Areas › Your body › Feeling from the inside
The body answers in sensations, in pictures, in a mood that turns up without explanation. If no words come when you check in, nothing has gone wrong.
People often decide they are bad at this because they went looking for a sentence and found a tight jaw instead. The tight jaw is the answer. Take whatever turns up in whatever form it arrives, and if you want to put it into words later, do that as a translation rather than as a test you might fail.
Qur’an and Sunnah
His eyes went white with grief and he was filled with sorrow (Quran 12:84). Jacob's sorrow is told through his body long before it is ever explained.
وَتَوَلَّىٰ عَنۡهُمۡ وَقَالَ يَٰٓأَسَفَىٰ عَلَىٰ يُوسُفَ وَٱبۡيَضَّتۡ عَيۡنَاهُ مِنَ ٱلۡحُزۡنِ فَهُوَ كَظِيمࣱ
and he turned away from them, saying, ‘Alas for Joseph!’ His eyes went white with grief and he was filled with sorrow
Qur’an 12:84read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Pooling fifteen imaging studies, people who struggle to identify their own emotions showed reduced activity in the regions that map bodily state during emotional tasks. A separate meta-analysis of over 7,000 people found that same difficulty was tied more to how much people report noticing bodily signals than to how accurate they actually are at detecting them. Both are correlational, but together they suggest naming feelings and sensing the body are linked without being the same skill.
van der Velde J, Servaas MN, Goerlich KS, Bruggeman R, Horton P, Costafreda SG, Aleman A. (2013). Neural correlates of alexithymia: a meta-analysis of emotion processing studies.. Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews doi
Trevisan DA, Altschuler MR, Bagdasarov A, Carlos C, Duan S, Hamo E, Kala S, McNair ML, Parker T, Stahl D, Winkelman T, Zhou M, McPartland JC. (2019). A meta-analysis on the relationship between interoceptive awareness and alexithymia: Distinguishing interoceptive accuracy and sensibility.. Journal of abnormal psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Feeling something and being able to name it are two different abilities, and the first arrives without waiting for the second.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
A long body practice is a teaching version. In real life, take one small piece: just the feet, just the hands, just a minute of noticing.
If you are moving attention through the body, start at the feet and work up. Leave the throat, the chest and the face until last.
One of the earliest signs that you are drifting out of the present is that your hands and feet go vague. Not numb exactly, just less there.