How To Care For Your Body While Working A Desk Job: Part 2

Or: "The Physical Sensations in Your Body Mean Legible Things That Point To Health"

Hi, I want to see this problem resolved more than I want to gatekeep this class, so I’m posting this transcript for free. If you’d like to see a video version or simply to support my work (<3) you can purchase that here.

This is part 2, the post where I talk about the solutions. For part 1, click here.

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Solutions

That’s my general tour of what we’re up against when it comes to desk work! Now let’s do a deep dive on the antidotes, and the ways we can stay healthy. What would we need to do for somatically good computer use?

Interoception

We’ve already discussed my first solution, but now we’ll do a more in-depth look at the concept of - interoception!

Interoception is our ability to feel our body’s internal physical sensations at positions localized in space. So, common interoceptive signals include: hunger! Or that you’re thirsty. Or maybe you feel a warm wave of joy spread through your chest when seeing someone you love. Or, perhaps all too common, your main bodily sensation is pain.

Importantly, interoception is not a fixed capacity; it’s not something that’s you’re allocated at birth and then you have only that amount of interoception forever. It’s a skill. Or, it’s sort of like a muscle. Meaning that practicing interoception could take you from having not that much of it to plenty of it.

Five years ago I had very little interoceptive fluency. Now I can tell things like “oh, my right side sacroiliac joint is meaningfully more gummed up than the left.” (SI joints are in the back of the hip.) Or, if I tune in, I can feel my blood vessels pulsing along to my heartbeat all the way down in my feet.

So, interoception is a subtype of tactile sensitivity, and before I learned bodywork I had no idea how high the ceiling on tactile sensitivity actually was. I thought that what I felt then, was all that there was to feel. Now I can essentially echolocate to stuck spots in people’s bodies by tugging on their web of fascia, from almost anywhere else on their body! And I have teachers that can put their hands casually on your sternum, and detect that “the sphincter between your gallbladder and small intestine is tighter than it should be” and that’s interfering with your digestion.

A takeaway here: tactile sensitivity is trainable, and also the ceiling is really high!

And I say this for awareness, not obligation. You probably don’t need the same amount of tactile sensing as a tactile sensing professional. And you probably won’t need to train anywhere near as much as I did to stay healthy.

But it’s such an interesting inquiry - it’s a world that I didn’t realize existed back when I was a software engineer, but now I see it as the missing piece to so much physical health.

Bringing Our Attention Back Into Our Body

One level of calling our attention back to our body is simply intending to. Simply realizing it’s a conscious move we can do. Right now, before we do anything else, do you feel sensations in your body? Like, any at all. The contact between you and whatever you’re standing or sitting on. Maybe you do have a slight muscle ache, or there’s a pull between one side of your head and your shoulder. Maybe your gut feels satisfied with whatever you ate for lunch. 

Do a general scan of your entire 3D structure. What are the top two physical sensations you notice?

That’s the super rudimentary baseline of where you are. But, often the mental checking and body scan didn’t cut it for me. Back when I was studying math I’d get so outside myself, transfixed on a math problem, that pulling my attention off that to check in with the 3D world felt like real effort - like sludgy or rusty or creaky. Or maybe it was simply hard to get a signal and there wasn’t much going on from my body. Or my body-map didn’t even feel like a 3D body at all, and it was hard to get a signal! It was all so murky in there.

In cases like that, we can do movements! 

Put another way - without tactile sensory input, it’s easy to forget that you exist. So, we can add back in some tactile sensory input, to get a clearer signal on our bodies. Let’s do an exercise to explore this. 

EXERCISE: 

• Change nothing about your posture, and simply pay attention.

• What’s your inner landscape like? Hang out with it.

• Now do some fast scrubbing of your hands over every surface of your body. The point here is to touch every last bit of your surface area. Pressure doesn’t matter: this is for you. Find a pressure you like and stick with it, you get to make this good for you.

