Stretch Points

My inner monologue in a Bikram yoga class about fifteen years ago: 

“Okaaaaay, reclined hero pose. Sure thing, here we go. Sitting here, this feels pretty good. I’m just gonna lean back here…keep my knees together…take a breath, relax…one elbow down. Now the other one. Okay, laying all the way down on my back, everything feels pretty good. Now the arms overhead, grab the elbows. . . Okay, we’re here. Wait a second. Wait. Wait. What? What IS this? This is not okay. Okay, okay, it’ll be over in a minute, just breathe. No, like a real breath. A REAL breath, Laurel, from your belly. C’mon. We can do this, we’ve done this so many times before. Oh god. Am I dying? Is it supposed to feel like this? Why is my torso buzzing? Do I want to…cry? No, don’t cry right now. Why do I want to cry? Is that my throat closing up? Can I breathe? This has never happened before! What the fuck is going on? Oh my god. I have to get up. I can’t do this. I have to get up right now.” 

Even though I remember this moment in stark clarity, I don’t remember how long it took me to understand what had happened. All I knew in that class and for weeks afterward was that I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to do hero pose ever again. The collection of sensations I experienced in those couple of minutes were so unfamiliar and so unpleasant, all I wanted was to avoid recreating them at all costs. 

My curiosity did get the better of me eventually, as it usually does. My mind returned to the moment over and over again, wondering: What was that? And why didn’t I know, when it had happened inside me? 

After a while, I figured it out. I wish I could describe the moment of epiphany to you, but I honestly don’t remember that. I only remember the satisfaction of saying to myself, “that was PANIC. I was feeling panic.” And I went back to doing hero pose, because now if I started to feel those sensations, I could say to myself, “I’m feeling panic, and I’m okay. Nothing in this room is here to cause me harm. I breathe in my panic and breathe out my safety. It is okay to move slowly and I can come out of this pose if I need to.” It still wasn’t an easy pose for me, emotionally, but I felt better being able to name my experience.

Much, much later, I learned the term interoception. Interoception is the scientific term for our ability to sense what is happening inside our bodies. 

Take a breath and do a quick scan of your internal state. Do you feel tired? Hungry or thirsty? Is some part of your body cold, warm, or numb? Can you notice how your skin feels where it is touching your clothing, furniture, or other parts of your body? 

For some of us, this is a relatively easy and simple process. We focus our attention on a part of the body, or the body as a whole, and boom! Lots of sensation and information, coming in hot. Our beautiful minds sort it out and label everything before we’re even aware, so when you ask me how I’m feeling, there’s a wealth of data at my fingertips. 

For others, especially if we’ve been taught through life experiences that our bodies are not safe, maybe not even ours at all, this process of interoception is much more difficult and fraught. The body exists as a minefield of alarms and sinkholes and quicksand, rather than as a safe, familiar home. We learn to not feel much of anything. Dissociation is an incredibly powerful defense mechanism, and a subject for another time.

I haven’t tried hero pose in several years, my flexibility not being what it once was. I do think about that moment of unrecognized panic on the mat fairly often, though. I truly don’t know if that was the first time I’d ever felt that emotion, but it was absolutely the first time I became aware of it, the first time I was able to match a collection of internal sensations and thoughts with the emotional label. 

You may be wondering what the heck all this has to do with the enneagram. And in many, if not most, enneagram traditions, it may not have much relevance. But this is what I love so much about the embodiment tradition—that it includes ways to understand and work with our interoceptive ability, on whatever end of the spectrum, from full awareness to complete dissociation. The enneagram has also helped me take my feelings less personally—another subject for another time—so that when I was able to label my experience as panic, I didn’t feel at its mercy. I had choice and agency about how to respond, which is a flexibility I value even more highly than being able to sit in hero pose.