Body Awareness
Interoception, alexithymia, embodied cognition, body schema, body image.
32 entries
All behaviors in Body Awareness
Alexithymia
A pattern of having no words for feelings — somatic activations arrive in the body but never reach a discriminable emotional label, leaving the Meaning System without the vocabulary needed to read what just landed.
Body as Refuge
The lived stance — usually earned rather than inherited — in which the body becomes a return-to-here home base when mind, work, or world destabilises, so the breath, the feet, and the sit-bones reliably bring the inhabitant back to a place that has not gone anywhere.
Body as Self
The phenomenological position — Merleau-Ponty's enduring contribution — that the body is not the container of the self but is the self; the *who* a person is, not the *what* a who has.
Body as Threat
The lived stance — usually installed by chronic pain, panic, illness, dysphoria, or post-traumatic residue — in which the body itself is the source of danger, so the system spends its days defending against the room it lives in.
Body as Vehicle
The Cartesian-inherited stance in which the body is the instrument that carries the mind around — to be fuelled, maintained, optimised, and otherwise ignored — useful as a working frame, costly as the only one a life is allowed to operate in.
Body Cues
The general category of perceivable somatic signals — hunger, thirst, fatigue, arousal, tension, temperature, urgency — by which the body tells a person what state it is in and what it needs.
Body Distrust
The lived stance of treating bodily signals as unreliable narrators — hunger, fatigue, pain, arousal, gut-knowing — usually after a felt rupture in which the body was wrong, betrayed, or unheard, and the system stopped delegating authority to it.
Body Image
The conscious mental representation of one's own body — its shape, appearance, capabilities, and felt-sense — overlaid with an evaluative-aesthetic layer that the Meaning and Belonging Systems have been quietly editing since adolescence.
Body Ownership
The felt sense that this body is mine — the pre-reflective, almost continuous certainty that the limb that just moved was my limb, the sensation that just arrived was my sensation, and the self doing all of this is located here.
Body Reclamation
The political-personal move of taking the body back from the regimes that have used it — objectification, medical neglect, sexualisation, racialisation, cultural shame — and re-installing ownership of how it is named, moved, displayed, and read.
Body Reconnection
The contemplative-therapeutic reweaving of conscious self with bodily experience after a season of dissociation, numbing, or sustained head-living, performed in small returns rather than a single homecoming.
Body Scan Practice
The contemplative discipline of moving attention systematically through the body — head to feet, or feet to head — noticing sensation as it is, with neither suppression nor commentary, as a way of reopening the felt channel between self and embodiment.
Body Schema
The unconscious sensorimotor map by which the brain tracks the position, posture, and movement potential of the body in space — the silent infrastructure that lets you scratch an itch without looking and pour coffee without watching your hand.
Body Signals Ignored
The chronic stance of overriding bodily cues — hunger, fatigue, tension, urgency, pain — in service of task, role, or productive identity, until the override becomes the default mode of being in a body.
Body Signals Misread
The calibration error in which a bodily signal is registered but mislabelled — anxiety mistaken for hunger, fatigue for laziness, fear for excitement, hunger for dehydration — and the wrong response is supplied.
Body Trust
The lived stance of treating one's bodily knowing as evidence — hunger, fatigue, arousal, conviction, ache — and the rehabilitated relationship with one's body after a long rupture has been repaired.
Body-Mind Disconnection
The lived stance of operating from the head while treating the body as a vehicle or interruption — a chronic dissociation from somatic signal that becomes the default mode of being rather than a momentary lapse.
Embodied Cognition
The position that thinking is not an abstract operation in a disembodied mind but a process grounded in sensorimotor experience — metaphor, reasoning, decision, and even mathematics are built from the body's interaction with the world.
Embodied Self
The phenomenological experience of being a self that is located in, constituted by, and continuous with the body — the lived sense that *I am here, in this body* rather than *I have a body* viewed from somewhere else.
Felt Sense
Eugene Gendlin's term for the bodily, pre-verbal knowing that precedes articulation — a holistic somatic awareness of a situation, question, or problem that carries more meaning than the conscious mind has yet put into words.
Focusing Practice
Eugene Gendlin's six-step process for making contact with the felt sense — the body's diffuse, pre-verbal knowing about a situation — and waiting for it to shift into language and integration.
Gut Feeling
The everyday term for a visceral signal — usually located in the belly — that arrives before articulated reason and biases judgment with a felt verdict the conscious mind cannot yet defend.
Heart Knowing
The phenomenology of conviction that arrives centred in the chest — a felt, often warm or expansive knowing about what matters, who is one's own, and what is true, that carries authority the head does not.
Interoception
The perception of the body's internal state — heartbeat, breath, gut, temperature, hunger, fatigue, arousal — the foundational sensory channel through which the Meaning System reads what just deposited and what is still waiting.
Interoceptive Accuracy
The objectively measurable ability to detect internal bodily signals — most often heartbeat — correctly, independent of how confident you feel about it; the body's literal signal-detection capacity at the perceptual layer.
Interoceptive Awareness
The metacognitive layer of interoception — your insight into how accurate your own body-reading is, the bridge between detection and confidence that determines whether body data is correctly trusted or wrongly dismissed.
Interoceptive Sensibility
The self-reported, subjective confidence you have in your own ability to feel and interpret bodily signals, dissociable from the objective accuracy that confidence claims to track.
Mirror-Self Recognition
The developmental capacity, emerging around eighteen months in humans, to recognise the figure in the mirror as oneself — a moment that marks the first explicit confirmation that the felt self has a publicly visible form.
Out-of-Body Experience
The dissociation of perceived self-location from the physical body — a felt sense of viewing oneself from outside, which arrives in two distinct forms: the protective, trauma-driven dissociation and the contemplative, attention-driven depersonalisation.
Rubber Hand Illusion
A classic experimental demonstration in which the felt sense of body ownership transfers onto a visible rubber hand when its stroking is synchronised with the hidden real hand — proof that the certainty of mine-ness is constructed, in real time, from sensory agreement.
Somatic Markers
Antonio Damasio's hypothesis that emotional experiences leave bodily traces which subsequently tag options with felt valence — a quiet pre-cognitive nudge that biases decision before reason is consulted.
Somatic Vocabulary Building
The deliberate practice of learning, naming, and refining words for bodily states — the antidote to alexithymia — paired always with the sensation itself, so the channel between felt event and language thickens and emotional granularity is restored.