Iterated Insights

Last night, I engaged in a prolonged session of interoception, focusing on the visceral sensations in my gut, voicebox, and chest. I did my best to pay concerted, sustained attention to the parts inside me that ached and felt uncomfortable. These are the tense, overworked muscles and soft tissues that quietly drive anxiety and negative emotions.

We often treat attention as a passive camera, a way to simply record what is happening. But my experience confirmed for me that attention is actually an active, remedial agent. Without lifting a finger, without any instruments, simply staying with the inflamed, aching areas helped bring them to peace. It felt as if I suddenly had physical access with my hands to the interior of my body, massaging the very tissues that keep negative psychological loops running.

The Scotoma of Aversion

Why do we rarely do this? Because it hurts. When we turn our attention toward our internal turmoil, the immediate sensation is aversive. Most people have very little tolerance for this. The moment they notice the discomfort, they reflexively turn away. Over time, we develop a scotoma—a blind spot—for our own internal milieu.

This avoidance is a defense mechanism. Biologically, pain signals usually tell us to withdraw. But you cannot withdraw from your own viscera. So, instead of physical withdrawal, we engage in attentional withdrawal. We look away. We distract ourselves. We ignore the signal, leaving the inflammation and tension to fester in the background, driving anxiety and stress without our conscious permission.

Attention as a Surgical Instrument

Overcoming this scotoma requires effort. Focusing on the turmoil, imagining it in space and time, picturing it in the mind’s eye is difficult at first. The instinct is to recoil.

But after just a few seconds of sustained observation, the dynamic begins to change.

We do not need external tests or lab assays to detect this internal state. Our somatosensory abilities already have direct access. The communication is bi-directional. When we direct high-fidelity awareness toward these areas of tension, we are not just listening to the complaint; we are sending a signal of safety back to the tissue. It is a non-invasive form of surgery where the “scalpel” is nothing more than steady, unbroken concentration.

The Clenched Fist and the Shape of Pain

During this process, I found that the turmoil had a specific texture and shape. It was an object in my perceptual field. Visualizing this shape was critical.

It is analogous to looking at your own hand. If your fist is clenched tight, you can look at it, realize it is clenched, and simply stop clenching. You have the proprioceptive feedback and the motor control to release the tension. But inside the torso, we lack that visual feedback. The tension in the gut or chest stays “clenched” because we are not looking at it.

By using interoception to give that turmoil a shape—by essentially “looking” at the clenched fist of the viscera—we gain the ability to release it. We convert a subconscious physiological loop into a conscious one that we can regulate.

From Affect to Perception: The Mechanism of Granularity

A crucial detail of this experience was that the turmoil did not just fade away; it took on a specific texture and shape before it dissolved. This distinction is biologically significant. It represents a shift from affect to perception.

Affect is vague. It is a sweeping sense of badness or danger with no edges and no clear location. In that mode, the internal signal acts like a global alarm, hijacking the amygdala and triggering a systemic defense response. The message is simply: “Something is wrong,” and the whole system braces.

The moment we visualize it—when we give it a geometry, a temperature, a density in our mind’s eye—we force the brain to process it as specific sensory data rather than as an existential threat. This creates distance. We are no longer inside the turmoil; we are the observer looking at it.

At the neural level, this shift likely recruits the insular cortex to map the signal with higher fidelity, and invites the prefrontal areas to interpret it. The body’s raw alarm is translated into something more precise and less catastrophic. As the mapping improves, the “soft tissues” that drive negative psychological cycles can finally stand down.

The Brain Circuits Behind Interoceptive “Surgery”

We can sketch a rough neural story behind this internal surgery.

Signals from the viscera travel upward through small fibers into the spinal cord and brainstem. From there, they ascend to regions like the posterior insula, which builds a primary map of the body’s internal state. This map is then integrated in the mid and anterior insula, where bodily data merges with emotion, context, and prediction. The anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex read this map and decide what it means and what to do about it.

When we never look inside, the loop is dominated by bottom-up signals. The gut sends distress; the amygdala and brainstem translate that into anxiety, hypervigilance, and sympathetic arousal. The prefrontal cortex never fully unpacks the message; it just receives a general sense of threat and runs with it.

