Interoception or Yinteroception? Moving towards Trauma-Yinformed Teaching.
Interoceptive awareness, defined as simply as possible, is our capacity to sense ourselves and know how we ‘feel’. In contrast to the more commonly-referenced proprioception which refers to our awareness of our bodies in space, interoception has to do with our bodies’ internal landscape. The immediate significance of this for teachers on their 100 hour yin training journey is that it is through befriending our internal landscape that we will learn to heal any trauma there. The bigger picture suggest that the effects of enhanced interoception are even more far-reaching; greater emotional literacy, increased confidence in who you are and what you want, and an altogether more robust connection to your intuition and inner knowing.
Are you feeling better, or are you getting better at feeling?
Hopefully, from your very first yin practice, if you were taught by a functionally trained teacher, your attention would have been brought to a target area with the invitation to sense that area. In doing so, you started to practise interoception, and have likely continued to do so for some time.
Paying attention to our body changes the experience we are having and our perception of the body, which in turn changes us. We can only have a self if the self has something to perceive. Every time you feel into a 7 out of 10 in your right butt cheek, you are strengthening your sense of self. As you improve your sense of self, you get clearer about what is meaningful for you. Put very simply, if you know how you feel, you have a better sense of who you are.
The majority of yoga students start with yang, so the chances are that when they come to our classes they will have had ample opportunities to develop their proprioception. However, in our western culture, where extroversion is overtly lauded over introversion, and a pervasive suspicion around silence dominates, spaces where we can practise and develop interoception are really few and far between.
Yinteroception?
There are so many ways that we practise and enhance our interoceptive awareness in yin that it seems only right to call it yinteroception. I sometimes wonder if the yin practice wasn’t invented with the purpose of enhancing our ability to sense ourselves better. We slow down, we turn the lens inwards, we find stillness, we stay in stillness, we inhabit our bodies, we notice, we observe, we notice, we stay, we feel. ‘To feel’ becomes the verb, the practice, the moment-by-moment choice we make to pay attention.
Functional yin teaching develops interoception by inviting students to observe, identify and differentiate between their diverse internal signals. It builds what Sarah Powers calls ‘body-based consciousness’. We have time to linger longer in the shapes, so we can tune into the variety of sensations that arise. We get better at feeling when we compare sides in asymmetrical poses like Bananasana, when we breathe into an area (‘feel the breath in the space between the shoulderblades’), when we use the numbers out of 10 to differentiate between the strongest sensation and the most subtle, and when we sense the tingling or qi flow and prana shifting and changing form in the body in rebound.
You will notice that all of these above inquiries depend on the invitation coming in the form of questions from the teacher, and so our language and verbal cueing take on an incredibly important role. We cannot just randomly tell our students to notice without suggesting something to notice. There has to be an object of awareness and, more of the time, we need to make that object very clear. Every time we as teachers use some iteration of noticing a feeling, we can directly bring up the practice of interoception.
Yin as a trauma access practice
People who suffer from chronic stress, pain or trauma often have difficulty sensing their bodies. They do not pay attention to the signals in the inner landscape. They may have long ago learned to dissociate, and they are challenged when it comes to deciphering what they are feeling emotionally.
Yin has great potential to be the access practice to help people reconnect with their ability to feel in the first place. As our inner listening to our inner landscape improves, we might encounter experiences which trigger. The healing is in the feeling. It is absolutely bound in our ability to feel. And everything that we can do as teachers to cultivate and nurture our students’ ability to feel should be central to our language and our intention.
“Hold to the truth you make every day with your own body, don’t hide your face away”
The practice against which we have no defences
Part III culminates in the practice and teaching of true yin yoga therapy - the integration, the feeling, the healing. It is where we are empowered, and empower others to do the work. Yin might just be the birthplace of our embodied and integrated healing, and learning not to turn our faces away from the aspects of our experience which challenge us, might be the ultimate indication of our progress along this path of integration: we are only as free as our ability to let things be. It might sometimes confound us with its simultaneous nuance and force, but between worlds it overspills, yin really is the bridge. And as we take just the final step towards embodying this understanding, we may just be completely redefining how history will remember it.
I’m so thrilled that you are part of this journey with me.
