People who say “I can’t feel my body” often confuse feeling with some special mystical capacity. Joe demonstrates it’s simply attention. Can you feel your right pinky? No — because you’re not attending to it. Now attend to it. There it is. That is feeling.
He walks a client through a progression: feel your vocal cords vibrate while humming, then maintain awareness of that spot without making sound, then feel your belly. When the client puts a finger on his belly button, he can feel it — then keeps the awareness after removing the finger. That’s all embodiment is.
“If you’re attending to it, isn’t that feeling your right pinky? Like, what am I missing?”
The interesting moment comes when the client tries to feel his belly and his face goes blank — suggesting that “I can’t feel” may actually be “I’m repressing the emotion that surfaces when I feel.” The inability to feel the body is often not a skill deficit but an active avoidance.
Related Concepts
- Dissociation removes your signals
- Flow state in sports is the same skill as embodiment in life
- Thinking you can’t feel may actually be repression
- Apply your embodied skill from one domain to all of life