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

Asking, “Am I just lazy?” is making a judgment by claiming ownership of a category, laziness, presumed to typify the self. Categories are like traits. If I’m lazy, there is not much I can do about it. Not only that, I can start to doubt or blame myself. In the process, I’ve completely lost my embodied self-awareness. I might look to others for a co

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

It is much easier for homeostatic and immune systems to tackle their more-or-less automated jobs of cell repair and rejuvenation if we take an active role in assisting them to do that. The longer we stay in thought, the more difficult it becomes to shift back over to the direct experiencing of the subjective emotional present. How does this happen?

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.

We can assume that the horror was a spontaneous and emergent emotion as Sacks connected—in the subjective emotional present of embodied self-awareness—his change in body schema to his interoceptive self-awareness. He graciously admits to us that he could not stay in that emotional present: the horror was too disturbing.

•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

When it comes to embodied self-awareness, practice is crucial in expanding it and giving us opportunities to make choices for our own benefit.

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.

The pleasure and pain that emanate from my body are uniquely mine and no one else’s and they establish not just a sense of ownership but a sense of being. I am a person by virtue of the fact that I am located in my body and nowhere else, and that body has a historical and physical location from which I can identify myself within the world. To parap