Jonny Miller shares that for most of his teenage years and twenties, he was “fairly numb from the neck down” — he had emotions but no definition or attunement to where they were or what he was actually feeling. Developing interoception — the ability to sense the many different flavors of sensation alive in the body — made emotional work “50 times easier.”
In Joe’s live coaching, the key move is noticing when someone goes into their head and redirecting: “Bring it back down into the body — what’s the sensation?” Feeling the interoceptive sensations associated with an emotion is usually what enables the emotion to move. Without that body awareness, emotions get processed as stories and thoughts rather than felt and released.
Joe outlines the phases of emotional work: identification (naming), somatic experiencing (feeling it in the body), expression (movement), and finally seeing that emotions aren’t particularly cause-and-effect related — the same somatic pattern can attach to different stories sequentially.
Related Concepts
- Body awareness is just attention
- Emotional inquiry as embodied exploration
- Pleasure is noticing sensations moving