• Pass your hands over ALL your surface area. Experience the sensation of it. Even scrub your ears. Underside of the jaw. Bottoms of your feet.

Did those two experiences feel different? If you’re anything like me, sometimes with the first one you start straining to “get present,” and it might accidentally be uncomfortable or effortful. With the second one, I basically get present for free, because I experience all the sensations and they naturally draw my attention to my body without my forcing it.

Think about how that felt for you. For variation, I’ll introduce another way too - we did scrubbing, but we can also do patting, or impact, or tapping. Again, all over the body. Do some free exploring: pat all over body. This is good for circulation - which we’ll talk about in the section on movement variety, later - and for getting your attention back in your body! I’ll do this when I’m feeling really attentionally far away and need some intensity to get myself hearing my body again.

Some notes on this practice of, "Where is our attention?” “Does it include our body or not?”

Ideally our attention would include our body the vast majority of the time. Or, when we left, we’d be able to relatively easily come back, and at least we’d make conscious choices about leaving and staying. There’s eventually a skill you can develop where your body is more ambiently here and part of the field, rather than complete nonexistence and complete external focus. But, in any job, it’s normal to get wrapped up in things, and even without other movement or action steps at all, the simple act of getting our attention back in our body is already plenty helpful.

I hypothesize this is why some meditators can sit still for so long without getting nearly as pained as the average desk jobber. Because the whole point of many styles of meditation is to experience the body, so they’re making subtle subconscious postural microadjustments the whole time, and also the attention itself has a protective effect. It keeps metabolism humming along. 

Disclaimer

Ok, so now we can hear our bodily signals! But, what do we do with them? The next piece is - they are information. Many of them want something for us, but they’re a nonverbal language so it can take a little bit to learn to read them and resolve them in realtime. 

And, running with this language metaphor - many of us were not taught that there’s signal in this tactile world, or that it can meaningfully point us towards health. Like, I used to think muscle aches were something that just happened randomly. And when we’re not in the habit of looking at that part of our potential sensory bandwidth, and cleaning up in there, if we look for the first time, we have no idea what we’re gonna find in there!

We all have wildly different starting places. Maybe there’s a whole bunch of interoceptive gunk in your body that nobody ever asked you to pay attention to. I was absolutely in this category. The first time I tuned into my body it was a whole onslaught of pain, both physical and emotional. 

And if you’re similar to how I was in the past - if your world of body sensations turns out to be extremely uncomfortable - please do not stay in there. Get in, get a read, get out. You’ve got all the information you need, no need to hurt yourself by hanging out in high anxiety or 8/10 chronic pain or whatever else might be in there. I’m a huge proponent of healthy distraction: when you know you’re going in the right direction but also just need a break in the meantime.

But if your interoceptive world is like, medium comfortable or even nice, congrats! I want to acknowledge the role that luck plays in this. If we haven’t consciously learned to steer the ship but our ship is still sailing relatively smoothly, that is a gift. When we make interoception a deliberate practice we can keep that smooth sailing and be less vulnerable to slow drifts out of alignment.

Question for you to get a baseline - When you tune into your whole-body interoceptive landscape, where is it on a scale from “very painful” to “super comfortable, I could hang out in here all day”?

Interoceptive Literacy & Navigating Towards Health

Now the question is: we have interoception, what do we do with it?

My quick answer is - we steer. We take our body sensations seriously, and what makes them feel worse versus better, and we do more of the stuff that makes them feel better and less of the stuff that makes them feel worse! This, in essence, is How To Care For Your Body While Working A Desk Job. 

You’ll notice that there’s a difference from what the average ergonomics department recommends as opposed to what I recommend. I asked a friend to read their ergonomics report, and the report included this picture:

This is the same picture they send to everyone! And the missed opportunity I see here is that not everyone can just do this and they’re immediately healthy. Most people already have some set of underlying bodily restrictions that their interoception can tell them about. In these cases, the best thing for their structure in the moment won’t necessarily look like that chart. For example, if someone has rounded-forward shoulders due to contracted pec muscles - which, after a history of desk work, is a lot of people - simply forcing the shoulders back will also push the ribcage too far forward, create compensation patterns, and lead to instability in the spine and lower back. If this is you, you’ll be able to tell because molding yourself to this template of “good posture” will still feel like an uncomfortable effort or straining in certain places. 