Sustained interoceptive attention flips that balance. When I hold my awareness on the aching gut or tight chest, I am engaging top-down control from prefrontal and cingulate regions. I am effectively asking the insula for a higher-resolution picture. The brain responds by sharpening the map. As the picture becomes clearer, the amygdala no longer needs to treat the signal as an undifferentiated emergency, and the autonomic system can shift out of full defensive mode.

Subjectively, it feels as if the turmoil “dissolves.” Underneath that experience is a re-weighting of circuits: more insula and prefrontal involvement, less amygdala and raw alarm. Interoceptive attention is not just a feeling exercise; it is a way of recruiting specific brain networks to reassess and down-regulate a chronic defense response.

A Simple Protocol for Interoceptive Rehabilitation

Because this process is so visceral, it helps to have a concrete way to do it. Here is the basic protocol I followed.

I start by sitting or lying somewhere quiet, with my breathing slow but natural. I do not try to force relaxation. Instead, I ask a simple question: Where in my body does it feel worst right now? I let the answer emerge without overthinking it. It is usually the gut, the chest, the throat, or some combination.

Once I have located the worst spot, I place my attention there as if I were resting my hand on it from the inside. I am not visualizing textbook organs. I am just noticing pressure, heat, tension, density. Then I try to give it a shape. Is it a knot, a stone, a clenched fist, a twisting rope? If my mind wanders, I gently bring it back to that shape.

I do not try to fix it directly. I do not argue with it or analyze it. I simply watch what it does. Sometimes it pulses, shifts, spreads, or contracts. Sometimes it stays frozen. Either way, I hold it in awareness for as long as I can, usually in stretches of a few minutes. If it becomes overwhelming, I widen my attention to include the whole body or the contact with the chair or bed, and then narrow back down when I can.

Over time, the texture usually changes. The shape softens, breaks apart, or moves. At some point I can feel a distinct moment when the body decides, “It is safe to let this go.” That is the release. Afterwards, I ask the question again: Where does it feel worst now? The hotspot often moves to a new location. Then I repeat the process with the new area. It feels like doing multiple sets in physical therapy, except the weight is awareness.

Starving the Reflex

This process does more than relax us; it disrupts the reverberating neural loops that maintain chronic stress. These physiological holding patterns rely on our lack of awareness to persist. They operate in the shadows of the subconscious, reinforcing themselves through automatic reflexes.

By holding these sensations in steady, non-judgmental attention, we “starve” the reflex. We interrupt the automatic reinforcement cycle that keeps the gut churning or the chest tight. The turmoil cannot survive direct, high-resolution scrutiny. It needs the scotoma to exist. When we remove the blind spot, the loop loses its momentum and dissolves.

Limits, Safety, and When to Get Help

There is an important caveat. Not all internal sensations are safe or wise to explore alone.

For people with a history of severe trauma, abuse, or panic, turning inward can initially amplify fear or dissociation. The body may be storing not just generalized stress but very specific traumatic imprints. In those cases, it is better to approach this work gradually, ideally with the help of a therapist or somatic practitioner who understands what interoceptive work can uncover.

Even without trauma, there are boundaries. Interoception is not a substitute for medical care. If pain is sharp, new, or accompanied by alarming symptoms, it deserves evaluation by a physician, not just an hour of meditation. The point is not to use attention to explain away legitimate warning signs, but to stop treating every chronic, poorly mapped discomfort as a life-or-death emergency.

Done wisely, this practice is not about forcing the body to feel better. It is about giving the nervous system enough information and enough safety that it can finally stop bracing against ghosts.

Rehabilitation, Not Just Relief

Ultimately, what I experienced felt like more than a momentary release; it felt like rehabilitation. Just as we rehabilitate an injured limb through targeted physical therapy, we can rehabilitate these internal areas through targeted attentional therapy.

The experience suggested that we have an innate, self-contained capacity for healing. We do not always need external tests to tell us what is happening inside. The machinery for diagnosis (interoception) and the machinery for cure (sustained concentration) are one and the same. We simply have to overcome our aversion to looking within.

Today, after spending about an hour doing this last night, I feel significantly better. The turmoil dissolved not because I fought it, and not because I ignored it, but because I examined it with the precision of a surgeon.

Healing is not always about adding something new to the system. Often, it is about removing the blinders and allowing our innate somatosensory loops to do what they were designed to do: communicate, regulate, and restore peace.

For more on these concepts, check out programpeace.com.

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