Resilience : Practical exercises: Introduction : The idea of working with the body

A systems view of biological health

Section 4: Practical exercises

1 : Introduction : The idea of working with the body

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The fact that our culture tends to focus on what is wrong (so it can be fixed) means that the body is often simply ignored and only paid attention when it feels "bad" in some way. But actually there are always pleasant enlivened sensations occuring somewhere - the trick being simply knowing how to access them[1]. And particularly (for our purposes here) access them in a useful way. So it should be said quite clearly right at the beginning - that the end point we are aiming at is to be able to feel (by exercising choice) the "good" and pleasant feelings that reside in the body. Feelings that I put in the general category of "comfortably and pleasantly alive".

These pleasant, comfortably alive (enlivened) interoceptive sensations are important because they arise (and can only arise) in parts of your body-mind that know you are OK-enough and in-control-enough, and that the world is safe-enough in this present moment.

This present moment is also important because your body-mind is unconcerned with what has happened in the past or what might happen in two minutes time. Rather - it is concerned with your immediate wellbeing, and wishes to optimise itself based on a completely real appraisal of your adaptive needs in this moment. If the body-mind finds itself unnecessarily adapted to things that have been - or things that might (or might not) happen at some uncertain time in the future - then it (almost) immediately wants to reorganise itself around the recognised reality of the present moment.

To give one important example (that we'll come back to later), almost everyone is aware of the "glow" state that arises when we are in the presence of something beautiful - something that "touches us" (or "touches our heart"). This is not a thought or an idea or anything mental - except for the thoughts / stories that are atteched to it. This state is a feeling - a response by the whole of your layers of body-mind/being that lie below the level of thought, to something of beauty. You are aware of it through a combination of (i) quality of mental presence and sensory engagement, (ii) certain sensations in certain places in the body, and (iii) a particular quality of responsiveness of both the body and the mind.

The usual strategy employed by most people (including myself in my early years) who feel uncountenance-able feelings - is to retreat from the physical body into the vast world of mental and imaginative (or even imaginal) space. The only problem with this as a long-term strategy is that mental activity needs to be grounded by the physical. If it isn't then there is nothing to stabilise it should the difficult feelings and everything else in the subconscious burst up into the mind. Lack of somatic grounding is the start of mental instability, because the mind has nothing to hold it, contain it, or set limits to its activity - except if you can exercse a degree of wilful mental control that very few people possess. It is therefore important to make peace - to be at peace - with the body, and to be comfortable with its "language" - the many varied qualitative sensations that form the interoceptive and emotive ground.

Interoception is an everyday experience

Awareness of the body is not "thinking about" the body, but is instead experiencing the body - as it actually feels. Everyone must recognise that they (you) already employ interoception on a daily basis - feeling where your limbs are (proprioception) is a form of interoception, as is the sense of touch, of balance, of feeling "self", of physical presence, of strength and energy (or lack of it), of feeling when you need to go to the toilet or are hungry, thirsty, satiated, warm or cold, sexually aroused, and many other things besides. So feeling (being aware of) the body is not only about "feelings" (emotions), but also about the vast array of more subtle physical sensations that give information and collectvely bring a sense of being alive.

So it should be said (again) here right at the beginning that the end point we are aiming at is to be able to feel (by exercising choice) the "good" and pleasant feelings that also reside in the body - the feelings that I put in the general category of "comfortably and pleasantly alive". These feelings are relatively subtle, so if you are not used to putting your attention on them, it may take a little time to trust their existence, to learn to discriminate them, move your attention between them, and trust that you can intuit their meaning.

Sometimes Interoception is NOT an everyday experience

Once you become familiar with interoception and your sensory connection to the body deepens, you might start to occasionally experience odd things. The body is the non-conscious, and manages the sensory system. It is therefore capable of merging senses in a slightly dream-like manner. If this sensory crossover is permanent it is called "synaesthesia", but almost everyone experiences sensory crossover to lesser degrees.

If you experience something that is unexpected, that is a good indication that it has a certain reality so far as your body-mind is concerned. I trust slightly strange sensory experiences almost more than normal ones when exploring the body, simply because of the sometimes very fine line between the imaginary (made-up) and the imaginal (sensed) - so if it is unexpected I assume I would not have wilfully made it up - so it must be carrying real information from somewhere, albeit not necessarily in a form I know how to interpret.

