Turning Our Attention Inwards
Are you hungry or tired right now? Are you in a comfortable position as you read this?
Did you happen to shift in your chair if you realized you weren’t comfortable?
Knowing how we are feeling and what is going on in our body is essential to taking care of ourselves. Perception of sensations from inside the body is something called interoception, or interoceptive awareness, and we need it.
a quiet moment at our Morocco Retreat.
Why is interoception important? Just like when you checked in with yourself to see if you were sitting in a comfortable position, once we are aware of our inner states we are able to move towards change. If you don’t realize that you’re hungry, you’re not likely to go and make yourself a sandwich. If you don’t realize that you’re tired, you’re not likely to start getting ready for bed.
Being aware of what’s going on inside our body is difficult for many reasons and for many of us. Have you ever been in the middle of work and only realized when you were interrupted by a phone call or coworker that you actually didn’t eat all day? Or have you ever doom-scrolled social media and only realized afterwards that your eyes are feeling strained and you have a headache? Our lives are full of distractions and we are often pulled outwards, to what’s going on outside of us, or inside our screens. Those of us who are neurodivergent or have PTSD also tend to have lower interoceptive awareness.
So, it’s no wonder that we can often go days, if not weeks or months, without realizing that we are in pain or discomfort; that we have an ache in our neck or shoulders, and not do anything about it. You might not even think to book a massage or do some stretches until the discomfort becomes so loud that you have no choice but to pay attention to it. In addition to a massage, what will help your neck pain is often something that requires awareness too. If your neck is hurting due to a posture you’re often holding, like “tech neck” (chin jutting forward to look down at your phone/computer), we need to be aware of what’s going on in our body to be able to move towards postures that take the strain off of our neck long-term.
One of the things that helps with improving our interoceptive awareness is massage. Massage can be an hour or hour and a half where you spend time with your body, where you get a chance to move your attention inwards and check in with how your body is doing. You don’t need to have a specific issue to benefit from massage; you might not know where you are holding tension until you take the time to feel into your body. RMTs will often hear clients say “Wow, I didn’t even realize I was tense there”, or clients may begin a session saying “My back hurts”, as in overall, and be unable to point to a specific area. Throughout the massage, you’ll work with your massage therapist to hone in on what areas hold discomfort, so your awareness of where you have discomfort moves from “my whole back, I don’t know, everywhere” to “an inch inwards of the bottom of my left shoulder blade”. That information is powerful. You may be surprised how simply knowing where your discomfort is can shift your experience of it, and can help your body make the adjustments needed in order to heal.
Improving your interoceptive awareness can be a great explicit goal for your massage treatment plan, if that’s something you want to work on. Even if you never think about interoception, it can be a beneficial by-product of a massage anyways. What people often call a “just relaxation massage” also allows your body to integrate information and improves interoception on a subconscious level.
So, massage can be an incredible resource for you to become more aware of how your body is feeling and help us to be better friends to our bodies as well. We live our whole lives in our bodies, shouldn’t we spend some quality time getting to know it?
