Body Sense

Restorative embodied self-awareness as a pathway to well-being.

Alan Fogel Ph.D.

When Anger Becomes Empowerment

Anger can be experienced as dysregulated (lashing out, self-blame), modulated, or restorative (life-affirming).

Having a Body vs. Being a Body

The concept of owning, rather than being, a body is a Western cultural invention that prevents whole-person healing, living, and restoration.

The Fiction of a “Mind-Body” Separation

"Mind" and "body" are no more real than fictional characters in a book, movie, or TV series. So why do we believe in them and treat them as if they existed in the flesh?

Are There Health Benefits to Feeling Emotions?

Yes, but many people think that emotions are a sign of weakness.

10 Questions to Help You Feel Embodied Awareness

It’s okay to be stressed, get irritable, withdraw, or feel down. Noticing that what is happening is a positive step toward self-awareness.

3 Ways We Experience Pain: Unrelenting, Manageable, and Relief

Here are some simple ways to manage and relieve pain using our embodied self-awareness.

Getting in Touch With Pain

Do you suffer from emotional or physical pain? Have you tried many types of pain treatments? Pain may be relieved by learning to just feel it.

Fuzzy Feelings: Getting Closer to Our Real Feelings

The felt experiences from our own body including sensations, pulsations, and emotions take time to coalesce in awareness.

Restorative Sexuality: Beyond Excitement and Attraction

Finding restorative sexuality is one key to lasting sexual intimacy, even in the face of illness, dysfunction, and aging.

3 (and Only 3) Ways to Know One’s Self

The neural networks that sustain conscious awareness of our own feelings and thoughts are designed in such a way that there are only three ways to experience ourselves.

Restoration in Nature

Restorative Embodied Self-Awareness

Are you feeling disconnected from yourself? Restorative embodied self-awareness could help you find a way back to what you "truly" feel.

Emotional and Physical Pain Activate Similar Brain Regions

In order to get over grief, resolve anger, and even embrace happiness, we have to really feel those things in the body.

Psychotherapy, Medication, or Body Sense for Mental Health?

The Body Sense of exercise, meditation, massage, eating well, being in nature, doing service activities, social intimacy and religion/spirituality can improve mental health.

Strength Training Using Motor Imagery

Paying attention to your body while working out can increase cardiovascular fitness, strength and agility, and fat metabolism. A study published in August 2011 in the journal Frontiers in Movement Science and Sports Psychology adds another way in which body sense can enhance your workout: by imagining muscle contraction in place of actually doing some of the reps.

Sedentary Work

Sedentary work contributes to weight gain

As an increasing amount of time at work and school is sedentary, you can use your body sense to alleviate the resulting risks to your health and weight.

The body has a mind of its own

As odd as it may sound, being aware of our own discomfort -- including that sickening feeling of breath holding -- is actually a good thing.

The limits of mindfulness

Meditation is a wonderful way to enhance body sense. For some meditators, however, body sense can become “too much.” They feel overwhelmed with their own personal suffering, with physical and emotional pain. They are lost and not able to find guidance within their own meditation community.

Can your child get too much exercise?

A problem arises when adults push children into competitive sports where winning matters more than what may be good for the child's body, mind, and health.

When bad is good

Why does just a little bit of getting knocked around by life help us grow stronger and more resilient? If we are sleepwalking through our lives, taking things for granted and not really paying attention to our own body function, sensations, and emotions, the sudden loss of easy freedoms can bring us back to our body sense.

From darkness to light

I've always thought it odd that in the late Fall -- when my body just wants to withdraw into cozy, warm rest in response to the longer nights and cooler temperatures - urban culture becomes more active, more complex, and more demanding. Perhaps it is not our dark moods that are problematic so much as our sense of their cultural unacceptability? 

Couple Intimacy

If You Are Happier After Sex, It's Not Because It Feels Good

Being fully engaged in the experiences of your body — without being distracted by thoughts — is the key to real happiness.

Are all cries good for you?

A "good" cry is connected to deeply felt sensations of warm tears, a sense of vulnerability, and relief, resonating in sound and feeling within the body sense of the crier and the listener. False forms of crying actually suppress body sense awareness states, as if these cries are used to cover up feeling or redirect them elsewhere. 

Holding one's Breath

Waiting to Exhale

How your breathing relates to your emotions, personality, and health.

Green Exercise

Outdoor exercise confers special benefits compared to exercising in synthetic environments; benefits primarily related to psychological state. Outdoor exercise makes people happier, less fatigued and angry, more tranquil and relaxed, and bestows a more lasting energy boost compared to indoor exercise.  

You were anesthetized during surgery: Does that mean you forgot everything that happened?

In my book on body sense, I wrote about a middle-aged client I called Rebecca who, during a Rosen Method Bodywork session, "remembered" something that happened to her during an abdominal surgery under general anesthesia, a surgery that occurred a dozen years earlier. She remembered the body sense of having some kind of wedge put into her to hold her open during the procedure. She had no conscious memory of anything that occurred during the surgery to remove nonmalignant uterine fibroids. Since the surgery, for the entire 12-years period, she had continued to experience abdominal pain that should have, but did not, disappear in the months following the surgery. 

You think you are happy (or tired, or angry): Are you sure?

Tom thinks he's a bit off and he thinks he's tired. The problem is that he's thinking about how he feels. He is thinking about how he feels because that's how Tom, in his busy and demanding life, goes about solving most of his problems: he thinks about them. What does Tom really feel? Not only doesn't Tom know what he feels, he also doesn't know that he doesn't know what he feels. People who get lost in judgment and expectation can get worn out with the task of trying to figure out how to behave, how to please, how to be better. 

Slow Movement with Awareness

Slow Movement with Awareness: Better Than Exercise?

If exercise is your only form of movement, it is not a very balanced diet.

PTSD is a chronic impairment of the body sense: Why we need embodied approaches to treat trauma

A trauma from outside the body creates a reaction in the body (behaviors like fight, flight or freeze, alterations in gut function, cortisol and other hormones that alter metabolism, immune system response, etc.). Because of this, some trauma survivors may not respond to traditional psychotherapy. They may need a more body-centered approach to treatment.

Your child may have difficulty running, jumping or throwing

We assume that the body's "lower" needs and urges must be suppressed in order to develop our "higher" human faculties of thought, moral behavior, and spiritual attainment.

Why your Spirit needs your Body (and vice-versa)

Body sense awareness leads to greater awareness of things deemed spiritual: feelings of connection, compassion, love and gratitude, forgiveness, surrender, and acceptance.

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