Developing Interoception - Healing Trauma - Clairsentience

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Interoception refers to the representation of an organism’s internal states, and includes the processes by which it senses, interprets, integrates, and regulates signals from within itself.

- Wikipedia

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The word “interoception” is used to describe your capacity to have an internal perception of your internal environment. Our brain continuously receives signals from the body and the environment. The process by which we identify signals from the body, such as "I am hungry," "I feel afraid," and "It made my skin crawl," is referred to as interoception.

When it comes to somatic integration, interoception is a skill we need to develop in order to be able to see into the body at deeper levels and embrace a healing process that integrates the body with the mind. 

Much of the material that manifests as thoughts or beliefs is stored deep in the body. This is why I often refer to it as the “body-mind” one word. In my experience the mind and body are not really separate in the way we usually think they are.

When developing interoception most of us begin with very little awareness in the body or ability to perceive clearly what is taking place there. It can often start out numb or feeling very dense or even foggy. In the beginning we can only feel/see the physical layers but over time our perception becomes more and more subtle. We can begin to see into our nervous system signaling and eventually into the subtle energy underneath. 

To begin with though we have to get to know our physical biology so to speak. Explore around. Get to know our purely biological impulses like hunger and thirst. Get curious within our chronic physical tension patterns. Over time the awareness deepens into the subtler layers informing these more superficial patterns and urges. 

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Why is interoception such an important skill to develop for healing trauma?

Here is a brief quote on the subject from Irene Lyon, taken from her Smart Body Smart Mind course:

If someone had a lot of scary events as a kid, or didn’t feel safe with their family situation, initially the body would respond to this threat by constricting. Then, it waits for the stress to leave. Waits for the threat to go away. But, more often than not, the threat doesn’t go away and the body starts to shut down and freeze. When this occurs out of biological necessity (remember: the autonomic nervous system kicks in for preservation), we start to lose the capacity to sense and feel the insides of ourselves.

Sadly, when we can’t feel and tap into our interoception, it’s tough to know exactly what’s going on within ourselves, and when this happens, it can be hard to make positive and meaningful changes, or to move forward with certain behaviors that will make a positive impact for us. Truth be told, many of the decisions and paths we take when this occurs can be incredibly detrimental. This is because the original wiring didn’t get set up correctly, and so a vicious cycle perpetuates.

To access these early states of stress and shock, and to help to rewire the system, sometimes (and more often than not) we need to go directly to the source, and actually TOUCH it.

Trying to process our past states of shock and stress can be very tricky when we only do so via our thoughts, because the initial entry point of the disruption wasn’t based in thought and cognition, it was based IN THE BODY.

Remember, our earliest memories are held in the body, in our “somatic” memories.

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Somatic processing through interoception becomes important in cases where shock occurred pre-verbally, when processing was still precognitive, and the energy of this survival stress was stored in the body.

Getting to know our own internal subtle signaling - processing this through our conscious awareness in current time, gives us the opportunity to access and release frozen emotional energies in the body, reintegrating this energy into our system, into a healthy flow. Even the act of just feeling certain subtle sensations, integrating them into conscious awareness, heals trauma naturally, as long as your higher cognitive mind is in a relaxed, observant, spacious state with it.

As touched upon in the quote, it also gives us a deeper capacity for sense making within our behavioral patterns, we get into the more subtle internal impulses that compel us toward certain emotional reactions, beliefs and behaviors. Through getting into conscious contact with these internal mechanisms we slowly gain mastery over them. Not through changing them by force, but through understanding them. Once we’re aware of the subtle impulses at play underlying our habits, we have more space and capacity to make new choices naturally.

A sort of internal mapping occurs, where dots are connected over large swaths of what were previously blind spots in our awareness and understanding of ourselves - we’re able to make sense of our experience in ways that empower agency.

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Getting beyond trauma, interoceptive capacity becomes extra sensory 

Eventually a well developed interoceptive capacity leads to clairsentience, or the ability to sense or feel psychically. The inner interoceptive sight into the subtle bodies leads to the ability to see/feel the subtle realms. 

In my experience the gate to extra sensory perception is actually through the body.

When you get at the level of sensing the subtle energy realms, it’s not a far cry at that point to translate this information into insight through the visual space of the third eye. 

Because interoception, when practiced consciously and on more subtle levels, is a form of sight. You are seeing into your nerve endings, into the subtle energy channels, and then into the greater field. 

