Feeling Inside Your Body

Heart to Heart

I didn’t know the classic test of intercoception (your own internal sensing of your body- which can allow us to feel pain, hunger, anxiety etc) was to be quiet for a minute and see if you can feel your own heartbeat. I did this while preparing for the creative writing session I was running on interoception and felt it quite easily. But then, I’ve now done around three years of regular meditation sessions where you sit and feel your breath or do a body scan (internally sense into parts of your body, often from your crown down to your toes). I didn’t know that alongside “Find inner peace and the path to enlightenment” should possibly have come the heading “Also be able to find your own heartbeat, recognise when you definitely should have that wee and maybe be a bit less confused about whether you’re anxious or actually just need to eat some cake”.

Some of the participants in my session had responses to the heartbeat exercise like “Nope, nothing there!”, “What heart?” and “Am I alive?”. We then reflected on and wrote about this and on how we feel inside our bodies and also wrote about hunger and pain. Even this bit of reflection on our insides might help with the tuning in to them over time. Apparently generally the signals that various neurons send to your brain should function like background music in a film. You shouldn’t consciously notice them but they do help set the mood (which is another reason why it’s good to be able to recognise “I am feeling mild existential despair today. Oh hang on, it’s actually that my trousers are too tight, I’ll just loosen them”.

Sometimes however these signals can become blaring alarms that we can’t turn off. I got us to do a quick fire exercise where we constructed our own pain scale. Not one that doctors might ask us to use, but one in our own language. Several of us had scales that went from for example “Four: All is right in my world, here’s a calm blue horizon” to suddenly “Eight - all the demons of hell are loosed and nothing will be right in my stubbed toe or the world again”. Basically what felt like a very sudden onset of pain after we hadn’t felt subtler signals.

(The Mankoski pain scale Here has been developed by a chronic illness sufferer to help people who might mask or struggle to feel or describe their pain, to help them communicate with health professionals and people around them. So many neurodivergent people don’t have their health problems taken seriously because they’re not “performing” pain in expected ways).

I also got us to be inspired by this Rumi poem and think about our body as a metaphor like a guest house. There’s definitely things going on in there- what might they be?

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

- RUMI —

The whole session reinforced something I’ve been thinking about for a while- how important the bodily is to any acceptance of neurodivergent identity and being. I’m such a words person and there’s so much I, and others, get out of sharing words and reflections and feeling less alone. But it’s often been through things like my swimming, meditation, poetry performance on stage (all of which require breath and body awareness) that breakthroughs in my wellbeing have come.

I’m pondering how to run online sessions that keep our bodies in them - much as it can be a joy to escape them into the world of words. Watch this space. And in that spirit- this will be the first Substack post I’m also making available as audio.

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