Therapy 101: What does body awareness mean, or how to listen to your body
For the Therapy 101 series, think of it as a refresher. No matter if it’s your first time in therapy, or it’s your second or your tenth, these are some base skills and reminders that can serve as a foundation for us to build on. Each one will include some concrete changes you can experiment with right now, as well as some longer context for what I hope might be helpful information for you.
Something is happening in your body right now. If you take a deep breath and direct your attention inward for a few seconds, you might notice sensations like a tightness in your jaw or shoulders, a hollowness in your chest, or a restlessness in your tummy. (if you skipped the deep breath and scrolled down looking for the concrete tips, I gently encourage you to try doing a deep breath anyway.)
Most of us, myself included, have been taught to treat these sensations as things to push through, manage, and suppress so we can get back to getting things done. Most of the time, we become very skilled at living from the neck up with no conscious effort at all, just as a byproduct of living in the culture we exist in.
So why does it matter, and why should you care?
Traditional talk therapy prioritizes the mind: the stories we tell ourselves, the beliefs we hold, the patterns we can name and analyze. And that work is real and valuable, but difficult memories, chronic anticipatory anxiety, grief, the ongoing weight of racial and historical trauma live not only in the mind, but in the body as tension patterns, held breath, bracing for impact, collapse and exhaustion. Often, you can understand your anxiety and depression intellectually, know exactly where it comes from and why, and still feel it in your chest every morning. Body awareness is one of the first steps to challenging moving through your day on autopilot, and challenging autopilot is one of the first steps to creating change when a pattern or behavior that used to work fine is no longer working at all.
Self-disclosure: Reminding myself I have a body to listen to
My first memory of consciously reconnecting to body awareness and taking in body signals as valuable information rather than a nuisance didn’t happen in a therapy room. It happened when I noticed a pattern: every time that I had really intense anxiety, it was in enclosed brightly lit spaces, particularly when they were loud: a crowded birthday party with overhead lighting, a concert with a lot of flashing lights where I was too far away from the exit, an office that was right by the train station.
I had no conscious memory I could connect this to, no clear narrative that I could point to and say, “oh right, that makes sense!” Beyond the obvious of noticing I was now quicker to get overstimulated than I was used to, I realized that for whatever reason, my nervous system and my body had started associating that kind of overstimulation with danger. I could function through it, mostly, at a big cost to myself (and if I could play therapist to my past self, I would probably encourage them to explore why I was so determined to push through it and ignore it), but if I misjudged or overestimated my capacity, I would end up overwhelmed and completely wiped.
Having the context I do now, years later, I can trace that pattern back to a cluster of experiences that together, little by little, contributed to it, even though none of them had directly to do with brightly lit enclosed loud spaces. At the time, I was both intrigued and unsettled.
Intrigued, because once I started noticing, I couldn’t stop noticing: how long has that tension in my left shoulder been there? What else has been hiding here, waiting for me to finally pay attention? Unsettled, because the strategy I had always used to manage my feelings and emotions – analyzing them, explaining them, thinking my way through them – didn’t help me get any closer to figuring out what was going on.
Something You Can Try Right Now
These exercises don’t require any special setting or prior experience. They can work whether you’re at your desk, on the subway, in bed before sleep, or standing in your kitchen, with some minor adjustments as necessary.
Exercise 1: Starting a connection
After a difficult conversation, a hard meeting, or a moment of tension, find a few minutes and try this:
Bring the situation to mind briefly if it feels tolerable to do it. If it doesn’t feel tolerable, you may need some time to ground: we’re not trying to force you to relive it, just to reference it with curiosity. Then ask: Where did I feel that in my body? Scan from your feet upward. Notice if anywhere feels different than baseline: tighter, heavier, more activated, less activated (numb counts too).
Place a hand on that area if it feels comfortable. You don’t need to do anything else. Just let some attention rest there, and notice if the sensation shifts, intensifies, or stays the same. Then take three slow breaths and return to your day.
This exercise is useful for beginning to map the relationship between specific stressors and where they land in you, which is information we can build on in therapy.
Exercise 2: The morning body scan
Before you check your phone in the morning, spend sixty seconds with your body. Starting at the top of your head, slowly move your attention down: scalp, face, jaw, neck, shoulders, chest, stomach, lower back, hips, legs, feet. You’re not looking for anything in particular, just noticing what’s already there before the day begins to layer on top of it. If you have another few minutes of time, jot it down in a notebook: it doesn’t have to be a detailed entry, a list of words is good too. It can be interesting to look at how what you notice changes day by day over time.
This is especially useful for high achievers who tend to wake up already in planning mode. It creates a brief moment of contact with your baseline state before the mental to-do list takes over.