People with restrictions might need any of a whole host of oddly-shaped interventions and remediations. And the funny thing is - once those are addressed, this shape of good posture tends to arise naturally. But the posture itself is the externally visible outcome of the internal process.

This doesn’t describe the importance of movement variety, and we’ll dig more into that later. But to build on this chart: what does the felt experience of sustainable good posture feel like from the inside, if your body is relatively free of restriction?

What Health Interocepts As - What Does Health “Feel” Like?

Good posture should not feel like straining or effort. It’s more about diffuse even muscle tone across all muscles. It’s a sense of readiness and range to be in any position; a simultaneous combination of ease and stability. Ease and stability both increase in tandem and that’s very important - increasing one without the other is a sign that something’s off track.

We’ve all heard to push our shoulders back, but a thing I’ve pieced together in my studies is that, if we’re going to aim for a feeling, the feeling to aim for is more “length” than “opening.” Feel like your head is rising from the top as if hung by a string, and then the rest of your structure is naturally falling into place underneath. There’s that ease-and-stability piece.

In this picture, gravity is a friend, not something to fight. It’s welcome structure to sprout up inside of. It holds you up a little bit, and you’re able to fluidly shift to where you want to go. Gravity is like a comfortable weighed blanket or a constant hug, not a force to strain against. If there’s strain, that’s an indication of the structural-muscular system being off-axis somehow, and a good indicator for more intensive attention or seeing a bodyworker.

Let’s do a quick interoceptive check. Stand up and gently shift your weight between your two feet. Look for a smooth pour of gravity easily between them all the way up from your feet to your head. Not in fits and starts, and not places where the motion or signal “catches” or gets lost. Any of those places are restrictions that could be worked out somehow.

Alright, sit back down. 

Here are a few other cues I’ve accumulated of what sustainable postural health feels like from the inside:

A quote from this article.

So this is actually about a friend of mine working with a very good holistic metabolic provider, more about diet and lifestyle, but I’m putting it here to show the broader cultural trend. With respect to posture, there’s a lot of cultural acceptance of vague symptoms of “aging” that actually hide correctable things that we don’t need to accept. He puts it so colorfully and I’ll let you all read that for a second. 

Imagine this but also applied to posture. I’m linking it because as you go on the interoception journey, you might also start noticing cues from various food you eat. That’s outside the scope of this class but, it is something that might happen.

My highlight here is: by default, days feel clean, clear, energetic, with no major gut problems or vague ‘aging’ symptoms. When those symptoms come back, it’s for legible and temporary reasons.

Another teacher of mine talks more about something she calls “full body presence:” it really is possible to sensorily inhabit all the corners of your body, and to have them feel like a comfortable home for you, from which you meet the rest of the world. She contrasts it to “disrupted body presence.” Something I see in my bodywork practice all the time is, people whose attention simply doesn’t reach part of their body. In my case, I didn’t really feel my legs or pelvis until a year ago, so I spent a lot more time dancing and now they’re online! Bringing them back in has helpful attentional-protective effects on my longterm health.

One more real world example. Heidi Priebe, who’s now a therapist, used to have a lot of emotional health challenges herself. She’d go to work and do all these things that she then felt she had to recover from, after. But now that she’s cleaned up some of the initial issues, and also adapted her life to be a better fit for her - she feels like she’s fully centered in her life most of the time. There aren’t these big cycles of expenditure and recovery. She’s showing up sustainably, so there’s nothing to recover from. 

