Coming home to yourself
ESSAYS BY HUDSON TAYLOR
We often live outside of our bodies — suspended in thought, pulled forward by urgency, or distracted with the noise of our external world. Your body, patient and persistent, waits for you to recognize it.
Interoception is the word we give to something much older than language: the felt sense of being alive within your own skin. It’s the awareness of your heartbeat before a difficult conversation. The subtle tightening in your chest when something doesn’t feel quite right. The way your breath shallows when you’re overstimulated.
To attune to these signals is not just an act of mindfulness. It is a return to yourself.
“It’s the awareness of your heartbeat before a difficult conversation.
The subtle tightening in your chest when something doesn’t feel quite right.”
We all have to deal with change - recalibrating our lives and values in ways we didn’t expect. And while external shifts are easy to name — jobs, relationships, cities, our internal ones can be more difficult to explore.
Do you notice when you need rest? Do you sense that when you’re triggered, your body tells you before your mind rationalizes?
Interoception offers a kind of orientation. It does not ask us to fix or judge, only to notice. It’s in this noticing that we begin to move differently and can respond to ourselves and those around us with more clarity, more responsiveness, more care.
This skill, like all others, can be practiced. It might begin with a single breath, or a hand over the heart, or the question: What do I feel right now, and what does that feeling need?
There is no finish line to this kind of work. Only an ongoing invitation to inhabit our bodies more fully, and to treat our inner signals as information.
