Do you know your 8th sense?

If you are a dinosaur like me, you probably learnt in school that we have 5 senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch.

Nowadays though, scientists agree that we have a few more than that (between 8 and 23, depending on who you ask), some of which being more turned inwards.

One of them is called interoception: the ability to perceive internal signals. Your heart rate, the tightness in your chest, the knot in your stomach, the heaviness behind your eyes. It's the sense that tells you something's off before your thinking brain has caught up.

Research by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio showed that emotions don't only happen inside our heads, they have a physical signature. For example, anxiety tightens the chest, anger clenches the jaw, joy creates a lightness in the torso, etc.

If you've lost the ability to read those signals clearly, it becomes much harder to regulate your emotions, because you're working with incomplete information.

The problem is that modern life trains us to ignore the body. We spend hours sitting in front of screens, and the brain learns to filter out physical signals because they feel like distractions. Over time, we stop noticing tension until it becomes pain, and we stop noticing fatigue until it becomes exhaustion.

A practice I LOVE to recalibrate this sense is the body scan. It's a kind of meditation, but the goal isn't to relax (though that often happens). It is to train attention: noticing our sensations without judging, observing them without trying to fix them. And like any skill, it gets sharper when we do it regularly.

If you'd like to give it a try, I recorded this short practice. Let me know how it goes :)

Yoga Nidra - Body Scan

And some personal news: I have now moved back to France! Tesla, Crapsy and myself are doing great, just recovering from these very intense weeks.

If all goes well, I should be able to open the doors to Yoga with Clem very soon, entirely online this time! I have very exciting projects in mind, but for now, I'm following my own advice and taking a breather :)

Take care,

Clem

Yoga with Clem

La Madeleine, France