Exercising choice (discrimination)

There are many reasons why being curious and deliberately seeking out this "comfortably alive" is useful, important, and will add value to your life, including :

Life-affirming feelings of Love, appreciation, happiness, compassion, joy, self-empowerment, buoyancy (effortless lightness), strength, self-presence, being energised, centred, grounded (etc) - also reside and arise in and from the body. They are enjoyable, and add richness to life.
The body is a vast source of really useful information. The body-mind "knows" far more than your conscious mind. If you develop a good working relationship with it (by being interested in the body), become familiar with its "language" and get into the habit of also referring to the body, then you have an extra depth of information about the external world, and also a means to know how it is affecting you, which leads to an increased capacity to navigate the world effocrtlessly and elegantly.
Yor body-mind needs you to engage with it (through your interest in it) because this is a vital element for it being able to calbrate itself to the real world. It can only work efficiently if it is properly calibrated. If it is uncalibrated, then it starts to accumulate adaptations unresolved experiences, not realising that they have come to an end. It is these accumulated incomplete adaptations that contain the painful sensations and memories that eventually can make people body-phobic.
Fear turned inwards at the body (such as Phobophobia - a fear of being afraid, or Algophobia - a fear of pain) confuses the survival-defence system, because your body-mind expects you to not be frightened of the body, and fear to be reserved for external threats. Therefore These inward-turnerd fears tend to create a catastrophic amplification cycle in which the thing being feared and the fear gradually increase - because your body-mind "thinks" there is a desperately dangerous external threat. One example is "Central Sensitisation" - a gradual increase in pain that is resistant to painkillers. An interest in "pleasant" ("comfortably alive") sensations (in the detailed manner described in this book) reverses that trend.
What surprises most people is the idea that the body is full of many different - often contradictory - sensations and experiences. It's just that the big sensations often exert a pull or swamp the voices of the quieter sensations, so the immediate (and false) impression is that there is only one feeling or experience to be had. The quieter sensations are usually the healthier more pleasant ones. So if one knows how to find them, this provides many useful and important opportunities (see later).

The end result of the practical exercises is a comfortable, energised, more present Embodiment in which there is more awareness of the strength of the body.

A few (potential) positive gains...

Developing life-skills that enable the prevention, reversal and healing of traumatisation; and the prevention, reversal and healing of central sensitisation.
A richer, more resilient and resourceful capacity to engage with Life
Perceptual skills that allow a more "natural" engagement with the living world - the local and global ecosystems we inhabit. This includes Better empathic skills and the capacity for higher quality relationality with both people and non-human life.
Inhabiting the body and nervous system more in the way that they evolved to be inhabited tends to reduce the adaptive load... Resulting in more available energy and metabolic and immunological adaptive capacity, which may then result in better physical and mental health.
Furthermore, daily familiarity with the somatic layer of sensory experience provides an incredibly useful reference point - a conscious qualitative sense of your own somatic resting state. If this changes, then it often indicates something imporant going on internally - or externally (via counter-transference or resonance with other people).

The exercises I provide are in some senses somewhat "clunky" in terms of how the cognitive mind and body-mind are evolved to interract. The clunkiness comes about because getting back to an integrated mind and body is a journey - quite a long jurney. They are designed to re-connect a more seamless integration between conscious and non-conscious/soma. As this connection grows you will find the exercises easier, but also less necessary in daily life - their use being increasingly confined to dealing with retained memories of overwhelm.

Clearly this is not a panacea - I have a healthy disrespect for anything that claims to be the best thing since sliced bread. But it is an extremely useful life-skill, way of seeing the world, way of inhabiting and using your body - that is a basis for pretty well everything else, to be applied and used as you see fit.

There are a few caveats. One being that - once dissociation has progressed to the level depersonalisation and derealisation or psychosis, then the exercises and suggestions here may sometimes not be of use. Another being that this is a recipe. There are many suggestions, theories, programmes and techniques in the world, and some of them can be mangled together with no particular loss or danger. The ones presented here are quite subtle and very fundamental, and do not mix well with other recipes. This is a raspberry pavlova. Some experience in cooking and eating it (and understanding the ingredients) is needed before an attempt is made to improve it by mixing it with a recipe for beef stroganoff or waldorf salad.

References & Notes

1 I guess that most people who have got this far are already comfortable to some extent with the idea of working with the body - of feeling the body - of somatic (soma=physical body) interoception (feeling sensations inside the body). But that is not necessarily where everyone is starting from.
Many people are actually comfortable-enough with their body or already enjoy it as a source of pleasant feelings. But over the years I have also come across many people who are terrified of their body ("alexithymia") - perceiving it as a store of overwhelming emotions, of pain, or simply inexplicable feelings of overwhelm. The body can hold emotions that feel like they might take over, of mind-numbing terror, murderous anger or hatred, betrayal, grief, physical pain, anxiety and distress, sexual urges and desire, anguish and angst, bottomless emptiness, overwhelm itself or siilar feelings of heaviness and burden, memories of "difficult" events or periods of life, or feelings so complex and confused that they are inexplicable and incapacitating. In addition some people suffer an excruciating thinness of psychic skin that makes them deeply and inescapably sensitive to electrical fields, other people's feelings (or even thoughts), environmental pollutants, noise, and many other unpleasant experiences. Sometimes distress also arises because the everyday sensory experiences of being alive are "missing" and the self and the world feel somehow numbed, distant or even absent.