With interoception and movement, that’s what I want for your posture! Bring more movement in, interspersed throughout the day, and then check that it’s actually landing as a ‘yes’ in your own felt experience of your body. Do the recovery along the way, rather than piling it up for later.

Oh and, last thing - regarding full-body presence, what I have now is a sense of where my body’s healthy center is, and then I track deviations from that, and I do movement or relaxing or eat or whatever it is I need to do, so that I reliably return to center. That’s been a really helpful and straightforward structure to develop in my awareness - a felt sense of center - but again, five years ago I totally didn’t have it. 

So, having a felt sense of what centered health - posturally, emotionally, metabolically - feels like for your body is a great thing for longterm sustainability. 

Movement Variety

Now that we have interoception, here’s the part where we start using interoception to steer.

I’m thinking about it like this: the body sensations are like the letters on a page of a book. But before you learned to read, the letters are simply squiggles. From there we can develop literacy, which is the ability to cognitively know what the letters mean, and then there’s fluency, which is the ability to communicate in the language.

Interoceptive literacy - Ability to sense your body’s internal sensations and cognitively know what they mean.

Interoceptive fluency - Ability to consistently navigate your body’s interoceptive sensations towards health.

Interoceptive literacy would be me knowing that a particular cramp in my hand means, “Oh no! Overuse from typing, warning sign” and interoceptive fluency would be my automatic instinct to shake out my hand in a particular way that relieves the ache. Or maybe exploring a split keyboard that stops my hand positioning from being the uncomfortable one.

I actually don’t think that pure awareness, without the ability to understand it or act on it, is very helpful. It can even be overwhelming! So no need to build your raw interoception before building your literacy or fluency.

And, the thing with building those latter two is - it’s not instant. It’s a process that starts with you trying various things - whether it’s movements, or perhaps lifestyle changes like diet or schedule, or perhaps finding a bodyworker and trying a session with them. And then as you try these things, you check how they interoceptively land in your body. So I’m glad to be able to get you started on this now, because, while it’s a simple concept, the embodied journey will still take time and there’s no way around that. 

And I wanna underscore the impact of partnering with professionals about this. There’s a surprising amount of stuff resolvable through solo changes. But if you’re not used to interocepting, particular pains or sensations of pulling or pinching might simply be above your pay grade, and that’s what bodyworkers are professionals at resolving.

That said, your interoception WILL still help you choose a bodyworker if it comes to that. Because a lot of people ask me, “how do I know if it’s working?” when it comes to a particular health intervention. My answer is always “do you feel better?” And I mean, like, really obviously better. Not in a “mayybeeee” way. There exist practitioners that will super obviously help you feel better. Yet there are also many that won’t, and the state of things right now is that finding the right fit can actually be kind of a project. But interoception will still help you with that. 

Interoceptively-Led Movement - How Does This Part Of My Body Want To Move?  

Here’s a nice bridge between interoception and movement: interoception can literally drive movement. Let’s do an exercise.

EXERCISE:

• Can everybody scan their body and pick a mildly tense spot?

• Call it up in your awareness.

• Ask, either verbally or nonverbally, “how does this spot want to move?”

• Experiment with it and do that motion. Allow the tense spot to generate the motion and, it might be surprising.

• Whether you get a signal or you don’t, try various movements top-down and query that spot for a response. The ideal is if you can feel the spot itself driving the movement, but it may not happen this time.

• Feel into this exercise for about 60 seconds.

What are your main takeaways? This is something you can get more advanced at, but I’m just seeding it in your awareness for now.

When I say that this class is bodycare 101, and it’s an orientation to the field, this section on movement variety is the main place where I feel that. There are SO many movement practices out there. They’re so deep. Go out and try them, build your movement vocabulary. Many of them take longer than one sitting to explain, let alone learn. See which ones land and don’t land for you. Trust that internal feeling of knowing what works.

I’m going to talk about two more kinds of movement - movements for muscles, and movements for fascia - but please be aware that this is an incomplete total list. Practice interoceptively checking in with yourself. Do you feel better after the movement than you did before? If better, great, soak that up.

