When the Body Stops Feeling Like Its Usual Shape

After a recent sound bath, a client came up to me trying to describe something that had happened during the opening meditation.

I was guiding a practice I use fairly often that I call the Boundaryless Meditation (you can read more about that here).

It begins like a fairly traditional body relaxation. We bring attention to different areas of the body and allow them to soften. But then I ask people to do something slightly stranger.

I ask them to relax not only the body part, but their conception of the body part.

The image of the feet.

The sense of their edges.

The idea of where the legs begin and end.

Eventually, the usual outline of the body is invited to become a little less definite.

I am not asking anyone to leave their body. If anything, I am interested in what happens when we experience the body without relying quite so heavily on the mental picture we ordinarily carry around of it.

This client had apparently gone pretty far into that experience.

Afterward, she tried to show me what it had felt like. She spread herself outward with her arms and described feeling enormous, oversized, almost overfilled. The gesture was something like spilling over herself. Her body no longer seemed contained within its normal dimensions.

She also described an unusual sensation around the soft palate of her mouth.

And this was the part she was really struggling to explain.

She knew she had experienced something.

But what sense was it?

It wasn't taste.

It wasn't exactly touch.

It wasn't smell.

It wasn't hearing.

She had a sensation and, for a moment, no category in which to put it.

Standing there talking to her, I didn't have a very good answer either.

My first thought was that perhaps she had become aware of some pulse-related sensation and was perceiving it in an unfamiliar place. But that was my interpretation, not hers. She never told me that she felt her heartbeat.

And the more I thought about our conversation afterward, the less interested I became in solving the mystery of exactly what physical event she had detected.

The more interesting question was:

How can we feel something quite distinctly and still not know what kind of feeling it is?

That question led me to interoception.

Interoception

Interoception, pronounced in-ter-uh-SEP-shun, is a term for the sensing and processing of signals originating within the body.

Cambridge Dictionary describes interoception as the awareness of what is happening within your body and gives examples including hunger, thirst, temperature, tense muscles, and a racing heart.

The National Institutes of Health uses an even broader definition. Interoception includes the processes through which we sense, interpret, integrate, and regulate signals from within ourselves.

That last definition really interests me.

Not simply sensing.

Interpreting.

Integrating.

Somehow taking an enormous amount of information arising from inside the body and turning it into an experience that makes sense.

That is already much bigger than the five senses most of us learned as children.

Sight.

Hearing.

Smell.

Taste.

Touch.

Those five are real, of course, but they are not a complete map of human sensation.

We also sense the position and movement of our bodies. We sense balance. Pressure. Temperature. Pain. Stretch. Breathing. Hunger. Fullness. Internal movement. Cardiovascular activity.

And even those categories begin to overlap.

The nervous system is constantly gathering information about the body from many different sources and somehow assembling it into the remarkably convincing experience of:

This is me. This is my body. This is where I am.

Most of the time we never think about how strange an accomplishment that is.

The Body You Carry in Your Head

This is where another idea becomes useful: body schema.

I initially thought body schema simply meant the mental map we have of the size and shape of our bodies.

It turns out to be a little more complicated than that.

Researchers don't even completely agree on where terms like body schema, body image, and body representation begin and end. But body schema generally refers to a continuously updated sensorimotor representation of the body that helps us know where our body is and move it through space without consciously calculating every action.

You don't have to look at your hand to know approximately where it is.

You don't calculate the length of your arm before reaching for a glass.

You can scratch your cheek with your eyes closed.

Some continuously updated representation of the body makes all of that possible.

Researchers often distinguish this from body image, which is more conscious and includes our perceptions, beliefs, ideas, and feelings about our bodies. Some models add yet another category, a body structural representation, describing our sense of the locations, relationships, and boundaries of the different parts of the body.

So there probably isn't one little picture of the body sitting somewhere in the brain.

There are multiple overlapping representations.

And they are not fixed.

That is the part that fascinates me.

How Big Are You?

We ordinarily experience the dimensions of our bodies as obvious facts.

My hand is this big.

My torso stops here.

My legs occupy this much space.

I end here and the floor begins there.

But our experience of those facts is partly constructed from sensory information.

Change the information, or change how much attention we give to different parts of that information, and the experience of the body can change with it.

There is research showing that meditation can alter people's perceived bodily boundaries.

In one randomized study, participants who received brief mindfulness training reported a decrease in the perceived sharpness of their bodily boundaries compared with people in an active listening control group. The researchers described the effect as a relaxing of the perceived boundary between the self and surrounding space.

I find this particularly interesting because that is remarkably close to what I am intentionally playing with in the Boundaryless Meditation.

I ask:

Can you soften the image of your feet?

Can the exact outline of your legs become less important?

Can your sense of your torso become less definite?

Eventually:

Can you relax the image you have of the whole body?

I developed the meditation experientially. I wasn't trying to reproduce a neuroscience experiment.

But my client's response made me realize that I was deliberately playing with something we usually take completely for granted:

the stability of our internal representation of ourselves.

And when that representation softened, she didn't disappear.

She felt enormous.

Feeling Bigger Than the Body

I keep thinking about the gesture she made when she described it.

She didn't just say, "I couldn't feel my boundaries."

She showed me a body that was almost too full for itself.

Expanded.

Oversized.

Spilling outward.

I don't know exactly what changed in her body schema, body image, structural body representation, or some combination of all three.

I don't think we need to pretend that we do.

