If you are in a continual state of stress, like in PTSD, this greatly affects your interoceptive ability. To foster interoceptive accuracy, it is important to move the client from a sympathetic state into a parasympathetic or vagal state, which is what happens with Bowen therapy or breathwork. This works by regulating the enteric brain, which includes nose breathing and diaphragmatic respiration. The diaphragm has no spindle muscle cells so it is entirely receptive to the enteric gut via Vagus nerve stimulation.
A practitioner’s efficacy in helping their patients has much to do with their ability to perceive which is an interoceptive contemplative practice. Intuition is driven by somatic markers in your own body. It is essential to consider whether the sense is self-generated or perceived from the client.
Patients describe muscular pain very differently from fascial pain. Muscular pain is described with very precise words, descriptors of pain such as burning, cold, tearing, or pulling, whereas, fascial pain is described with emotional words like cruel, agonizing or mean pain. The insular cortex is coding physical perceptions from an emotional perspective.
The client fishes for interoceptive feedback when you leave a therapeutic pause for their body to respond. Interestingly in the first minute after a Bowen move, a patient is spending 80% of the time searching for
