Many people place attention on the body, think that they feel nothing, and then say "I don't feel anything"

In fact, "nothing" sensations are also sensations!!! So a few possibilities - you can have a play with words and see to what extent you are able to match them to the actual sensations. A few suggestions:

• Blank
• Absent
• Empty
• A black hole
• Fuzzy, indistinct
• Distant
• (something else...?)

These "nothing" sensations may also be apparently nothing because you are unused to being interested in the more subtle layers of sensation. Or they may be dissociations - places where you are less embodied. In fact, an inability to be aware for any reason is also a reduced degree of embodiment. This shouldn't be any cause for alarm, surprise or shame - welcome to 99.9999% of the human race!

The "meaning" of them - which determines how they should best be approached - depends on the response when you place your attention on them: see the basic rules for applying discrimination to interoception. "Nothing" sensations are usually best investigated by being interested in them for only a short time - say only 5 to 15 seconds. Trust your impression over that time, and then move on (see "what else is there?".

Even strong dissociational absences can be described - in fact the stronger they are, the bogger the absence and the easier it is to recognise their presence and describe them. These are not so uncommon as you might think, to the extent that Tolkien gave Bilbo to say he felt like " butter spread too thinly on toast ", and everyone instinctively (or by experience) knows what he means.

Fairly high on the spectrum we have

• depersonalisation - feeling unreal or like a cardboard cutout figure - difficulty relating to any sensation from the body as if it is coming from a distance and belongs to someone else
• derealisation - feeling like the world isunreal or like a Hollywood set - the world feels disturbingly alien, familiar yet unfamiliar and distant (so it is unreachable - event strong contact has a sense of not being real)

Both are caused by release of endogenous opiates and cannabinoids

If you suffer from this degree of dissociation for substantial parts of the day, then self-help techniques are unlikely to get you very far, and the general rule is that more professional help is needed - would be ideal if it is available. Nevertheless it is worth pursuing the following exercises, just allowing a few minutes several times a day. Even if you don't feel any kind of response, the fact that you are interested will start to inform your sensory system and something might begin to change. Small gains are worth a lot.

I have heard many times that all sensations are equal grist for the mill. The idea that "it's all energy" is a mindset of "Unity in Multiplicity". In contrast, here we are ooking to enter a mindset of "Multiplicity in Unity" - where detail leads to a recognition of newness.

However, whatever you focus on becomes the dominant theme for your body. Your cognitive attention determines how your body gears itself up to respond to the world. So if you focus on "activated", hyperaroused, fearful or adrenalin-filled sensations for any substantial length of time - this will tend to magnify your body's fear and preparedness for fight-flight. If you focus on dissociative or despairing or grief-filled states for any substantial length of time - they will tend to increase, and this will also tend to increase any dissociation. And conversely- if you pay more attention to resourced sensations then the body will become more resourced and resilient.

This important topic is covered in depth elsewhere, and will be re-visited many times during the practical exercises because of the nuanced approach that has to be cultivated.

In particular, if you have any kind of mindfulness, focussing or meditation practice you will have honed your capacity to attend to your body. Meaning that - where you place your attention will have more effect.

In this sense, meditation skills are something of a two-edged sword. As skill and mental penetration increases, the mind and your attention have to be used with increasingly deliberate gentleness, restraint, discrimination and clarity. I have worked with many meditators and mindfulness practitioners. Most have no problems, but a few have accidentally dug a hole for themselves by treating all sensations as equal and consequently being pulled into the loudest somatic or emotional noise. Then (with no strategy to exercise discrimination of focus) being pulled into unhelpful states that take over ("flood") and then may also collapse. Meditation, mindfulness and focussing are all excellent practices and skills worth developing - indeed, the practical exercises presented here are grounded in them. But the instructions I provide for discriminatory awareness are really important pieces of information that make these practices safer and give you the skills and knowledge to take control if necessary.

