Connecting to Your Wisdom Body: Yoga as a Gateway to Interoception and Embodied Living

We spend the first many years of life developing our cognitive faculties. From kindergarten thru college, almost all of the learning we are exposed to focuses on building the mental and intellectual faculties needed for modern living.

But have you ever noticed that there is another level of knowing? A level of knowing tied primarily to bodily sensations and to those elusive, intuitive hunches we often refer to as ‘gut feelings?’

In this online course, Cynthia Price, a body-psychotherapist and founder of the Center for Mindful Body Awareness, will guide us into a deeper understanding of the importance of connecting with the body’s inner wisdom to build greater interoception and embodiment.

The benefits of building interoception are wide-reaching. Interoception enables us to connect with the bodily sensations that inform us of what the body needs at any given moment. For example, the ability to know when we have eaten enough or when the body needs to move because we’ve been sitting too long is based on interoceptive awareness.

But interoception also enables us to connect with the bodily sensations that underlie mood and emotions. It also opens the door to a more intuitive approach to living by getting us in touch with the subtle hunches or gut feelings that offers a deeper level of guidance for our lives.

Cynthia Price developed the approach Mindful Awareness in Body-oriented Therapy (MABT) during her 20 years of practice as a bodyworker and body-psychotherapist. During this time, she worked extensively with individuals who were disconnected from their bodies due to stress, trauma, and pain.

“With body disconnection, people are typically not fully aware of their feelings, the links between physical and emotional sensations, and how to engage in self-care and regulation in response to stress and emotional triggers,” notes Cynthia. “The MABT approach was developed to facilitate health and healing by promoting the capacity to attend to and process somatic awareness and experiences.”

The ability to manage daily stressors and to engage in self-care of chronic conditions is greatly enhanced with body awareness, Cynthia notes. It enables you to better listen to and attend to bodily cues about your physical and emotional well-being.

Learning to engage in interoceptive awareness may be unfamiliar to beginning yoga students, and it can be challenging even for more experienced practitioners of yoga.

However, when taught and practiced in the right way, yoga can be an important gateway to building greater interoceptive awareness. Thus, learning how to facilitate and guide interoceptive awareness when teaching yoga is an important skill.

In this course (two lectures and yoga practice), Cynthia Price will discuss how to bring interoceptive awareness into your teaching and practice, and show how research links interoception to greater levels of well-being. Included will be a practical focus derived from many years of clinical care and research and drawing on the MABT approach.

What You Will Learn:

• The different aspects of interoceptive awareness and how they relate to critical components of teaching interoceptive awareness within the context of yoga.
• How to identify the common challenges people have when trying to access and engage in mindfully attending to the body (i.e., engaging in interoceptive awareness).
• What we know about how yoga practice can be a tool for building greater interception and body awareness.
• How to identify the common challenges people have when trying to access and engage in mindfully attending to the body (i.e., engaging in interoceptive awareness).
• What research tells us about how interoceptive awareness contributes to health and well-being.
• Strategies you can use to engage and facilitate interoceptive awareness when teaching or practicing yoga.