Movement For Muscles 

One thing to know about movement for muscular health: muscles are meant to contract and relax, and hitting the bottom of the muscular ‘off’ response is important. Sustained contractions - muscles that are “always slightly on” - cause muscle knots, and also that postural adaptation and skew I talked about earlier. We can create muscular relaxation through movement; the definition of movement is that when we move, opposing muscle groups contract and relax. So if we’re stationary, what’s on is just on, and what’s off is just off. But via movement variety, all the muscles get to take turns to be ‘on’ and to be ‘off’.

The sustained contraction that comes from holding an off-center posture for long periods of time - for example, in desk work - is something to watch out for. If I hold out my arm to type, we’ll notice that the muscles that create this posture are “subtly on the whole time.” So, mostly pectoralis major and the anterior deltoid. This sustained contraction is a known source of muscle knots. It’s ‘hitting the bottom of the muscular relaxation response’ that clears those muscles of the warning signs of achiness and stiffness, and prevents the muscle knots from forming.

Good news, muscle knots can be worked out by a skilled massage therapist or bodyworker. But prevention is super easy too.

In the body’s timeline, 7 hours a day is a LONG time to be in sustained muscular contraction. We need a lot more relaxation interspersed through this. But quick shakes, interspersed when you feel that achiness creep in - for me this is often 10 or 20 minutes while typing - go a long way to keeping muscles clear.

Summary: muscles are meant to contract and relax, and hitting the bottom of the muscular ‘off’ response is important. Sustained contractions - muscles that are “always slightly on” - cause muscle knots, and also that postural adaptation and skew I talked about earlier. We can create muscular relaxation through movement, because the definition of movement is that when we move, opposing muscle groups contract and relax. So if we’re stationary, what’s on is just on, and what’s off is just off. But via movement variety, all the muscles get to take turns to be ‘on’ and to be ‘off’.

Shaking is exceptionally good for helping muscles get all the way through their full relaxation, because it introduces outside momentum! And that momentum gives the muscles more of a break, because suddenly they’re not the only drivers of the movement. 

Let’s try a quick movement for our muscles:

• Shake your arms so that all the muscles in there get a turn to relax

• Or pick another spot: I really like leg shakes, but pick a large area of your body that you can shake on several different axes.

How does that feel? What do you notice about your muscles?

Movement for Fascia

Now that we’ve talked about movements for muscles, let’s get into movements for fascia. What is fascia? What is fascia? Honestly it’s easier to feel than explain, but let’s try anyway. Fascia is connective tissue that wraps and suspends all aspects of your body - muscles, skin, organs, and bones. There’s fascia around every system. If you’ve heard the term “myofascial system”, that’s why. It’s because fascia gives muscles form, like the balloon around a water balloon, so separating fascia from muscles doesn’t make much sense. 

Fascia is the texture of extremely elastic or strong flexible saran wrap. It’s continuous all through your body - one view of the body is not that fascia wraps muscles, but that fascia splits to allow muscles to exist inside it.

And, these saran wrap sheets of fascia - and the more spiderwebby stuff that houses the lymphatic and fat layers of your body - are supposed to be hydrated enough to smoothly glide over one another.

Awkwardly, when they don’t move, the layers of fascia grow cross-links between one another. These cross-links stiffen the tissue and makes it harder for the layers to glide over one another and for water to get in. This happens while you sleep, so often it’s part of your morning stiffness!

Luckily these cross links can be cleared with gentle movement if you catch them early. Alas, with prolonged stationariness, the cross-links compound so much that there can be serious loss of range of motion. This starts a feedback loop, leading to even less motion and more stiffness. In the long run the sheets can get so stuck together as to require a really advanced myofascial bodyworker to de-adhere them. Hopefully we don’t want it to get to that point. Keep your fascia lubricated and gliding smoothly by moving often!

