1) The Body You are Wearing

Your body is the place where your autonomic experience plays out. So learning to grasp and move the levers of your autonomic nervous system requires that you learn how to listen to what is happening inside the body you are wearing.

The scientific word for this is interoception. It means feeling yourself on the inside. Interoception is an inner sense. Just as your body has senses pointed outwards into the world around you (like vision and hearing) it has senses pointed inwards to your interior (inward vision, inward listening).

Most of us are moving so fast, and the modern world is pulling our attention outward so hard, that we don't have much time, or much training, in bringing our attention to what is happening at a felt level inside of our bodies.

This is a skill we need to grow if we are going to understand ourselves autonomically.