Exercise 3: Grounding through the senses
When you notice yourself dissociating, or living entirely in your head, this is a simple way to come back into your body:
Press your feet firmly into the floor and feel the pressure. If you’re sitting on a piece of furniture or you have one nearby, put your hand on it and notice if it is warmer than your hand, colder than your hand, or same temperature. Look around and name five things you can see, and describe them. (I see a clock vs I see a clock. It is red. The arrows are moving. )Take one slow breath, letting your exhale be longer than your inhale. Orienting to your environment through your senses is one of the nervous system’s most basic pathways back to a regulated state.
Why we stop listening to our bodies, and how that can show up in the therapy room
Mostly, because we are taught to by the culture around us. It’s not a personal failing to learn to disconnect from your body when disconnection is encouraged and rewarded by the dominant culture you exist in. For many people, learning to override physical and emotional signals is a form of protection, and the only way to get through the day (or the only way to get in the room).
For high achievers and perfectionists
When your whole life is built around performing at a high level always all the time, the body can start to feel like an inconvenience. Hunger, exhaustion, illness, all become interruptions to the schedule that get in the way of productivity. Many high achievers have learned how to manage the body rather than how to listen to it: regular caffeine to keep going, a regimented exercise routine, an optimized sleep hygiene protocol. What can happen over time of not knowing how to start (or sometimes, stubbornly looking away from) listening to the body, is that the signals of “slow down” and “this is too much” get more persistent and more frequent, and harder to ignore.
How that can show up in the body and in therapy:
Intellectualization of your feelings: high achievers are often very skilled at naming emotions and explaining their inner experience, but there’s a difference between understanding that you are anxious or depressed, and feeling where anxiety or depression lives in your body right now. In therapy, this can show knowing the answers, but it’s like you’re narrating from a distance (You may have also encountered therapists telling you they’re not sure what they can do for you, since you already know the whys of what you are feeling.)
Practical fixes for symptoms: chronic neck pain becomes something you manage with a standing desk, a racing heart before presentations gets labeled as nerves, carpal tunnel syndrome is quieted away with ice packs. While these are helpful, they are not addressing what is underneath the symptom long-term.
Rest feels dangerous rather than restorative: for many high achievers, stillness brings anxiety, restlessness, or a creeping sense of falling behind. It can be even more amplified for BIPOC and AAPI folks experiencing fears of being forgotten or left behind in their career fields.
Dissociation as a coping skill: staying in motion, reaching the next goal, solving the next problem. If it works and you feel good, it works great, and it can be very effective. If it doesn’t work, you may find yourself constantly running to avoid sitting with emotions that feel uncomfortable or unresolvable.
For BIPOC and AAPI folks
For many BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) and AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) communities, the body has been a site of external scrutiny, judgment, and projection for a long time. Being looked at, commented on, made into a symbol or a stereotype, or simply feeling the need to brace against others’ assumptions can make turning inward feel unsafe or counterintuitive. When the outside world has made your body a contested space, why would you want to spend more time there? Body awareness, in this context, isn’t just a mindfulness practice. It’s something that has to be approached with real acknowledgment of why it hasn’t felt safe, and externalizing trauma stored in the body.
How that can show up in the body and in therapy:
The experience of double consciousness: W.E.B. Du Bois described double consciousness as the sense of always looking at yourself through the eyes of others, forcing a “fragmented identity”. In the body, this can feel like a persistent split: a part of you monitoring perception from the outside while another part is trying to simply exist.
Hypervigilance in public or professional spaces: The experience of tracking whether you are being watched, followed, or judged is a chronic, low-grade stress that often lives in the body as persistent muscle tension, elevated heart rate, or difficulty fully exhaling.
Invisibility and hypervisibility operating at the same time: Being unseen in one context and over-scrutinized in another can create a kind of chronic instability in how it feels to exist in your body — never quite sure whether to expand or contract.
Cultural contexts where stoicism is a coping mechanism: In many BIPOC and AAPI communities, emotional and physical self-sufficiency has been a form of protection. Showing pain or vulnerability in certain contexts can feel dangerous, or like a confirmation of stereotypes. Recognizing the wisdom in that adaptation, while also exploring what it has cost, is central to this work.
For Immigrants, Expats, and Adult Children of Immigrants
When you navigate between cultures, the body often becomes a site of careful management. Hypervigilance becomes a survival skill: monitoring the room for cues, reading social dynamics in real time, adapting your presentation to what the context demands. You become attuned to external signals while learning to subordinate internal ones. There can also be a particular pressure around not burdening others, around being the person who holds things together, who got this far by not falling apart. Attending to your own body’s experience can feel self-indulgent in that context, or like a luxury you can’t afford.