One particular aspect of a honed or naturally powerful capacity for focussed attention is that - when turned inwards it can become entangled with the body's interest in your attention and its interpretation of attention in certain rather black-and-white ways. If the body is to process anything at all that is stored as a memory, it's useful to bear in mind that these stored memories are not all held in a single place. So a more useful meditative state is more relaxed - not unlike driving a car, in which there is a foveal main focus, and a large peripheral attention - we have to be aware of many things at the same time. If your attending to the body is more relaxed and spacious (and not single-pointed), then this allows you to recognise associated processes that arise elsewhere in the body (and therefore facilitate their completion simply by the act of gentle peripheral recognition). In contrast, single-focus on a small volume of tissue for any extended time tends to lock the tissue up and slow everything down [1].

The same health warning goes for "moving energy" - which also sometimes goes with meditation practice. One basic skill in meditation is being able to watch the breath - by allowing the breath to breathe itself. Here we are doing the same - allowing the body-mind's innate intelligence to organise itself without interference (inter-fear-ance). So just as being able to allow the breath to breathe itself whilst you (simply) observe it is an important basic meditation skill, being able to let the body be itself and organise itself while you (simply) observe it is an equally fundamental skill.

Your body needs to know it is safe. Safety for your body equates to the ability to respond - which always one way or another involves movement (engaging muscles, tendons, ligaments).

If you are in the least bit under pressure (in a dentists chair, someone being agressive, etc etc), then if you try to "zen your way out of it" your body interprets this as a submission response (i.e. that it is very dangerous and you are not moving because movement would increase the danger) - and then would escalate its survival physiology state.

Strategies for responding according to your body's needs (so that you feel safer and more in control) are described in later the practical exercises. All of them are based on the principle that engaged muscles and ligaments can create a sense of control which then leads to true relaxation - far deeper relaxation than would be possible to achieve by "trying to relax".

The body-mind varies its state of integration as a way to optimise its response to any situation. If it has the capacity to integrate itself more, it will do so, and this re-integration is managed totally by the body-mind, not the congnitive mind. So having an agenda of "more itegration" is a bit like the managing director going into the basement and telling the plumbers to connect all the pipes together "to make the central heating work better".

The idea is to make best use of the intelligence of the body-mind, and focus on your/the cognitive mind's job descrition of CEO - rather than micro-managing! Integration will then follow automatically - in a way that is totally ecologically congruent with your needs and your body's adaptive load. Focusing on integration as a goal in itself gets in the way of this innate capacity for re-organisation.

All memories locked into the body are a result of some kind of overwhelm. All that is needed for them to recover is that they are presented with new information that indicates a return to being safe-enough. in-control-enough, and simply being and having enough to deal with whatever it was that caused the overwhelm. As soon as a large-enough piece of the overwhelm is released up into the body, then there is not enough to hold it - the original overwhelm is repeated, and nothig useful happens.

So a basic principle applied in all state-of-the-art trauma therapy and bodywork is " titration ". Titration is the controlled release of overhwelm so that it does not "flood" - i.e. it remains contained because you also have enough connection to the resources that will "hold and contain" it. In this way the overwhelm is provided what was missing when it was created, and so the body process continues and completes, and the overwhelm is gone.

Heroic teratments are often successful for more superficial and smaller memories, and this gives the impression that they are a good strategy. However, once the memoryt overwhelm passes a certain threshold of magnitude, support and ontainment (and titration) is the only strategy that progresses further. My attitude to this is - why start with a "heroic" approach at all, when at some point it is better to learn how to work in a more compassionate way with the body-mind?

Health is not a fixed state - because the body is inherently chaotic, constantly moving towards an elusive and constantly shifting point of metabolic stability. Illness is often caused by something becoming fixed - adaptations or emotions being locked in. In the words of Phil in "Groundhog Day" - Change is Good!

The phrase "...what else is there?" is particularly useful.