Tara Healey frames body awareness as a trainable skill rather than a gift. Like going to the gym, you build it in short reps with rest in between — not by white-knuckling it all day. She offers a graded progression: start with the hand (close it, feel the fingers on the palm, sense warmth, texture, temperature through the skin), then drop attention inward to the gut as if taking “an elevator ride all the way down to around your belly button,” then to the chest and heart.
“Learning body awareness is like learning any new skill. It’s like going to the gym. Go once, do a few reps, take a break.”
The first muscle to build, she says, isn’t sensing — it’s redirecting attention. The mind will keep lifting you back up into thought, and the practice is simply noticing that and gently returning: “Okay, thank you, mind. I usually give you all my attention. Right now, I’m going to put my attention on my core.”
Crucially, she insists the practice be made enjoyable, or you won’t do it. Take “little baby bites,” have patience, and find a way to make it juicy — “Oh, I’m going to go to Italy in my gut.” If it becomes another grim item on the to-do list, it stops. Curiosity and pleasure, not discipline, keep the practice alive.
“Make it easy. Make it pleasurable… How do you make it juicy? And I take little baby bites.”
Related Concepts
- Somatic awareness is a key to presence and to the wisdom of emotions
- Feeling nothing is itself somatic data worth exploring
- Enjoyment is the orientation for transformation
- The gut points you toward what you want before the mind knows it
- Balance time spent with grief one-to-one with self-care
- The body holds emotions whether or not you put attention on them