Honoring Your Felt Sense of Inner Knowing

Trusting our healing intelligence is aligned with releasing the conditioning that clouds the inner quality of listening and truth-knowing. 

When the mind and body are in harmony, this can come as a source of deep relief. We feel clearer about our feelings and needs and can attend to life in more trustworthy ways. When there is friction between the mind and body, what we know and what we sense, interferes with our ability to feel whole, alive, authentic, centered, confident, and at ease with life and decision-making. 

In some ways, we can have a false sense of what is a true felt sense of inner knowing, created by an unconscious awareness of our conditioning and the autonomic nervous system.

What informs the autonomic nervous system

Whether our gut is wrenching, our heart is racing, our gaze is harsh, or our mind is calm, it all depends on what is known as neuroception, a term originally coined by Dr. Stephen Porges. 

Neuroception receives and interprets information from our internal body and from the external environment. It works tirelessly to let our autonomic nervous system know whether people, environments, or situations are safe or dangerous. These signals go on to direct automatic processes, like heartbeat and breathing rate.  

This has a major influence on our stress responses and when we can shine the light of awareness on the system that is running behind the scenes, we can clear the view of what is truly happening in the present moment. We build conscious awareness, a skill of discernment, and ask these simple questions of “Is this old? Or is this accurate?” in terms of our interpretation of things arising at any moment. 

When neuroception misfires, it’s called faulty neuroception.  When we begin to attune our nervous system, the great news is we begin to repair to decondition, and rebuild self-trust. This opens the doorway to our natural source of highly intelligent inner knowing.

How to recognize patterns of conditioning and how they can present themselves

Conditioning, which shows up most of the time as our automatic response, is woven securely into our autonomic nervous system. It creates barriers to a quality of inner listening that is helpful in accurately informing inner knowing and neuroception.

Some of these barriers include: 

• Sensory awareness and a lack of interoceptive awareness
  This is how we interpret what we feel in the body as a sensation. Most of us walk around with little to no connection to what’s happening inside our body, to how we hold our posture, or how we are breathing. This lack of awareness can inadvertently create signals of threat and danger to our brain, keep us on high alert, and trapped in highly disruptive stress responses.

• Healing and feeling tones related to emotions
  I refer to “a tone” here as a felt sense of ease, expansion, openness, and receptivity or as a felt sense of tightening, contraction, withdrawal, and shutdown.  We can have a reactive physical feeling to shame, rage, anger, terror, and fear like feeling a somatic contraction, a clenching, or a gripping. It can also be a strong sense we are being sucked out of our groundedness and power center within our solar plexus. There may be a feeling of eyes wide open, freezing in the body, and going nonverbal. On the other hand, we can imagine sharing time and space with a trusted friend and feeling a sense of connection, engagement, safety, love, and warmth in our hearts. 

Different emotions can have different feeling tones located in different areas of the body. This is something very individual to each person.

• Cognition or thought

If conditioning happened very early on in childhood, often the cognitive element is not there. What this means is that we are mainly left with a lot of sensations sensed in the body with an immense emotional charge that can often overwhelm the nervous system. So we can have lots of big waves without a clear picture or a full story to explain the waves.  They arise in similar situations as adults as interpreted by neuroception. However, the story, understanding, and cognition may be added on later when we learn to attend to all the sensations with an informed sense of listening inward.

If conditioning happens from ages 4 or 5, very often there are thoughts and core beliefs associated with both the physiological and psychological memories. This is important to be aware of in relation to feelings, sensations, and emotions that feel highly charged and stuck. It may arise in cyclical ways that feel repetitive. It may mean there is a core belief component that needs investigating.

To put this all into context, allow me to share with you some of my own stories.  As a terrorized and fearful child, my survival conditioning was to freeze, then mobilize into people please. Being pretty sensitive taught me to take on too much responsibility for thoughts, feelings, and actions that weren’t mine, or even appropriate for my age. If something didn’t work out okay, I internalized that as being my fault. So first I had to address the immobilizing trauma stress response that blended into mobilizing to keep myself safe. By jumping in to fix everything, to make things better to relieve other people’s pain and distress, I tried to be the solution finder, peacekeeper, and boundary-less giver.  

I had to learn to build a “vagal tone” to relearn how to use my body’s brake and accelerator more efficiently. This allowed me to reshape the conditioning impressed upon my nervous systems. It helped me remain anchored in my body to feel safe implementing boundaries and regain some semblance of self-trust.  Increasing my tolerance levels for other people’s discomfort and pain, plus managing my highly intuitive felt sense of inner knowing, became a priority too. Just because I could feel and sense feelings didn’t make them my responsibility.  Learning how to listen in an informed way to my body’s sensations allowed time for the feeling tones of guilt to integrate. It also set me free of the core limiting belief that to feel safe, loved, and accepted, I had to neglect myself, my body, and my needs. 

A deeper, more trustworthy felt sense of inner knowing arises naturally when we move closer to this truth and through this closeness, we become more authentic.

When we unburden our body, our nervous systems, and energy from all its conditioning, our sensitivity becomes a gentle inquiry and our reality becomes clearer and more accurate.  The closer we move towards the truth of inner knowing, the more the body lifts, lights up, and enlivens a deeper. more connected, truthful way of being. Through unburdening the nervous system, we build an expansive bridge back to our wiser inner knowing. If we are feeling imprisoned by our trauma practice, listening to our nervous system it is a doorway to inner freedom. 

If you need help with rebuilding a connection to this often undervalued yet profoundly wise resource, connect with Roseanne at [email protected]