You have a body.

You have a body. This is a fairly safe prediction to make for the moment, since as far as we know, no one has uploaded their consciousness into any sort of digital domain. As yet, no self-aware artificial constructs exist to read this. That you are in possession of a body is the first in a number of statements and questions that we will present that will seem (hopefully only initially) to be rather obvious.

Of course you have a body! To take it a step further, of course you are embodied. But what it does mean, to be embodied? Being embodied means that your experience of the world and of yourself is grounded in and mediated by your particular, individual body. This is to say that your mind exists in the context of your body, and is influenced by it, even emerges from it. And although this notion of you having a body seems obvious, there might be some complications hidden in there. For instance: who, exactly, is it that ‘has’ this body?

Continuing to be Captain Obvious, an interesting thing about living things is that they move – every body moves. Some movement is automatic and not under your control (the peristaltic contractions that move food through your intestines), some movement appears to be under conscious control (walking), and others (where things get particularly interesting) are somewhere in the middle. Of the movements that are in this category of partly automatic and partly volitional, one of the most immediate and primal is breathing. Our first breath signals our beginning as a distinct individual and our last breath signals our end.

The chances are pretty good that you’re breathing now! It’s also possible that when you read the words saying that you were breathing, you became more aware of the act itself: “Right, I am breathing”. You may be sitting at a desk, or standing in a bus looking at your phone; regardless, you are in a place where you can breathe.¹ If you’re engaged in the disaster of social media at all, you will very often see posts encouraging you to breathe and “check-in with yourself”. This is well-intentioned but vague (and perhaps not very helpful) advice. What does it mean to breathe? What does it have to do with how you feel? How does stopping to breathe consciously and actively help you “check-in” with yourself? Well, it doesn’t have to , by default. And that’s why it’s not necessarily useful advice.

If you are somewhere where circumstances safely allow, take a moment to focus on your breath. Don’t necessarily change how you are breathing, though you probably just did without meaning to. I did, while writing that sentence² Just feel the rise and fall of your chest or belly, wherever your breath is going. If you’re breathing in through your nose, see if you can feel your breath against your nostrils; if you’re breathing through your mouth, then try to feel it on your lips. Just hang out for a second doing these things. Maybe close your eyes, if you can do that where you are, and just focus on the act of feeling yourself breathing.

Again, without changing what you are doing (notice also that, in breathing, you are doing something), you might give some attention to how your head moves as you breathe. If you are inhaling into the upper chest, the head will tend to rise with an inhale and nod a bit with the exhale. If you are breathing into your belly and leaving the upper chest quiet, an inhale will tend to push the upper spine back perhaps tilting the head down and back a little. On the exhale the head will return to its previous position.

These movements may be small and you may or may not get a clear sense of them, but either way the point is having the intention to pay attention to the breath (or any other movement) and just notice. This is conscious interoception: The act of listening to, deliberately paying attention to, your internal state and all the signals we receive about how we are doing. Having done this. what else might you notice? Do you feel more grounded? More connected to your body, more in and of yourself than you did? If so, neat! If not, also neat!

Interoception is your body and brain keeping track of all your internal states via a large and specialized network of nerves and centers in the brain. Interoception is how homeostatic processes actually work in the body and is thus a significant contributor to you not being dead. Like movement, some of these signals are unconscious, some conscious, and many are available to conscious awareness, but only if we take a moment to listen or observe. If your blood sugar is low, you don’t necessarily feel the complex chain of hormonal signaling taking place, but you may notice that you are irritable. Some signals of interception are a bit more insistent. That hollow feeling in the pit of your stomach after fasting for 24 hours is not easy to overlook.

Many of our interoceptive feedback signals fall into the category of being available but hovering just below unfocused consciousness – so we notice them only if we listen. This tends to be the case for a surprising amount of our emotional awareness. It is the tightness in your gut, sweaty palms, or that held breath that lets you know you are scared. It’s also the warm, relaxed feeling in your body that goes with being with someone you love and trust. These feelings can begin and persist at a low-level before we notice them, and before we become consciously aware of the emotional experience we’re having. Interoception is thus fundamental to how we actually feel and experience our feelings, and how we know we are even having an emotional experience in the first place. This is not, incidentally, really separate from the rest of our homeostatic mechanisms.

So, now that you’ve done an interoception, and know that you’ve done it (with your breath just a minute ago), and know what it is, you might have some inkling of why it’s important, and why it’s the noticing that matters. If you’re an embodied consciousness, and emotional experiences are felt in the body, then learning to notice what your body is doing can help you to know what is that you feel (in all the senses of the word) at any given moment. And if you can know what you feel at any given moment, then you can act in an informed manner based on that information. Perhaps you can even move to change how you feel.

Having discovered this, we might describe a practice where we use some technique to help focus our attention in our body, listen to our body using our interoceptive sense, and then gather insight into how we wish to act in the world. But how should we choose to focus our attention in the body? Through the use of conscious and controlled movement. In the example above, we used the most fundamental of all such movements, breathing. But almost any movement can be used as a sort of interoceptive query, as a starting point for understanding ourselves better.

This might seem like a peculiar statement. And it’s true, we all engage in lots of seemingly empty, meaningless movement in our daily lives, that we perform with little attention or intention besides “drink the coffee”. Just reaching for a cup of coffee seems like a pretty straightforward action. “I want a sip of coffee, therefore I reach.” But someone watching us might say “you seem tense” or “you look cheerful today” based purely on how we reach out in an everyday gesture. If you are an embodied consciousness, and your emotional experiences are happening in your body, then they must color and inform how it moves.

