On Living from the Neck Up
And how mindfulness can help us relate to bodily experience without being overwhelmed by it
I remember in the early days of work with my first therapist, telling her that I felt flat. It was hard to feel much of anything deeply, except sadness and fear.
She introduced EMDR, partly as a way of helping me make contact with what was happening in my body around certain traumatic memories.
I felt nada. Zilch.
The implications of that weren’t clear to me at the time. But now I know I was completely disconnected from my body.
I was living in my head; inside a “mental control tower,” as my teacher Tara Brach likes to call it.
Disconnection = Self-Protection
I’d suggest most of us live with some level of disconnection from our bodies. We eat without tasting. Rest without recovering. We move through our days from the neck up and consider it normal.
Then, there’s trauma—which can cut us off from our bodies completely.
When what’s happening in the body feels like too much, whether everyday overwhelm or the aftermath of deeply painful experiences, our brain naturally starts to muffle inputs from the body.
Emotions live in the body. Disconnecting from it keeps us safe. But it also cuts us off from access to the aliveness of feelings.
It’s an act of self-protection. We tune out what feels threatening so we can stay functional in our daily lives.
That’s why I felt flat.
Emotions begin in the body. Disconnecting from it keeps us safe. But it also cuts us off from access to the aliveness of feelings.
It was hard for me to feel things like joy, excitement and awe.
Even my fear, anger and sadness showed up in the form of anxious thoughts, not embodied emotions.
Beginning the Journey
The EMDR didn’t help. Several years of talk therapy gave me a supportive space to understand the weight of what I’d been through.
But I still operated largely from my mental control tower.
As I’ve written about before, it took a full-on mental and physical breakdown during the pandemic to wake me up to all that my body was carrying and start me on a trajectory of true healing.
Psychedelic-assisted somatic therapy was a critical first step to opening up access to my body. (I’ll write more about this one day. I promise.)
But in the months leading up to my first psychedelic journey, I’d already made what turned out to be a critical leap.
I discovered Vipassana or Insight meditation, and particularly mindfulness of sensations.
Stories vs. Sensations
Our bodies speak to us in the form of sensations.
Most of us think we experience our bodies directly. But much of the time, we’re actually experiencing thoughts about our bodies.
Instead of the raw sensory data our bodies give us, we live inside interpretations, labels, predictions, or stories layered on top of it.
What’s actually going on inside is much simpler (though no less difficult to be with): tightness, pressure, heat, fluttering, heaviness, buzzing, or holding our breath.
“Something is wrong.” “I can’t handle this.” “I’m in danger.” “This means I’m broken.” “This will get worse.” 🙋🏻♂️
What’s actually going on inside is much simpler (though no less difficult to be with): tightness, pressure, heat, fluttering, heaviness, buzzing, or holding our breath.
Scientists call the ability to sense our inner physical experience interoception. It’s how we understand bodily signals like hunger, heartbeat, breathing, tension, and emotional activation before we can write any story about them.
This system does more than report data; it reflects our internal state. For example, when we’re stuck in fight or flight, interoceptive signals can get amplified and biased toward threat detection—even when there’s no clear and present danger.
That’s why some people can be simultaneously disconnected from their body and flooded by it. We can have a racing heart, shallow breath and tense muscles, but have no idea how to make any sense of it. (As I see it, this is at the core of what we call anxiety.)
So, the challenge isn’t just about getting back into the body. It’s about learning how to relate to bodily experience without getting overwhelmed or cut off by it.
How to Find Your Way
Mindfulness of sensations invites us to practice awareness of our interoception.
When we sit down to practice and begin to pay attention to our anchor, one of the things that can most easily and forcefully pull us away is bodily discomfort: an aching back, squeeze in the belly, pressure in the chest, tension in the shoulders.
Insight practice invites us to let our attention shift from the breath or our chosen anchor to the sensation that’s pulling us away.
By shifting our awareness to the sensation, we get to learn about it. What is this sensation really like? Is it fixed, or does it shift from moment to moment? When we pay attention to it, does it ease or get more intense?
Sometimes, practicing awareness and curiosity can reduce the sensation’s intensity and create space for us to return to the anchor.
In some cases, the sensation will persist or get even more intense. When this happens, we can invite kindness.
That might be a generalized kindness towards ourselves as we sit with this uncomfortable experience. For example, saying something inwardly like: “This is hard. Can I be gentle with myself right now?” or “I don’t have to fix this to be OK.”
Or you might choose a more somatic, embodied approach, such as placing a hand on the area of discomfort or hugging yourself. Self-touch can activate some of the same soothing neural pathways as touch from another person.
How to Practice Mindfulness of Sensations
Find your anchor: the breath, or wherever you naturally rest attention.
When a sensation pulls you away, shift your awareness toward it.
Get curious: What does it feel like? Does attention ease it or intensify it?
If it softens, return to your anchor.
If it persists, invite kindness: “This is hard. Can I be gentle with myself?”
Or place a hand on the discomfort, or hug yourself. Self-touch soothes
The Long Road Home
I say this with the caveat that practicing mindfulness of sensations can be hard.
(If you’ve experienced trauma or feel very disconnected from or flooded by bodily sensations, I strongly encourage having professional support as you begin your journey.)
Learning to come into the body after being disconnected for much of our lives takes a lot of patience, dedication, and care.
For me, my early experiences of coming into my body happened on my first psychedelic journey.
They were extremely intense, as I encountered a lot of fear, sadness and anger that had been locked up within me. I was lucky to have an experienced and supportive guide to hold me through the early days of that process.
My experiences during practice were much more manageable, but still took commitment.
I’d set my intention to allow my anchor to fade into the background and to place my awareness on the perpetual knot in my solar plexus.
Early on, it was only a matter of seconds, and I’d catch myself lost in thought, distracting myself from an experience that was quite difficult to be with.
Over time, though, through many repetitions of this process, the seconds turned to minutes. It became easier to stay present with my inner experience for longer periods.
I like to think of this process as befriending my inner life.
It opened up a whole world of experiences that just weren’t possible before: embodied joy, excitement, and aliveness. Being connected to my emotions in a way that lets me navigate life more calmly and responsively. Tapping deeply into my intuition, which I believe lives inside our sensory experience.
Descartes Got It Wrong
A striking piece of research suggests that the speed of human thought is about 10 bits per second, while our sensory systems gather data at roughly a billion bits per second.
And while our minds appear to think just one thought at a time, our sensory systems process thousands of physiological inputs simultaneously.
Most of this happens outside conscious awareness.
Descartes would have us believe that the mind is all-powerful. But the body is far more than a passive vessel for thought. It’s continuously processing, regulating and responding in ways that shape what we experience as consciousness.
When we learn to listen inwardly to the sensations, signals and raw data behind the story, we’re tapping into something much richer than anything the mental control tower alone might offer.
So, coming into relationship with the body doesn’t just change how we feel. It changes what we can know, and how deeply we can know it.
For me, it opened up a whole world that I didn’t even know I’d been locked out of. With care, commitment and the right supports, it might do the same for you.
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