How To Listen To Your Body
How are you feeling in your body at this very moment? Can you notice your breath, the weight of your tongue, the space between your shoulder blades?
If you find yourself able to drop into this awareness easily, wonderful. But if you paused and thought, ‘I have no idea what you're talking about’, you're not alone.
For many people, particularly those who've built their lives around competence, responsibility, and having things figured out, the invitation to tune into your body feels like being asked to decipher a language you’ve never learned.
Why body awareness can feel challenging
There are many reasons why accessing your body’s signals might feel challenging. Perhaps you learned early that it wasn’t safe to feel too much, or that your worth was tied to productivity. Maybe you’ve experienced trauma that taught your nervous system to disconnect as protection.
If you’re like me, you might live with chronic pain that makes body awareness feel overwhelming at times rather than nourishing. Or perhaps you’re neurodivergent and process sensory information differently.
For those of us who spend our days managing complex projects, supporting others or working towards meaningful change in the world, the body can feel like just another system to optimise rather than a source of wisdom. When you’re used to pushing through fatigue to meet deadlines or setting aside your own needs to serve your mission, ‘listening to your body’ can feel impractical or even indulgent.
More than just trusting your gut
If you’ve ever heard someone say ‘listen to your gut’ what they’re referring to is interoception – our awareness of what's going on inside our body. Beyond just the gut, interoception includes noticing your heartbeat, sensing fullness in your stomach after a meal, or the distinctive flutter in your throat when you're about to cry.
Some people are highly interoceptive – they can feel their pulse, sense their digestion, notice subtle emotional shifts. Others connect more readily through movement, touch, or the environment around them.
This is why somatic work includes multiple types of perception, each offering its own gifts.
Three pathways to body awareness
Proprioception: Your body in space and motion
Proprioception is your body's sense of where it is in space and how it's moving. It's what allows you to touch your nose with your eyes closed or know the angle of your elbow without looking.
I might invite clients to explore the difference between having their feet hip-width apart versus closer together, or to notice how their sense of stability shifts when they lean slightly forwards or back. What's fascinating is how quickly people can sense these differences, even when traditional body scanning feels inaccessible.
Proprioceptive practices might include:
Noticing how the space behind your knees changes when you sit versus stand
Sensing how shifting your head angle changes your alertness during challenging conversations
Feeling how your spine responds when you imagine growing taller before a presentation
For people who find interoception overwhelming, proprioception can be a gentler, more accessible way to begin developing body awareness. It's often clearer and less emotionally charged than trying to sense internal sensations.
Exteroception: The world touching you
Exteroception involves noticing sensations from outside your body through your five senses – the texture of fabric against your wrist, how sound lands in different parts of your ears, the quality of light in the room.
These practices can be profoundly grounding when you're feeling anxious or disconnected. Try noticing:
The way your clothes move against your skin when you breathe
How sound travels through your body differently – does your colleague's voice land in your chest while construction noise hits your shoulders?
The subtle temperature differences between your palms and the back of your hands
Exteroceptive awareness creates a bridge between your inner world and the world around you. It can be remarkably soothing and helps establish a sense of safety and connection without requiring you to dive into internal sensations.
Intercorporeality: The space between us
Intercorporeality is our awareness of other bodies and the connections between us – sensing the energy when someone enters a room, noticing how your posture mirrors or resists another person’s, feeling the difference between being truly seen and politely ignored.
You might explore this awareness by:
Noticing how your breathing pattern shifts around different people
Sensing how your shoulders or throat respond in different conversations
Observing moments of resonance or disconnection in group settings
Intercorporeal awareness reminds us that we don’t exist in isolation. We’re constantly in relationship, and our bodies are always responding to the energy and presence of others. For people in leadership, caregiving or advocacy roles, this type of awareness can be both professionally valuable and personally protective.
Which path to take?
No path is better than another. While somatic mentoring will generally seek to expand your capacity for body awareness, the goal isn't to become highly interoceptive if that's not your natural way of being. The goal is to discover your own unique doorway into embodied wisdom and to nurture that relationship with curiosity and compassion.
In my work with clients, I'm always listening for the pathway that feels most alive and accessible for each person. Some are natural body scanners who can drop into interoceptive awareness immediately. Others come alive through movement, environmental awareness, or noticing their responses to different people.
Always, we work at the pace of your nervous system, honoring what feels safe and supportive. This is especially important for those used to pushing beyond their limits or carrying significant responsibility for others' wellbeing.
The invitation
Cultivating body awareness is about developing a more curious, compassionate relationship with the intelligence that lives in your bones, your breath, your nervous system's responses to the world. We're not looking to achieve perfection, we’re practicing tuning in to what’s here.
Your body has been faithfully serving you, carrying you through late nights on projects you care about, supporting you through difficult conversations, celebrating your victories even when you were too busy to notice. It deserves your gentle attention and respect, whatever form that takes.
The invitation is simple: Begin where you are. Notice what you notice. Trust that your body's way of communicating is perfect, even if it doesn't match anyone else's.