There are entire 90 minute dance classes on simply moving from the awareness of your fascia. It’s hard to do in one sitting, but try and sway, moving and fluidly. Interoceptively, do you have a sense of ‘elasticity’ inside your body? That sensation is fascia. Try moving from that.

Go Out And Explore

So that’s two specific movement explorations for our desk job problems. Now here’s my movement tips & tricks grab bag.

Let’s talk specifically about countermovements. These are the offsetting positions to the ones you are most commonly in. So, one of these I do all the time is to stretch my pecs after typing. 

Another type of movement is a bit sillier. One of my teachers says that we need to get used to what she calls “socially unacceptable movements.” On her work breaks every 30 minutes, she gets up and rolls around on one of those exercise balls. Or literally puts on music and dances. A friend of hers, who’s also a bodyworker, says - go lift your chair over your head to turn on your big muscle groups, and then get back to work. 

That’s a thing you could do that I would totally encourage. But that said, regarding “getting used to socially unacceptable movement” - no need to be super public about it. You can go find a bathroom and do this in private, or just in a quite corner no one goes in. Though if you want to be public I totally encourage it!

If Pomodoros or taking breaks every 30m feels abrupt, bring the movement in as you’re working. Change positions. Shake out your arm for 10 seconds while you’re still typing and thinking, without breaking your flow.

Another overarching principle I use to organize movement is - now, after the practice I’ve put in, I’ve built an interoceptive sense of what healthy center feels like, and I can tell when I’m off it. When I am, I do whatever I need to do to make sure to get back on it, which can be a lot of shaking or even jumping around. So this sense of - tracking center. Tracking deviations from center, and moving to clear those.

A few inspirations!

Image source from this blog post of his

Do you know Stephen Wolfram? He’s big in the computer science and physics worlds. He’s clearly experimented to find a setup that works for him - he has a laptop platform that straps to his shoulders, and will walk around outside with it. As a quote from his blog here:

“Whenever the weather’s been good—I’ve tried to spend a couple of hours of each day walking outside like this.

I seem to have enough peripheral vision—or perhaps I’ve just been walking in “simple enough” environments—that I haven’t tripped, even when I’m not consciously paying attention.”

Beyond standing or walking desks: there’s a physical therapist making something he calls the limber desk, which is a standing desk that goes all the way to the floor, but also has extra encouragement for you to use it in a variety of positions. The great thing about it isn’t the particular shapes of the desk, but the flexibility that it has to meet you wherever your felt sense of freedom is at. He says the great thing about this desk is it gives you “10 posture options, rather than 2.”

He has a great catchphrase, “the best posture is the next posture.” If you’ve heard of sitting on exercise balls to work, it’s the same principle - more variety of movement in general equals more health. I personally do a lot of work kneeling.

The limber desk

That’s the end of my tips & tricks for now, but overall - the world of movement variety is very deep! This is only a brief intro.

Iteration: Develop Your Inner Compass

To wrap it all up, what do interoception and movement variety look like when they’re supporting your health in an ongoing way over time?

They look like something I call “building your inner compass.”

And, the only reason I’m calling this your “inner compass” is, because as far as I’m aware there’s not a clear scientific term for it yet. But I am actually referring to something rigorous and precise. By “inner compass” in this case, I mean the sum total of your subconscious bodily motor and metabolic processes. So, the same thing that keeps you breathing, or that digests your food without you actively thinking about it - or, that currently might guide you into slouching at your desk without your conscious mind noticing it either. That inner compass is deliberately trainable, and one of the best investments you can give yourself is investing in those self-regulatory subconscious body processes so that the healthy thing becomes the thing that happens by default. 

The way towards this is to calibrate. To pay continued attention over time. It’s a simple principle - the journey is the embodied enactment of it. Unfortunately there’s not much shortcut to this - but by paying attention to your body, you don’t even need to involve your conscious mind, you’ll simply start noticing you make clearer choices over time. Turns out a particular twist in your stomach means you don’t want to eat tuna salad anymore; and you found this out by noticing your stomach, then eating the tuna salad, and noticing that it got worse. And this memory is stored in your body and decreases your future choice of eating tuna salad without you consciously having to think about it.