How that can show up in the body and in therapy:
Difficulty distinguishing between physical exhaustion and emotional depletion: When you’ve been trained to keep going regardless of how you feel, “tired” and “overwhelmed” can blur together. Slowing down to differentiate them is often a first step.
Grief that has nowhere to go: Immigration and relocation involve real losses of community, language, the version of yourself that existed in another place. These losses are often not fully realized until much later. When grief doesn’t have an outlet, it tends to settle into the body as a heaviness that shows up unexpectedly, a tightness in the chest when a familiar smell or song surfaces. Many immigrants and expats notice this grief most when they return to their country of origin, or when they can’t. In therapy, naming it as grief and locating it somatically can be a first step toward moving through it.
Acculturation and pressure to assimilate: The sensory landscape you grew up in - climate, food, smells, sounds, language - shapes your nervous system in ways that are easy to underestimate. When those cues disappear and are replaced by an unfamiliar environment, the body can carry a low-grade sense of feeling slightly out of place, even years later.
Disconnection from cultural practices: Many cultures have embodied traditions that quietly regulate the nervous system. When immigration or relocation severs those connections, that regulation often gets lost without an equal replacement. This can show up as a vague sense of being untethered, or a body that feels harder to inhabit than it once did. Therapy can be a space to notice what’s missing, and to think about what it might mean to reclaim it.
For Queer and Trans People
For many LGBTQIA+ people, particularly those who grew up without supportive people, stories, or communities that reflected them back, the body can have a complicated history. Surviving environments where your body, your gender, or your desires were treated as something to hide, fix, or be ashamed of often involves learning to get very far away from physical experience.
How that can show up in the body and in therapy:
Dissociation as an early survival strategy: When your physical presence felt too visible, too legible, too different, leaving the body can become an automatic and deeply practiced response. In therapy, rebuilding a relationship with physical sensation often has to happen slowly and with a lot of care.
Hypervigilance in the body: Knowing where the exits are, reading a room for safety before entering it, adjusting your presentation based on perceived threat is often experienced not as a conscious thought but as a physical state
Gender dysphoria and the body as a site of distress: For trans and nonbinary people, there can be a complex relationship between inhabiting the body and feeling at home in it. Body-informed therapy has to be attuned to this, and never assume that inviting someone into their body is straightforward or automatically affirming.
The physical experience of masking: Code-switching and masking behaviors like suppressing mannerisms, modulating voice, choosing when and whether to be out can be conscious and unconscious, taking a toll on the idea of connecting with the body.
Is This for You?
If you’ve been nodding along while reading this, you might be someone who has spent years being the one who holds it together, performs well, and keeps going. You might be a first or second-generation immigrant who learned early that there wasn’t space for your inner experience, only your output. You might be queer or trans, and have a complicated history with feeling at home in your body at all. You might be Asian American, BIPOC, or both, and carrying the cumulative weight of navigating spaces that were not designed with you in mind. You might be a therapist or a healer yourself, quietly running on empty.
People who tend to find this work useful are those searching for things like queer-affirming therapy in NYC, EMDR for immigrants, IFS therapy for high-functioning anxiety, therapy for Asian Americans, or simply a therapist who won’t need the whole backstory explained. If any of that sounds like you, you’re in the right place.
Working with a Therapist
If you’ve spent years living in your head, body-informed therapy can feel genuinely unfamiliar and a little odd at first. With approaches like IFS, we pay close attention to where different parts of you live in the body: the lump in your throat that comes in when a part that fears rejection shows up, he heaviness in your stomach that might be an exiled grief. With EMDR, we can track where distressing memories live somatically, and use bilateral stimulation to help the nervous system move through what got stuck. In art therapy, sometimes what can’t be accessed with words gets more clarity and shape through image, which can open the door to embodied processing.
I offer a therapy space that takes both your mind and your body seriously, integrating IFS, EMDR, and art therapy, and grounded in a real understanding of the specific lived experiences that shaped how you relate to yourself and the world. Your cultural background, your immigration history, your intersectional identities are welcome here, as they are central to the work we do together.
I offer virtual therapy to adults in NYC and across New York State. I am an out of network provider, and I hold a limited number of sliding scale spots for clients who need them. If you’re considering longer-term therapy and want to get a sense of whether we’d be a good fit, I’d be happy to hear from you.
About the Author
Leila Zhanybekova (they/she) is a licensed and board-certified creative arts therapist (LCAT, ATR-BC) with nine years of post-graduate experience providing psychotherapy to adults in NYC. Leila offers virtual EMDR, Internal Family Systems (IFS parts work), and art therapy to immigrants and adult children of immigrants, BIPOC and AAPI communities, LGBTQIA+ and gender diverse people, and high achievers navigating burnout, perfectionism, and complex trauma. Leila works in English and Russian and sees clients across New York State.