Your Brain's Secret Ally – The Power of Proprioception, Interoception, and Awareness
You Can't Heal What You Can't Feel
When I first started slowing down—really slowing down—I realized something strange: I wasn’t sure what I was feeling, but I realized I knew nothing about myself. I was completely out of touch with my body, breath and mind. I could not feel emotions, I blocked out aches and pains, I moved and breathed unconsciously, and my thoughts were constant- they were all over the place. I thought I had the answers, I thought I understood my body, I was completely wrong and I was overlooking the fine details, the actual language of the body. I realized that my inner awareness was mostly static.
I didn’t know where my ribs ended or if my breath was shallow. Where tension was, how I was supposed to move or breath. I couldn’t feel my feet, legs or my back unless they hurt and became fatigued, which, strangely, I realized was all the time? How could I not feel, yet experience fatigue and pain as normal? I dismissed these signals and considered it a normal feeling. I didn’t realize I was numbing myself and my body felt more like a vague outline rather than a living, breathing home.
And that’s when I started learning about two quiet superpowers:
Proprioception — your ability to sense where your body is in space.
Interoception — your ability to feel what’s happening inside your body.
Both are trainable. Both are essential. Both are often dulled by pain, trauma, stress, or fast-paced living.
And both are foundational to the Pneuma Yoga Method.
Proprioception: The Map of You
Proprioception is how you know your elbow is bent even when your eyes are closed. It helps you walk without looking at your feet, sit up straight without a mirror, and move with grace and ease.
But chronic tension, stress, injury, and repetitive patterns can dull this sense.
Over time, parts of the body become “blurry” in the brain’s map. The nervous system stops checking in with those muscles or joints. You lose precision. Movement becomes effortful. You start to feel clumsy, even stiff.
In Pneuma Yoga, we rebuild this map.
With slow movement, breath, and awareness, we bring clarity back to the brain-body relationship. We reconnect.
And when you can sense where you are, you can begin to change where you're going.
Interoception: Feeling From the Inside Out
Interoception is your ability to notice the sensations of your inner world—like your heartbeat, your breathing rhythm, gut sensations, or emotional shifts.
It’s how you know you’re thirsty or anxious. It’s what tells you when to eat, when to rest, and when you’re overwhelmed. And it’s crucial to regulating the nervous system.
When interoception is dulled (as it often is under chronic stress), we lose touch with our needs. We override discomfort. We miss early signals of burnout, fatigue, or emotional overload.
Rebuilding interoception means learning to listen again. It means tuning in instead of checking out. It means cultivating the subtle awareness that is the true gateway to healing.
Awareness Changes Everything
These two forms of awareness work hand-in-hand. And together, they:
Reduce pain and tension
Improve posture and coordination
Enhance breathing
Deepen meditation
Support digestion and emotional processing
Why? Because they shift your system from reaction to relationship.
When you feel yourself clearly, you stop fighting against your own body. You begin to cooperate with it.
And that’s when real change happens.
Nociception: Pain vs. Awareness
Here’s a twist: Pain isn’t always caused by tissue damage.
Nociception is the nervous system's response to a perceived threat. But when the brain's body map is blurry, it often interprets disconnection as danger.
The result? Chronic pain that’s real, but not rooted in injury. The more disconnected we become from our body, the more reactive our system becomes.
Somatic practices restore coherence. We re-map. We reconnect. We re-pattern.
And pain, in many cases, begins to fade.
My Journey: From Foggy to Focused
When I started this path, I was more disconnected than I realized. Years of chronic pain, surgeries, and stress had numbed me out.
But as I practiced slow somatic movement, something shifted. First, I noticed tension. Then I noticed breath. Then I noticed me. This has taken tremendous time and practice, yet I continue to learn, to discover knew things about myself I never realized. It constantly amazed me how much I cannot sense and feel within my body. Stress and trauma have buried tension deep beneath my radar, and constant practice continues to unravel my tension and reveal deeper layers of bracing.
Ther have been dramatic releases where I felt so much shift that I was joyfully terrified to move because my body had shifted so greatly and I didn’t want to lose the feeling. There have been constless subtle realizations, like: "Oh... I can feel my shoulder blade now. Wow what is that all about?" Then, the next day, it is different and you have to practice again. It is a constant learning and relearning process that slowly changes the shape and understanding of your inner dimensions, that are seriously as vast as the cosmos. Each new discovery feels like a victory.
And those small wins changed everything.
They helped me build trust. They helped me stay consistent. They helped me understand that healing wasn’t about fixing my body—it was about learning to relate to it.
This Is the Work of Pneuma Yoga
In Pneuma Yoga, we use the following tools to awaken proprioception and interoception:
Somatic exercises to increase sensory awareness
Subtle breath practices to refine internal perception
Meditation to observe without judgment
Guided embodiment to bridge the body, mind, and nervous system
These aren’t big, flashy movements. They’re small, mindful ones.
They ask: What do you feel? Where? What changes when you breathe?
And from those questions, everything begins to shift.
Want to Start?
If you’re curious, begin with the guided meditations and practices inside the Pneuma Yoga Method:
Try a free 10-minute somatic reset Fill ou the form on “the Deep Rest and Reset” page.
Explore the Red Light Response class for full-body awareness
Check out our membership with short videos, meditations, and full-length sessions
Because healing starts with sensing. And when you learn to feel again, you begin to heal again.
The body remembers. Your job is to listen.