But her description is a wonderful reminder that the body we experience is not simply identical to the anatomical body.

There is the measurable body.

And there is the felt body.

Usually they line up so closely that we assume they are the same thing.

Then occasionally something shifts.

A hand feels enormous.

A leg seems to disappear.

The boundary between the back and the floor becomes difficult to locate.

The whole body seems to expand.

Anyone who has spent much time lying very still in meditation may recognize some version of this.

Nothing necessarily happened to the physical dimensions of the body.

What changed was the experience of those dimensions.

Then There Was the Sensation in Her Mouth

Which brings me back to the second part of her experience.

Something was happening around the soft palate, and she couldn't identify what kind of sensation it was.

Initially, I wanted to name it.

Maybe you're feeling your pulse.

Maybe you're sensing vibration.

Maybe it's pressure.

Maybe it's this nerve or that blood vessel.

But I don't actually know.

And neither did she.

I now think that uncertainty is more interesting than the answer I was trying to give her.

Remember that the NIH definition of interoception includes sensing, but also interpreting and integrating what is sensed.

Those are different things.

Something happens in the body.

The nervous system receives information.

We become conscious of some part of that information.

Then we attempt to understand it.

Usually this happens so seamlessly that sensation and interpretation feel like one event.

I'm hungry.

My heart is racing.

My stomach hurts.

I'm cold.

But underneath those statements are signals that had to become experiences and experiences that had to become meanings.

My client's experience seemed to interrupt that process for a moment.

There was simply:

Something is here.

Before:

I know what this is.

I love that.

And then, while I was writing this essay, I broke a tooth.

My Body Knew Before I Did

I took a break from writing to have lunch.

I bit into a tortilla chip and immediately knew that something was wrong with one of my molars.

There was no pain.

And even now, I can't really tell you what the sensation was that told me something had happened.

Was it pressure?

A tiny change in movement?

Vibration?

Sound?

Something about the way my teeth came together?

I honestly don't know.

I just knew.

And almost immediately, before I had really formed a thought about it, my tongue began searching.

It moved toward the tooth and started feeling around its surface, investigating what had changed.

There was something wonderfully strange about catching myself in the middle of that process while I was literally writing an essay about sensation and the body's internal representations.

Because the sequence seemed to be:

Something changed.

Then:

Attention went there.

Then:

My body investigated.

And only afterward came the sentence:

I think I broke a tooth.

The tongue searching was especially fascinating to me.

It knew, in a sense, what the landscape of my mouth was supposed to feel like.

It began exploring that landscape for a change.

This is not exactly the same thing as my client's experience, and I don't want to force everything into the category of interoception. The mouth is also rich with touch, pressure, proprioceptive, and other sensory information.

But the experience revealed the same gap.

I knew before I could explain how I knew.

The interpretation came after the information.

And once I started paying attention to that sequence, I wondered how often it must happen without us noticing.

We remember the conclusion.

My tooth broke.

I'm hungry.

Something hurts.

I'm anxious.

But perhaps experience begins a little earlier than language does.

Before the Body Has a Name for It

This may be one of the reasons body-based meditation can sometimes feel so strange.

We are not accustomed to sensing without immediately categorizing.

We spend most of our waking lives surrounded by things that already have names.

Phone.

Chair.

Email.

Car.

Person.

Foot.

Hand.

Heart.

Pain.

Hunger.

Anxiety.

But the body itself doesn't necessarily speak in nouns.

It speaks in pressure.

Rhythm.

Warmth.

Contraction.

Expansion.

Tingling.

Movement.

Weight.

Absence.

Something difficult to locate.

Something difficult to describe.

And only afterward do we decide what those things are.

Perhaps practices that bring sustained attention toward the body occasionally allow us to catch that process earlier than we normally would.

Not after:

This is my heartbeat.

But at:

There is pulsing.

Not:

My leg is relaxed.

But:

The boundary of my leg is becoming difficult to find.

Not:

Something is wrong with my tooth.

But simply:

Something changed.

There is something very different about meeting sensation at that stage.

Maybe Listening Is Bigger Than Hearing

I talk a lot about sound baths as a practice of listening.

Usually that sounds as though I mean listening to the crystal bowls, the gong, the room, the traffic outside, or the silence between sounds.

I do mean all of those things.

But perhaps listening can be understood more broadly.

Listening to the pressure of the floor.

Listening to breathing.

Listening to weight.

Listening to the edges of the body becoming less certain.

Listening to something in the roof of the mouth that you cannot identify.

Listening to a tooth before you even know you have broken it.

Listening even when you don't yet understand the language.

That last part matters to me.

We tend to believe that understanding is the goal of attention.

Maybe sometimes attention can come first.

Maybe we can experience something without immediately determining what caused it, what category it belongs to, or what it means.

That doesn't mean unusual bodily sensations should never be investigated. A persistent, painful, new, or concerning physical sensation belongs in a conversation with an appropriate healthcare professional, not in a sound bath practitioner's diagnosis.

But not every unfamiliar sensation needs an immediate story either.

Sometimes there can simply be a moment of curiosity.

That's interesting.

I don't know what that is.

Let me feel it.

My client came to me because she couldn't find a word for something she had experienced.

I couldn't find one either.

Ironically, searching for that word led me to an idea I like much more:

The body is communicating with us constantly, and sometimes our experience of it is richer than the vocabulary we have available to describe it.

Maybe part of learning to listen is becoming comfortable with that gap.

The moment after sensation arrives,

and before we decide what it is.