Your body sensations aren’t random TV static - they do, over time, aggregate into coherent guidance that steers you well and takes care of you. But, they do that when they’re well-calibrated, and once you’ve put some skill into reading and surfing them. 

So for any given roomful of people, our body signals might not be calibrated by default. When our attention is all outside of us, our body signals can get strange and messy and incoherent, and that’s normal. But another piece of how to calibrate and smooth these signals out is - it’s important to actually let in the experience of what you like. Spend time enjoying the movements that you like. Inviting that enjoyment to grow, and feel bigger, and fill your present experience. Really milk it. This imprints it into your subconscious, so your future sensory signals send you towards more of what you want - rather than away from what you don’t want, which can keep cycling and looping. 

Remember to experience the felt sense of feeling better. This is a way of “saving to disk” what you want your body to aim for.

That said. Sometimes we cannot find a good thing. You may not always know what your knee pain might want. In that case, the way to build your inner compass is to try a whole variety of things - which can absolutely include seeing professionals - and feel what feels better, and what doesn’t. The more you meet these initially illegible signals with variety, the better-calibrated your intuition will get, overall! 

So, in general, pay attention to what feels good, let in the feeling of feeling good (very important, don’t skip that step) and do more of what you like, EVEN IF it’s something you’ve never heard of before. If your key to feeling better in desk work is to, I don’t know, notice a craving of yours to keep a jar of nutmeg on your desk, and smell it whenever you’re feeling stressed - and you notice your body really likes that, that you relax and feel pain-free and all that, and it’s a reliable body ‘yes’ for you - congrats! You’re doing it, you’re following your inner compass.

Especially if you haven’t heard of the thing you’re doing before, and it’s working for you, this is extra important! This is how new science is made, we’re just cutting out the middleman. The field of physical health science is still ultimately asking people for their subjective qualitative experience, and I assure you, there are enough people with random anatomical differences - for example, different rates of muscle repair - that mean that one person could possibly pull off slouching for hours a day as long as they do a single backbend, and another person could do 10 backbends and still be messed up by 20 minutes of slouching. So generic rules like “don’t slouch” are not so helpful. Follow your inner compass, don’t wait for the state of the art of physical therapy to catch up. If you pull off the following your inner compass thing, you’ll become a huge boon to the field of physical health because we’ll want to interview you about what you did to get healthy, and adjust our methods accordingly.

Don’t expect or try to heal it all at once. It might be a project and it might take time. Body tissues have certain paces they go at, that differ per body tissue and per type of restriction. This can get plenty complex, so I’m just giving you the nugget that - different body tissues have their own pace. Resolving some of these things might happen instantly, OR it might be more like growing a plant. Where you plant a seed, and you water it day by day, and over time you have a seven-foot-tall sunflower, but it took a while, and there was no way to speed it up because it’s a natural process with its own timelines. So long as you’re paying consistent interoceptive attention over time, you can see which way things are trending, and intervene when needed, and that’s plenty to support your health over time.

And, regarding it maybe taking a while - I hope that reads as a relief, rather than a disappointment. Because interoception is basically free, and, the time will pass anyway. So it’s with interoception that the healing can happen basically for free over a long period of time. It can be a pretty “set it and forget it and wake up 6 months later and things are meaningfully better” sort of thing, and it’s calibrating your somatic inner compass that helps it go like that. 

Or, maybe not even “set it and forget it.” Now that you know how to luxuriate in the felt sense of things feeling better, it’s more like - set it, and all your days can be just slightly better than they were before, maybe 1% or 2%, and over time those percentages add up and you’re in a much different spot than you were before.

