If there is an itch, it wants to be scratched. If someone invades personal space, the body wants to move away. If there is a feeling of happiness, a smile or laugh wants to arise and be expressed.

In the suppression of urges, then, it is not just the brain but the neuromuscular system that is activated to contain the urge. If one is threatened but cannot fight or escape, the skeletal muscles in the arms, legs, and trunk that might have become fully active instead become tensed at a low level of contraction. If you’ve ever witnessed a cat (or

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.

Denial is the suppression of self-awareness of the possibly difficult and painful outcomes of one’s embodied experience, an experience of which one is aware. An example would be telling oneself that even though one feels hurt and abandoned, one “doesn’t need” a significant other who has decided to end a long-term relationship.

“Crying is okay.” . . . It just has this really remarkable effect, in the sense that, you know, you are not running away from it. You are not angry at yourself for doing it. You are not trying to stop yourself and trying to hold back because that is who you are at the moment. . . . I am happy to be with the crying cause that’s what I need to do rig

One could say, as the philosopher John Dewey did, that all art (verbal, visual, auditory, gustatory) is the transformation of the artist’s embodied self-awareness into a sensory form that leads back to another embodied experience, that of the person appreciating the work of art (Dewey, 1934). But that transformation is never perfect, hence the inhe

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.

The most highly creative form of normal absorption has been called flow. Flow occurs when one’s skills perfectly match the challenge of a task, when there is a sense of pleasure or “high,” when attention is totally focused on one’s activity, a loss of self-consciousness (but not necessarily self-awareness), and an expansion of the felt sense of tim

body schema is the part of embodied self-awareness that senses that our body belongs to us and to no one else, as well as our sense of movement and balance, our ability to locate particular parts of ourselves, our sense of our body size and shape, and the awareness that our body has boundaries that separate us from objects and other bodies.