Body agency

The Five Inner Senses of Embodiment

Activism, Body agency, Body Awareness, Body Ownership, Body Resonance, Embodiment, Emotional Balance, Interoception, Proprioception, Psychology, Social Justice, Therapeutic / By

Embodiment is a radical science, life-changing method, and lineage of ancestral wisdom that improves physical, emotional, and social well-being. Its key revelation is that the body has a mind—a power, presence, and awareness—of its own, and this awareness shapes us as much as we shape it. Many people are aware that well-being requires a strong mind-body connection. What isn’t yet common knowledge is what the body part of that connection entails. Over the last decade, science has shed new light on the factors that lead to well-being, but some of the most important insights into the body’s true potential haven’t yet reached mainstream understanding. From a young age, most of us are familiar with the five major senses that help us process the world around us: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Yet no one tells us that we have inner senses, too, which help us perceive the world inside […]

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Why Optic Flow Restores Us

Body agency, Depression, Nervous System, Neuroscience, Proprioception, Therapeutic, Well-Being / By

Boosting optic flow is a powerful and effective way to nourish physical and emotional well-being. Optic flow refers to the unique sensation that occurs when you perceive your environment actively moving in relationship to your body’s movements. What’s at play here? As you walk, bike, run, or swim, objects in your environment appear to move. During a walk, for example, objects grow larger as you approach; this lets you know you’re getting closer. During a swim, you perceive the bottom of the pool (or lake or ocean) receding underneath you, or objects on the side moving as you turn your head to breathe. In optic flow your eyes move, continually updating your brain on your location. That’s not all optic flow does for you. Your visual system links closely with (read: is part of) your autonomic nervous system. Activating your sympathetic (fight-or-flight) nervous system ignites the stress response. This dilates

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Neuroplasticity, boundaries, and the body

Activism, Body agency, Body Awareness, Boundaries, Connective Tissue, Connective Tissue Self-Massage, Embodiment, Empaths, Interoception, Mind-Body, Neuroscience, Personal Growth, Relationships / By

In a multiple-slide post on my Instagram feed, I talked about neuroplasticity, the science of change (and, um, how things can stay the same) in a 10-frame post. But that doesn’t lend itself well to this format, so here’s the text for you. Neuroplasticity refers to the role of the brain and nervous system (which includes the autonomic + enteric nervous systems) in helping create change. In this post, I’d like to apply that very cool science to the art + practice of setting good interpersonal + intrapersonal boundaries. Emerging research suggests that we can target a behavior we’d like to strengthen (or extinguish) by focusing not just on the practice itself, but on the prelude and postlude that precede and follow it. This helps recruit our attentional centers to pay attention. It supercharges our motivational system. And it deepens the relationship we have with the behavior we want to

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