly valuable in this process, at least as I’ve come to see it: interoceptive signals have a different relationship to our predictive models than external perception does. When you see a tree, your brain constructs that tree from photons, learned categories, memories, and expectations. There are multiple steps between the light hitting your retina and your experience of “tree.” But interoceptive signals—the tension in your jaw, the flutter in your stomach, the expansion in your chest—are signals about states that are already you. Your body is reporting on itself instead of something distant. This doesn’t mean interoceptive awareness gives us unfiltered access to truth—our brains still interpret and categorize these signals, generating predictions about them. But the signal chain is shorter, the stakes are more immediate (these sensations directly reflect our well-being), and most crucially, we can train ourselves to notice the raw signals before our conceptual mind labels them. In this sense, interoceptive sensitivity offers something uniquely valuable: not reality as it truly is, but the most direct form of self-knowledge available to us.
Beyond helping us perceive reality more directly, cultivating interoceptive sensitivity provides understanding of ourselves and others. Whether the recommendation is to listen to your gut or your heart, there’s a knowing that we have other, potentially better, sources of wisdom and decision-making than the mind. Studies back this up, showing that signals often appear in our body before we consciously arrive at thought-based knowing. The more somatic work I’ve done, the more I’ve been in touch with and been able to act based on bodily knowing. In my life, this shows up as instant recognition when I meet someone who has an important role to play, an instinctive pull in certain directions on my career path, a clear signal that I don’t trust someone, or simply a much more refined body map showing me exactly what stimulates my nervous system and how, giving me a chance to work with my reactions with much more agency.
I can give an example of this. I met someone at a party. Within seconds of our conversation beginning, my chest opened, my breath deepened, and I felt an unmistakable pull toward this person—not romantic, but something else I couldn’t name. My mind hadn’t yet processed who they were or what they did, but my body already knew this person mattered. I reached out to them in the following weeks, and we ended up becoming close collaborators on a major creative community project. Before developing interoceptive sensitivity, I would have dismissed that initial bodily response as random or meaningless. Now I trust it as data.
Each time I enter a somatic session as a client and verbally explain the content of my life, I’m asked to become aware of what sensations arise in my body, to describe them in detail, including where they are, their intensity, how they relate to emotions, and how they’re changing. By repeatedly bringing attention toward sensation, whether in my stomach, feet, chest, or head, I notice these sensations over time with more nuance and refinement. Suddenly, when I feel constriction in my stomach, I might notice that the experiences on the right and left sides of my belly are actually different, and that when I breathe into my belly, this difference becomes even more apparent. What I’ve found is that as I’ve mapped my own bodily terrain with more discernment, my ability to understand the affective experience of others has also increased. My bodymind seems to mirror aspects of their experience in my own. Whether it’s the closing of their throat, joy in their heart, or a wave of energy traveling down their arms, I often feel sensations in my own body in similar locations to where they report experiencing them.
This mirroring has multiple physiological bases. Research on therapeutic relationships suggests several mechanisms may be at work: mirror neuron activation, physiological entrainment between practitioner and client, and skilled attention. Expectancy effects are also involved, but the specificity and consistency of these experiences I’ve had suggest they involve far more than expectation alone. The outcome I’ve had reliably confirmed by clients is that I’m picking up what’s happening in someone else’s system within my own, sometimes with me feeling it first, before it becomes conscious to them. This embodied understanding shapes how I work with clients.
I can use my body map as a compass to support someone in becoming more conscious of their own experience and, in that process of bringing attention toward their experience, allow movement and change to take place. To feel ourselves more fully, especially what we had previously suppressed and hadn’t been fully conscious of, is transformative. However, I’d like to add that for some clients, the challenge isn’t developing more sensitivity. Some clients may already receive abundant somatic information. Instead, they need nervous system regulation that allows them to stay present with their intense sensations. In these cases, breathwork and attentional practices create safety rather than enhanced perception, expanding their window of tolerance for the sensitivity they already possess. But this extends beyond the therapy room. This capacity for viscerally understanding others’ experience inside yourself supports a sense of interbeing that is vital to cultivate in this time of deep separation in the modern era. When you can feel another person’s grief in your chest, the intellectual understanding that we are interconnected becomes lived knowledge in your body.
Cultivating interoceptive sensitivity offers three interconnected capacities. First, it allows us to perceive reality more directly, wedging open the predictive filters that keep us living in expectation rather than experience. Second, it grants access to embodied cognition, the bodily knowing that precedes and often surpasses purely mental decision-making. Third, as we map our own somatic landscape with greater precision, we develop the ability to feel others’ experience within our own body—the tension held in their jaw, the softening in their shoulders. These benefits are a progressive deepening: the more clearly we feel ourselves, the more we can feel each other.
These individual capacities point toward something larger. When you viscerally experience another person’s pain in your own body, interconnection stops being philosophy and becomes one’s somatic truth. Charles Eisenstein writes in The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible that the idealism needed for the changes our world urgently requires is a matter of the heart, not the mind. This is the idealism that moves us beyond self-interest, that makes the environment, other species, and distant strangers matter enough to inconvenience ourselves, to change how we live, to act for collective benefit even at personal cost. By developing our capacity to feel ourselves and each other, we build the embodied foundation for that idealism. From this space of direct knowing—where another’s suffering is something we feel in our own chest and interconnection is lived experience—we can create the world our hearts are dreaming of: one where we respond to each other’s needs as readily as we respond to our own.
