3 Types of Body Awareness (And Why They Matter in Difficult Times)
What Is Body Awareness?
Most of us have been trained to think of awareness as something that happens exclusively in our minds. We come to see it as a slightly broader version of attention – a beam of light we can direct and focus on whatever we choose.
But awareness is inherently physical and embodied – it’s a process of information gathering and interpretation that involves more than just what’s going on in our heads.
At any given moment, information is being processed from different sectors of our bodies, our environment, our larger context, and our movement through the world. This is done through various receptors all throughout our bodies, nerve endings, and so on. Much of this happens automatically, but when we become intentional with our awareness, we can strengthen our ability to use it for the things we care most about in the world. And being able to do this requires us to know the details of how our bodies – not just our minds – collect information.
There are three types of body awareness (also known as sensory awareness):
Interoception
Exteroception
Proprioception
Taken together, these three ways of experiencing the world have a lot to do with how we engage with, and respond to, the intersecting crises of our moment.
Understanding these three forms of awareness can help us become more grounded, responsive, and resilient.
Interoception: Awareness of What's Happening Inside Us
Interoception is our awareness of our own bodies and internal processes.
This includes things like:
A pounding heart
A knot in your stomach
Tightness in your chest
Butterflies before a difficult conversation
A gut feeling that something isn't right
In our Western culture, this type of awareness has long-been ignored, shunned, and responded to with gaslighting – mostly because it can’t be controlled. It is uniquely ours – something each of us can attune to and develop on our own. When one of us says “I have a gut feeling this isn’t right,” it isn’t just a mental hiccup or fabrication – it’s likely us tuning into our interoceptive awareness and noticing something off. (Or our body screaming it loudly enough for us to hear it.)
Interoception – or what I might call “embodied inner awareness” – is the process through which we become attuned to how our body is responding to the current moment.
Interoception and Hope
We live in a time of intense political polarization.
Not only that, but our current moment is filled with crises coming from seemingly every direction – I refer to this as a time of “intersecting crises.” Dr. Cornel West says we’re living in a “time of catastrophe.”
So how can developing our interoceptive skills help us?
Studies show that people who are more highly interoceptive react to political polarization less and have more hope for the future.
This raises a vital invitation for us: to develop our internal awareness so we might stay grounded when confronting tension and harm in our current moment.
Ways to Develop Interoception
Here are just a few ways to do this:
Body scans + movement meditations
Noticing where emotions show up in the body
Tracking physical sensations throughout the day
Pausing and asking why something feels the way it does
Exteroception: Awareness of the World Around Us
Exteroception is what most people think of when they think of the senses.
This includes:
Seeing
Hearing
Touching
Smelling
Tasting
If interoception is about internal awareness, exteroception might best be remembered as external awareness. It is how we experience the world around us.
When we tap into these senses and become curious, we open ourselves more fully to our environment. We see more, hear more, and feel more.
Which is both enlightening and terrifying.
It is through this type of awareness that we become aware of injustice in the world. We read political news. We see harm in our communities. We gauge when we are safe and when we are not based on our environment.
Exteroception helps us understand the reality around us.
Ways to Develop Exteroception
Mindful walks
Five-senses grounding exercises
Practicing observation before interpretation
Proprioception: Awareness of How We Move Through the World
Proprioception is our sense of physical position in space and time.
It is our awareness of how we move through the world.
This can be the hardest type of sensory awareness to understand, yet it may be one of the most important because it has everything to do with our embodiment in the world.
For example, when we become overwhelmed, we can notice a shift in how we navigate the world. We might experience:
Dizziness
Frenzy/Anxiety
Out-of-body experiences
Difficulty feeling grounded
Disconnection from others
Disconnection from ourselves
We notice these things in our bodies as we move around – even just in our living rooms! Distinct from interoception when we notice these experiences internally, with proprioception, we attune our awareness to the ways in which we are physically moving.
With interoception, we might recognize we are feeling frenzied through a heightened heart rate.
With exteroception, we might recognize it is a response to the chaotic environment around us: loud music, inconsistent movement from others, etc.
With proprioception, we can recognize (and attempt to better influence) how this is impacting our movement and navigation of life while experiencing it.
Here’s another example: a teacher ends her school day feeling exhausted. The students, the parents, the Admin. The behaviors, the phones, the data. Everything overwhelming. But she can’t stop – she still has a staff meeting to go to.
So she stands up from her desk, noticing her brain fog and the pain in her knees as she does, and begins to move toward the library where the meeting is. Her steps are slow, unsteady, and just trudging forward. She notices all this, but doesn’t have the energy to change anything. As she enters the room filled with her colleagues talking loudly, she takes a deep breath and braces herself. She feels there but not there – distant and separate.
In this example, we see all three types of body awareness on display: interoception in the way she recognizes her brain fog, knee pain, and general grogginess; exterocepion in the way she recognizes the loud meeting room; and proprioception in the way she pays attention to her steps and how she is moving.
In this example, the teacher doesn’t necessarily have the energy to change anything – but recognizing reality is the first step. In the future, she might notice it, take a moment to rest or adjust, and then be better equipped to shape how she is showing up in the moment.
Proprioception holds the key to metabolizing the information that our other two forms of sensory awareness pick up.
Ways to Develop Proprioception
Yoga/Pilates
Mindful Walking
Balance exercises
Resistance training
Carrying, pushing, or pulling heavy objects
How Sensory Awareness Helps Us Navigate Crisis and Conflict
What do we do with all of this?
How do we, with all the demands and strains of our moment, become more in touch with our awareness in a way that doesn't overwhelm our system, shut us down, or burn us out?
One answer is learning to work with all three forms of awareness together.
Interoception helps us notice what is happening within us.
Exteroception helps us notice what is happening around us.
Proprioception helps us stay embodied as we move through both.
When one of these forms of awareness becomes overdeveloped or underdeveloped, we can struggle.
For example:
Too much external awareness (exteroception) without regulation can leave us overwhelmed by news and information.
Too little embodied internal awareness (interoception) can make it difficult to recognize stress before it reaches a breaking point.
Too little movement awareness (proprioception) can leave us feeling distant, disconnected, frozen, or unskilled with taking embodied action.
The goal is not to be the most aware person in the world.
The goal is to build our capacity for these types of awareness so we can stay present to reality without becoming overwhelmed by it.
Practices for Becoming More Aware
Below is a list of five practices I recommend for developing your capacity in these three forms of sensory awareness. This is absolutely not an end-all-be-all list, but I think it’s a great place to start.
Body scans
Mindful walking
Resistance training
Final Reflection
If awareness is one of our foundational capacities for navigating crisis and conflict, then sensory awareness may be one of its most practical and vital expressions.
The question we face isn't just conceptual and cognitive: "What do I think about what's happening?"
It's more specific and more broad at the same time:
What am I noticing inside myself?
What am I noticing around me?
How am I moving in the midst of it?
The more skillfully we learn to work with our bodies, the more capacity we may have to stay engaged with the world without burning out or giving up.
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