Want to improve your health? Start with interoception.
Welcome to the first edition of the Really Big Feelings newsletter. This week: how to roll with your anger, French recipes and Tibetan art, the concept and practice of interoception, and more. Subscribe for free at reallybigfeelings.com.
One big question: What is spirituality?
I define spirituality from the word, it comes from the word spiritus, which means life breath, aliveness. Spirituality is aliveness on all levels. It must start with our bodily aliveness, for many people say the sense of smell is practically non-existent. If you really are grateful come alive with your smell. It starts with the body. But of course when we say spirituality, we also mean aliveness to interrelationships, to our confrontation with great divine mystery, to which we are confronted as humans, and which we can look away from or forget or become dead to or become alive to. This coming alive, that is spirituality. — David Steindl-Rast
Go deeper → Podcast: David Steindl-Rast on On Being
Headlines
😟 A most stressful year. The Gallup 2021 Global Emotions report is out and it suggests that “2020 was officially the most stressful year in recent history, with a record-high 40% of adults worldwide saying they experienced stress during a lot of the previous day.” (Gallup)
🍄 More mushroom science. A Yale study found that psilocybin given to mice led to a 10% increase in the number and size of neuronal connections, which are typically reduced in people with depression. As an aside, hopefully as our intelligence improves we’ll grok that our treatment of animals in lab experiments is one of the great sins of modernity. (Yale News)
🤬 Get mad. Speaking of things to be angry about, here’s a useful step-by-step guide to working with your anger. (Psyche)
🧒 First trauma, then disease. It’s generally accepted in some therapy circles that developmental trauma leads to all kinds of illness. Science seems to agree, linking childhood trauma not just to more depression later in life, but also heart disease, cancer, smoking, autoimmune disorders, and more. (Knowable)
💊 Archives. Philip Strong wrote an essay in 1990 about how epidemics are accompanied by “plagues of fear, panic, suspicion and stigma; and by mass outbreaks of moral controversy.” Sound familiar? (Sociology of Health and Illness)
Inspirations
🥬 Eat. The healthy recipes of Clémentine Vaccon.
📖 Read. On Love by Kahlil Gibran.
🎨 Observe. The gorgeous art of Pema Rinzin.
🎵 Play. Meridian by Ascendant.
🎙️ Listen. An interview with Charles Eisenstein about creating a more beautiful world.
Concepts
Interoception. The perception of sensations from inside the body, including the perception of physical sensations related to internal organ function such as heartbeat, respiration, satiety, as well as the autonomic nervous system activity related to emotions.
Go deeper → Scientific Paper: Interoceptive Awareness Skills for Emotion Regulation: Theory and Approach of Mindful Awareness in Body-Oriented Therapy (MABT)
Practices
Somatic meditation. A body-based meditation (as opposed to, say, observing your thoughts come and go) is both spiritual practice and a way to improve interoception and deepen into connection with your day-to-day experience of who you really are. Here’s a free one called the 10 Points Practice from Dharma Ocean, a Tibetan Buddhist lineage, but which requires no specific beliefs or spiritual orientation.
