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

“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

Paradoxically, even though pain is meant to be a wake-up call, it is often treated like an unwelcome guest. All we want to do is get away from it or to have that guest leave as soon as possible. Pain often leads to suppression and absorption. Continuing to suppress pain in the absence of embodied self-awareness that leads to self-care, therefore, c

Attention to feelings as opposed to attention to thoughts leads to a decline in rumination and depressed moods

Research shows that this link between the ACC and the motor areas creates the motivational aspect of emotion, what the body wants to do (intentions and urges), what the body does (emotion related behavior, including expressions and vocalizations). In addition to coordinating messages about urges and actions to the skeletal muscles, the ACC can also

threatening events, especially if they are chronic, can fundamentally alter our embodied self-awareness.

•Coregulation occurs in the relationship between your awareness and the awareness of person who conceived this lesson. More typically, you would be in a live classroom where that person could continuously alter her responses to what she observed in the students. In some sense, this has already happened because the author of the lesson had learned h

Embodied self-awareness involves interoception—sensing our breathing, digestion, hunger, arousal, pain, emotion, fatigue and the like—and the body schema—an awareness of the movement and coordination between different parts of the body and between our body and the environment. Conceptual self-awareness is engagement in a thought process of categori

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.

Suppression, in general, occurs when we feel the need to protect ourselves by not exposing our feelings and urges to others. Suppression, then is a response to some kind of perceived threat to our ability to be in the subjective emotional present.