This is because we are social creatures and it is (and has been) critical to know what the people around us are feeling and intending, and also to convey our own feelings and intentions. We part of a long lineage of social apes who have had exactly this problem for millions of years, and did not have the luxury of highly complex, flowery spoken language or sonnets to express themselves.³ So we read the emotional states of others from their movements and advertise our feelings in our own. It is actually quite difficult to avoid doing this! So movement provides a special mode of entry to emotional interoception.

Just as we read the movements of others, if we slow down a little and pay attention, we can learn to become aware of the emotional states revealed in our own movements. The next time you reach for coffee (or tea, or a flagon of Klingon ale), try taking a moment to observe how you are reaching and what it feels like. Is this the reach of a happy person? A confident person? Is this person tired? Be careful not to spill your beverage of choice in this exercise. Even in the breathing exercise above, would someone watching you breathe think you were happy? Or tired? Enjoying the mountain breeze on your face? What do you say to yourself with every inhale, without really knowing you’re doing it?

So if we choose to bring our attention to our movement, and choose movements sufficiently slow and simple to be able to listen fully, we can get a new, different picture of ourselves. This can become a doorway that opens into a richer and far more nuanced life than is normally available to our rushed and rushing not-listening.

The masters of this, on a certain level, are dancers and some actors, who learn to generate and give expression to emotional experiences through their bodies. And the viewers of these movements, being hyper-social primates with a deep evolutionary history that precedes the advent of language, are able to share those experiences by watching them⁴. This is also a part of why watching sports is so engaging! Much more of our culture is expressed and shared this way than it might initially appear. Observing a small child attempting to reproduce the movement habits of their parents will make this rather obvious.

Dance and sports are also so marvelous to watch because physical mastery is simply a very enjoyable experience, even secondhand. Our mirror neurons actually recreate for us the experience of the movement when we watch another person move, to the extent that we can understand their movement. Interoception can thus also help you live a more interesting and enjoyable life by deepening your experience of yourself and the world in which you exist, and can be applied to virtually any sport or physical practice. An interoceptive practice can lead to just having more fun in life.

Now, you may have had the thought “This seems an awful lot like mindfulness.” And you would be partly correct! Mindfulness is the practice of intentional noticing, and as we’ve pointed out, noticing is indeed key. However, very often one of the main components of a mindfulness practice (and related practices in Buddhism, Christianity, and so forth) is the establishment of distance from emotional life. The mind observes what arises and then lets it go – a certain turning away from emotional experience. In this sense the practice of mindfulness, sitting, cultivating Buddha nature or Christian virtue is an act of distancing oneself from emotional, and thus physical, experiences. It is likely not a coincidence that most meditation is performed while sitting – not moving and not listening carefully to what a movement can tell us.

And let us be clear, this distancing does have value, as a means of creating some space around the more reactive part of our nature! We are full of semi-automated systems that respond to the world we live in, and a container ship’s worth of social programming. So learning to observe oneself without judgment is very valuable in developing clearer perception generally.

But it is easy to do this in a way that does not provide real insight into one’s emotional experience, and which does not deepen the experience of being an embodied consciousness. Any focus on an abstract notion such as attaining Buddha nature and Getting off the Wheel of Karma, or attaining a Christ-like frame of mind, being ruled only by Stoic logic, etc. tends to push our attention toward some imagined future state (one beyond this world, even!) and deflects our awareness of being, as Sting noted, a spirit in the material. In the cultural West in particular this turning away from the embodied self can manifest as the Christian idea of original sin and the fundamental impurity and sinfulness of the flesh, which is therefore not to be trusted and must be either ignored or forced into submission to one’s “higher” nature. This tends not to produce good outcomes, shall we say, especially when this ideology is brute-forced into the minds of children.

We, gentle reader, aren’t so much about this “higher nature” sort of thing. The practice we’ve described ever so quickly here, and which in a move of pure and unadulterated arrogance have decided to call The Interoceptive Way, places emphasis on intention, attention, interoception, and movement as tools for discovering a fuller, more harmonious experience of the various strands of our existence, as it is happening. Not some time down the road or in some other life, but beginning with this breath and this step, reaching for this cup of coffee.

As a Practice, The Interoceptive Way is the process of improving our interoceptive skills through the combination of insights derived from philosophy, behavioral neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, sociobiology, and evolutionary biology with exercises developed based on our experiences with martial arts, yoga, and other movement traditions. We emphasize the “process” part of this, in particular. Traditionally speaking a “way” describes a system of lived practice in service of some goal. To steal somewhat from Laozi, the Interoceptive Way has no goal other than the Way; the point of the Interoceptive Way is the practice itself.

This Way is more the learning of a set of skills, of becoming aware of a much richer and more nuanced experience of life, than the attainment of any particular abstracted, “higher” goal. This is very intentional. Firstly, because we cannot tell you what the best version of your life might be, only provide you with tools to help you discover this for yourself. And secondly, because it is easy for any goal to empty and subsume a practice, no matter how well intended or carefully planned.

The goal of various monks is usually something lofty: the Buddhist to end suffering, the Christian to lead a Christ-like, selfless existence, the Daoist monk to lead an effortless life in harmony with the Way. But the goal of a monkey is to get up to monkey business and have the best time possible before that inevitable last cup of coffee⁵or last breath. As mostly-hairless bipedal apes of somewhat questionable moral character, our nature is perhaps more in common with the monkey than the goals of monks, and we aim to create a practice that reflects that. We hope that you will join us in that journey.