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Key points
- A self-assessment quiz can check your ability to feel about yourself rather than think. It can also bring more attention to your embodied self.
- Commonly, times of stress and challenge can push us out of our body sense and into our thoughts, worries, and ruminations.
- Allowing yourself space for real feelings to surface is often enough to guide you back to a place of self-acceptance and self-forgiveness.
Since this contribution is about enhancing embodied self-awareness – our attention to sensations and emotions coming from inside our bodies – it might be worthwhile to take a few moments to assess how you occupy your attention/awareness daily.
Are you noticing your body sensations and feeling your emotions, or is your attention/awareness mostly occupied by your thoughts?
If you’ve kept up with some of the posts in this blog, you will learn that trying to think through problems and think about your emotions can be helpful but leads to a state of heightened stress response in your body.
In addition to this task-oriented mode of thinking, there is also default mode thinking which runs in the background and is almost always “on” with random thoughts, rehearsals, reviews of past actions, worries and doubts.
Just feeling what you feel, without thought or judgment, can have restorative, healing effects. You can finally drop your guard, be vulnerable, open up to yourself and others with honesty and genuineness.
Choose any or all of the following questions and try your best to be honest with yourself. A scoring guide follows the list of questions.
- Do you notice your embodied self-awareness (body sensations, stress or calm, emotional feelings) during school, work, housekeeping, childcare, etc.?
- In terms of muscle tension, do you grip the steering wheel tighter than necessary, stretch your neck forward when trying to read a computer screen, hold yourself rigidly at attention when other people are around, or clench your jaw?
- Do you change your movement or posture to alleviate the tension in your body, or do you just keep going, moving, talking, working, and ignoring your body state?
- When you feel tired or achy, do you know what happened to create this state? Can you feel what your body needs in these states?
- Do you ever stop thinking and doing and just take time to feel yourself?
- Do you practice/receive any type of leisure activity that calls for embodied self-awareness such as yoga, massage, bodywork, meditation, dance, arts and crafts, music, sports, etc.? Do you practice this with the intention to expand self-awareness and relaxation, or are you caught up in “doing” it, trying to achieve a goal, or thinking about something else the whole time?
- Do you ever stop to smell the roses, engage in open-ended play with a child or a companion animal, indulge in prayer, walk in nature with all your senses alert, share non-demanding touch with someone you love, take a hot bath, or go to a spa with no agenda except to relax?
- Do you ask for help when you need it, or think that you have to do it yourself?
- If you ever suffered a serious injury, accident, were a crime, refugee, or abuse victim, been in a natural disaster or at war, suffered from racism sexual harassment or abuse, have you ever done trauma therapy to deal with the emotional aftermath?
- Can you talk about your emotions easily, or do you push them aside?
How to obtain your score on this test of embodied self-awareness.
Each item is worth ten points. So, you can have a total score ranging from 0 = no embodied self-awareness to a score of 100 = fully immersed in embodied self-awareness. A score of 100 would mean that you never think and that you are totally in touch with every single feeling coming from your body. Most non-human animals are like this, but I’m pretty sure it’s not humanly possible.
Similarly, I’m convinced that nobody would get a zero, which would mean that you never feel yourself. To get a zero, you would have to say that you never feel any body sensations such as pain, happiness, anger, hot, cold, sexual arousal, or discomfort. We are all somewhere in the middle.
So, how can you score yourself on these questions? Saying, “Yes, I confess that I grip the steering wheel too tightly,” could be one response. This answer shows that even though you might not be able to coax your body to relax while driving, you are at least aware that you cannot relax.
You can give yourself six points for that awareness. Why six and not four? Because you are aware of your body sensation of muscle tension. Saying, “I have no idea, and I don’t care,” earns you zero points. If you are aware of your grip while driving and have taught yourself to relax your hands and arms when on the road, you can take all ten points. Bravo!
Or, you might say, “Wow, now that you ask, I realize that I’m not even aware of how I grip the steering wheel. I need to check that out next time I drive.” That is also a positive step toward expanding embodied self-awareness: becoming aware that you were not previously aware. You can take three or four points for that.
Take this quiz every few months and see if the answers change. See if your embodied self-awareness and sense of acceptance of your true felt experience expands over time.
It’s common that times of stress and challenge can push us out of our body sense and into our thoughts, worries and ruminations. But just noticing that this happens is a positive step toward self-awareness. It’s okay to be stressed, get irritable, withdraw, or feel down. And, if you can admit, “Yeah, I’m feeling pretty irritable right now, so maybe it’s not the best time to talk to me,” that’s ten points.
Just allowing yourself space for your real feelings to surface is often enough to guide you back to a place of self-acceptance and self-forgiveness. This is the healing power of embodied self-awareness. It leads us to feel better once we “get” what is troubling us. It leads to a sense of resilience and restoration.
