The water in the creek was not particularly frigid; just cool.
But my belly didn’t want to go in. Neither did my butt.
My mind, however, thought it was a great idea.
We needed an intervention.
I was on a solo spring backpacking trip in the Utah canyons.
It was a sunny afternoon, and a sweet little pool just deep enough to cover me beckoned amidst the slickrock.
I knew I’d feel amazing if I dunked.
But my body was resisting.
I could have just pushed forward and made myself go underwater, but this time, I took a different tack.
I tuned in to my actual sensations.
My toes were already in the creek, and I could feel the coldness all around them. Also the rough rock underneath.
My jaw was clenched. I sensed a tightness in my belly, and noticed my shoulders curling towards each other.
Even though it was a pretty safe situation by rational standards, my body was showing me I was scared.
So I started singing a little song I made up on the spot. Partly to move energy, partly to cheer myself on:
Sen-sa-tion is safe to feel!
Sen-sa-tion is safe to feel!
Sen-sa-tion is safe to feel in my body!
I felt my belly relax a little. I kept singing, loudly, as I crouched and dipped farther.
Soon I was breathing through the sensation of cold water on most of my body. I felt my flesh prickle on my arms and legs. I really felt the cold against me, without pulling away from it.
As predicted, when I popped back out of the water again a little later and laid down on the warm red rock like a lizard, I felt amazing.
I wasn’t aware of it then, but that day at the creek, I was cultivating my interoception.
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Interoception is your body’s ability to sense, interpret, and report what’s happening inside you.
The clench of a jaw, the tightness in a belly, the prickle of cold water on skin.
It sounds simple.
But often in my work with clients, when I ask someone what they’re feeling in their body in a difficult moment, a surprisingly common answer is: I don’t know. I can’t tell.
Not because nothing is happening. A lot is happening. But the sensing machine got turned off a long time ago—feeling things was, at some point, too much.
So we learned to live from the neck up. To think about our feelings rather than feel them.
The problem is, unfelt feelings don’t go away. They wait.
When we learn to bring presence to what’s actually happening in the body—to get curious about sensation rather than fighting it—emotions move. They sequence through, shift, complete.
You know that feeling after a really good cry, when it finally passes and the sun comes out? We can have that more regularly, in quieter ways, simply by staying present with what’s alive in the body long enough to let it finish its sentence.
That upgrades everything.
And here’s why it matters so much:
Your body knows things your mind doesn’t.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
The body processes enormous amounts of information below the level of conscious thought—and it has been doing so your whole life, quietly sending signals up the chain, trying to get your attention.
Most of us were conditioned to override those signals. (This is why it can be hard to find them when we try.)
We learn to push through. To be stuff down. To tune out.
In some ways the skills of overriding are great. Discipline, endurance, willpower—these skills that got many of us pretty far. They helped us survive. They’re worth having.
But they’re not navigation tools.
When you’re trying to figure out what direction to head in—what to say yes to, what to let go of, what you actually want your one wild and precious life to look like—these execution skills will not help you.
You need a different instrument entirely. That instrument is your body.
When you start to actually feel what’s happening in your body—to notice where you’re holding tension, where there’s openness, where something in you is leaning toward or pulling back—you start to have access to a quality of information that no pros-and-cons list can give you.
You start to know what a yes feels like. Not just intellectually, but in your belly, your chest, your jaw.
And you start to be able to feel the difference between fear-that-means-stop and fear-that-means-this-matters-and-I’m-scared-because-I-care.
That distinction alone has changed the trajectory of my life multiple times.
Not just my decisions and my inner compass, but my ability to know what I need and ask for it, to stay present in hard conversations, to show up in my relationships the way I actually want to.
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Back at the creek, I could have muscled through. I’ve done that plenty.
But that day, I paused. I got curious about the sensations instead of fighting them. I let my body have its experience, sang it a little song, and stayed present with what was real.
And then, from that place of actual contact with myself, I made a choice. I moved forward, but slowly, while in touch with the fear.
That’s alignment. Not making the fear go away. Feeling it fully and moving anyway—from genuine presence rather than white-knuckled willpower.
It’s a skill. It can be learned.
And the creek, as it turns out, is a pretty good place to start.
So: What does your body know right now that you might not be listening to?
How could you practice tuning in just 5% more today?
Self-awaredly yours,
Rachel
PS – This is some of the most meaningful work I do with coaching clients—learning to actually feel what’s in the body, sort the signal from the noise, and start letting that be the compass. If you’ve been curious about working together, a free 75-minute consultation is a good place to start. Hit reply to get yours on the books.