It’s very intuitive and direct, but it is also a form of sight. 

It’s the combination of feeling and sight. Feeling/sensing = felt sense = clairsentience, or clear sensing.

Remember that light is actually vibration and energy. You can feel the light signals in the invisible parts of the spectrum ( to the naked eye), with your felt sense and then translate them through the pineal gate.

So once this subtle interoception is developed, it expands into an extra sensory exteroception with the greater energy field, which gives you a window into other dimensions of reality or consciousness. 

You can consciously send the signals you receive from this greater field to the third eye, just as you do unconsciously all day and night every day and night with the habitual parts of the brain. The body/environment to brain pathway evolves into a, subtler energy systems and fields to pineal gate, pathway.

The hardware is already there. You just have to come into a subtler perception and reroute the pathway.

At this point in my journey I can “see” into alternate dimensions fairly often without any chemical or herbal assistance. Although I’m still learning to navigate and decipher the information I receive. 

The way that I’ve learned this perception is largely through interoception.

Even the act of translating a sensation in the body into an emotion, (emotion is sensation in the body combined with mental description), is a form of interoception. Which is largely unconscious for most people. 

I’ve taken this interoception a bit further, in that I’m now able to use it as a sort of subtle-extra-sensory perception of the actual energy signals coming in, that then make up the sensations that we translate as emotion and everything else. 

Here’s an example of how this process might unfold. 

When one first sits down to do a body scan meditation, with the mind in a state of observation, on the various sensations, usually what one sees/feels at first is chronic pain, tension or even numbness. But with practice over time, the signals perceived become subtler and subtler. You realize that chronic pain is just the densest expression of nerve signals in the muscle, that actually represent where the subtle energy is caught in a pattern of some sort and not flowing. This is what trauma is, at its basic energetic level. When you stop interpreting the signals through the habitual pathways in the brain, (this is what observation and equanimity are for), you move into subtler and subtler layers of your being. 

As you stop interpreting these signals habitually, you actually also integrate the energy, bring it back into flow, healing the trauma at its source point. 

The subtle somatic sensations in the body are actually signals of energy or light that carry information. 

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Gut instinct as a form of clairsentience

What is clairsentience? 

Clairsentience, to me means, ‘clear-feeling’. It is when psychic information comes to us via feeling or sensing subtle energies around us. People who are clairsentient can sense past what is physically there and pick up the underlying energies, through their own inner circuitry.

It often takes the shape of a gut feeling that can be formed about a person, place, or situation.

Claisentience is direct knowing through sensing. It is different than clairvoyance in that the psychic information actually moves through ones inner circuitry as feeling, versus just mental or visionary information.

Clairvoyance is a form of direct insight through the pineal portal, and while, in the case of clairsentience, this portal is used through interoception, to access the field, through the intuitive interface in the body, in the case of clairvoyance one does not necessarily run this incoming information through their own inner circuitry in the body. It comes as direct insight in the mind.

The gut or lower belly is indicated as a center of consciousness in many traditions, including Hawaiian philosophy and Taosim. It is also one of three bandhas in Yoga, that serve as energy channeling mechanisms in the body. The space between the lower belly and the diaphragm right below the heart is an insanely active space energetically.

The gut contains what is called the enteric nervous system, often referred to as the second brain. It contains 100 some odd million nerve cells, and is responsible for the creation and regulation of many biochemicals important for the endocrine system, which it exchanges with the brain through the gut brain axis.

This gut brain is right over the second chakra, the chakra of feeling and relating. The chakra of repressed emotion and often the unconscious mind. Little side note that accessing extra sensory information, subtle information and direct knowing, opens one’s higher mind to the unconscious layers of the mind, where this type of information is stored and processed. It can be dangerous to traverse this material without a certain level of trauma integration, because we will see our repressed images reflected back to us in these dimensions and we may not understand how to work with it if our nervous systems are still disregulated.

We are connected to the greater mind and field through this unconscious mind, which can be accessed through interoception. The various nerve plexuses in the body, like the one in the gut, are not just for processing information in the physical body and sending it to the brain, they are gateways to the energy systems and greater fields. We can use our body as an instrument and peer through these inner gates.

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I think the world of sensation and somatic sensing is going to be huge part of humanity’s spiritually evolutionary path forward, into understanding our multidimensionality and our multidimensional relationship with the world around us. In the meantime, what a valuable tool for the integration of trauma that surpasses the limitations of traditional therapies.