Something to know if you choose to work with practitioners - bodyworkers, physical therapists, acupuncturists, doctors, whatever. People often ask me what kind of bodywork would be a good fit for them, and I say that the quality is a lot more dependent on the practitioner than the modality. There are absolutely incredible massage therapists who have three kids and do standard Swedish spa massage, and even work at a local spa because they don’t want to do marketing. But then one of their coworkers might be a terrible match for you, and it’s honestly pretty illegible. So trust your sense of “does this actually feel like it’s helping me.” Even highly-trained practitioners can still be incorrect. Don’t give away your sense of discernment to them. One weird thing I found in the wellness field is  that 10 people will say healing something like, say, Bell’s Palsy, is impossible, and then I meet an 11th who’s been doing it for years. (In this case it’s an acupuncturist in New Jersey who heals Bell’s Palsy.) It’s kind of the wild west out there, but also real wellness is possible, so you really do need to keep your inner compass with you to navigate towards it.

The cool thing about using interoception as your body-care guide is you don’t need an infinite amount of it. You only need enough interoception to tell which way things are trending, so you can develop your own routine that keeps them trending better or stable. 

Sure there’s infinite amounts of interoception you could grow. Maybe you pick it up as a hobby. I like it enough to hone interoception and tactile sensitivity as my entire job. But you don’t need to. What I want for you is to grow enough interoception that you can tell the general state of things in your body, and what helps them, and what doesn’t help them, so eventually you can try different things and, over time get yourself on a better and better felt trajectory. Trending upwards, and healthier, in a known way, because you’re present and tracking it. 

I have all plenty of stories of the magic power of high tactile sensitivity;  but I want you to grow the amount of interoception that keeps your health on track, and frees you up to do whatever it is you care most about.

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The End

That’s the end of the class! Though, it’s actively in development, so please comment and let me know what resonated and what questions you still have <3

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Epilogue - when I taught this live, people were immediately curious for more follow-up resources, so here I’ll include the email I sent out to them after.

Follow-Up Resources

​Hi all, thanks for reading! 

If you are curious about ways to further your interoceptive journey, I am in the process of arranging a collaboration with an Alexander Technique specialist, who can give a deep dive of kinesthetic experiences for feeling into good posture. 

Stay tuned for more information on this class!

In the meantime, I’ve compiled a list of additional resources that you can check out.​

​Keywords & Modalities To Look At:

• ​Tactile Anatomy: taught by my teacher Myles! Here’s an example story of what it’s like: https://x.com/relic_radiation/status/1833237716647219319

• Dance - Axis Syllabus, Feldenkrais, Zero Forms, contact improv (varies depending on the teacher), "natural movement" (Ido Portal is a common name), Body-Mind Centering

• Interoceptive Posture - Alexander Technique

​Books:

• 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back - Esther Gokhale (I’ve heard good things! but have not personally read it)​

• Full Body Presence - Suzanne Scurlock

• ​Freebody - Cat Matlock (note, this focuses a lot on 'trigger points' which are not part of my own practice, bodyworkers have lots of different lenses) 

​Local places:

• ​SF Movement Group (appears they have closed but you could probably write them for other recommendations) https://sfmovementgroup.com/

• ​Emeryville: Athletic Playground https://www.tapgym.com/

• ​Berkeley: the Finnish Hall for contact improv. the classes Tu/Th are all-levels, and when you come in they usually have lots of flyers of additional weekend workshops: https://www.finnishhall.org/regular-classes-meetings-copy

• ​Berkeley: The Alembic, has occasional movement programming including Zero Forms on Monday & Thursday https://berkeleyalembic.org

• ​There's a "Natural Movement" meetup in Berkeley every Saturday! If this interests you write me and I can get you connected

​Online teachers I like:

• ​Yoga, but with deep anatomical knowledge https://bexnaj.yoga/allclasses

• ​Alexander Technique, though maybe not so postural https://expandingawareness.org/

• ​For exploring the emotional side of the mind-body connection: https://www.breakthroughcircle.com/contact-james

​All best,

​Elena