I sat down today with Nahid de Belgeonne to ask her about how she uses interoception in her somatic work. It was a fun. It was stimulating. And it was instructive.
As a therapist and neuroscience and therapy practice integration enthusiast, I always want to learn, and I can certainly learn a lot from someone like Nahid.
I hope this conversation can give you some good ideas to explore in your practice, too.
Some of my highlights of this conversation:
How Nahid holds the tension of being a somatic practitioner and trying new things while still remaining critical (and how to revises our positions in the face of new evidence)
Why interoception is important for what we experience and how that manifests in practice - also how body patterns can slowly be changed
Nahid gives us a VIP tour of what she does to somatically assess a client as well as some of the techniques she uses (e.g taking the weight of the bones)
We talk about predictive models of the brain, Bayesian priors (brain’s implicit ‘beliefs’ based on previous experience) and how those can potentially be updated through changing our somatic habits or patterns
The vagus nerve ‘reset’ and the importance of terminology
Nahid’s take-home message for us:
The body learns patterns and body can relearn new patterns leading to changed mind patterns, incrementally through small changes.
Be sure to check Nahid’s substack Soothe where can find long form articles, weekly Soothe somatic sessions (I went to one and I really enjoyed it) and more!
For more about the nitty gritty of interoception, mental states and mental health and its neural underpinnings see below.
