Body Sense: The Science and Practice of Embodied Self-Awareness (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology)

The ability to recognize and respond to threats to our safety is a fundamental design feature of our physiology. Threat is the felt sense of fear that a person or her or his property or significant others are under attack and in danger of physical or psychological harm. The threat may originate from outside of ourselves or from inside our bodies.

open and healthy sexual communication requires awareness of and emotional engagement with one’s own body sensations.

life is chaotic and unpredictable and we do our best to stay present with the flow of experience. To the extent that the child’s body sensations and emotions are denied, devalued, ignored, or punished by parents, the child will find ways to avoid sharing them with others and eventually to avoid feeling them entirely.

“The True Self comes from the aliveness of the body tissues and the working of body-functions, including the heart’s action and breathing” (1960, p. 148). The False Self is our conceptual self-awareness in the condition that it becomes divorced from the regulating reassurance of embodied self-awareness. It is the story we tell about ourselves that

Neural learning is reflected in physiological changes in the nerve cells and their connections. Practice leads to the growth of an increasing number of interconnecting fibers that can synapse between cells. The more synapses between adjoining cells, the more likely there will be a direct communication between them, and the stronger the neural netwo

The clinical implications are very clear and have been substantiated by research: teaching clients to pay attention to embodied self-awareness can assist them in changing their thought patterns to more positive and self-consistent ones, to elevating their moods, and enhancing the ability of their prefrontal cortex to link thought and feeling based

suppressing the experience and expression of emotion, cutting off interoceptive awareness, and in general denying and dissociating from one’s embodied self-awareness. Some methods of being out of touch with embodied self-awareness, however, seem like just the opposite.

As a psychologically experienced entity, awareness can feel very substantial, the very substance of our existence. Yet unlike water, the fluid of neural network activity does not have mass. It is in a sense, insubstantial as a physical entity.

Clinicians and educators who work with embodied self-awareness often talk about “mind” and “body.” This is an oversimplification that leads to misconceptions: the “mind” is in the head and the “body” is below the neck. The problem is that the mind is part of the body and the body has a mind of its own in its peripheral nerve cells and receptors and