Introduction
Since June 2015, I have offered Rolfing sessions in the Shibuya, Ebisu, and Daikanyama area of Tokyo.
Why hands-on Rolfing produces effects that last, unlike massage or seitai (manual body-alignment), I described in “How Rolfing Differs from Seitai and Massage — “Symptom” or “Structure”?” Here I want to take that further: what is the good of cultivating bodily awareness (interoception) through Rolfing, and how does it relate to intuition and to the vagus nerve?
By cultivating bodily awareness, Rolfing improves posture, and the effect lasts. “Bodily awareness” means noticing the state of the body’s interior.
Alongside the five senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch), which take in information from the outside world, the body also has sensors that take in information from within and send it to the brain. These sensors are what we can call bodily awareness — interoception.
The signals arise throughout the body — in the organs, within muscle, within bone. Strung together, they build up a single picture: the current state of oneself; how one feels in this very moment; and what to do in order to keep the body’s inner sensations in balance.
The Vagus Nerve and the Organs — Communication, and the Making of Emotion
One structure plays a key role in this sensing: the vagus nerve. The vagus is the one cranial nerve that reaches all the way from the brain to the abdomen, connecting the brainstem to the gastrointestinal tract, the bronchi, and the heart, and taking part in the work of the internal organs.
What is striking is how much it reports. Information from the lungs (breathing), the heart (heart rate, blood pressure), the stomach and intestines (hungry or full; which nutrients have arrived), the stomach (whether acid is being secreted), the gut (the balance of intestinal bacteria), the spleen (immune activity) — all of it travels continuously from the vagus to the brain. The vagus’s signals become bodily awareness as they reach the brain.
After a meal, for instance, how much protein, fat, and carbohydrate has entered the gut is relayed to the brain through the vagus within thirty minutes — well before the small intestine finishes absorbing the nutrients, which takes some four to six hours. On that basis, the body comes to feel sated, or to seek more.
The vagus is usually noticed for its parasympathetic role, calming the body. But it also works in the other direction. After sugar is eaten, for example, signals travel from the vagus to the brain that can prompt the body to want still more of it — so the vagus can drive activation as well.
And when the body is under stress, vagal activity drops, and the communication between brain and organs falls quiet. It is less that stress directly worsens the gut than that, with signals from the gut no longer getting through, problems like indigestion set in.
Finally, the vagus also integrates. From the heart (heart rate, blood pressure), the lungs (breathing), the gut (digestion, absorption), hormones in the blood, and more, it helps shape which “emotion” or “mood” the body expresses, and relays that to the brain. In the end, emotion shows on the face.
Why Interoception Matters — the Unconscious Rhythm of Heartbeat and Breath
One remarkable thing about the human body is that, in the presence of someone we are close to, the rhythms of heartbeat and breath fall into sync without our noticing. Which means that if one is familiar with one’s own interoceptive signals — attentive, say, to heart rate and breath — then in adversity, on meeting someone one clashes with, or in the middle of a challenge, taking a little time to settle those signals makes it far more likely one can break through and get past the moment.
Interoception, one might say, is an “intuition” that can be cultivated within oneself. And the encouraging part is exactly that: it can be cultivated. Rolfing, which settles posture by working with the fascia, is one way to do so.
If you would like to know more about the vagus nerve, the video below is worth a look.
Summary
In this post I have looked at the relationship between bodily awareness (interoception) and Rolfing through the role of the vagus nerve.