How to Feel
Getting in touch with touch with Bex Nagy
Welcome to The Ick Season 2, where I’m exploring the five senses via interviews with Twitter experts that I love and respect. Each personal essay is accompanied by a video interview, released every two weeks. First up: the sense of touch.
At age 34, I had to relearn to walk.
There are 33 joints, 26 bones, and 100+ muscles in a single human foot; more than 200 articulations in a single footstep. And I was doing it wrong. So wrong, in fact, that I’d torn the cartilage around my hip socket and broken one of the metatarsals in my foot.
I had to start over.
So I called a bodywork magician I know: Miles, a movement repatterning specialist. They asked me to feel my bones, and get in touch with my pelvis. I blinked back at them. You want me to what?
They told me to close my eyes, and search for the head of my femur nestled inside the socket of the hip’s acetabulum. They coached me to articulate all my tiny foot bones by spreading my toes wide against the floor. To get in touch with my pelvis, Miles told me, you can literally just touch it. I would lie on the floor and rap my knuckles on the iliac crests, the bony points at the front of my hips, and feel the vibrations through the bowl of the pelvic floor. If I was going to relearn to walk, they said, I needed to feel my skeleton.
Just one lap around the room, concentrating deeply on each footstep, was mentally exhausting.
I realized I’d been walking this earth in my brain and rarely in my body. I was trusting my manufacturer’s warranty to propel me upright through space. Until that moment, I hadn’t needed to check in on my skeleton…it was just there, idk.
Pondering each footstep was releasing all sorts of weird, locked up feelings. The bone-level awareness was freaking me out. I didn’t like feeling myself on the inside. It was kinda gross, honestly. Miles, I would plead, does feeling my bones really matter?
Touch Your Bones
A few years later, I got my answer in a flash.
I was lying on my back at a summer camp, letting a guy named @JhanaEnjoyer touch my fascia.
Two women were standing on a table in the middle of a crowded room. This was Vibecamp 2023, a giant IRL Twitter festival, and I was attending a workshop called “Tactile and Experiential Anatomy”. All participants were lying in pairs on the floor and assigned the role of “toucher” and “touchee”. Although it sounds like an advanced seminar, it was an excellent beginner’s entrypoint into how to feel.
I learned, for example, that fascia is fucking fascinating. The teachers, @embryosophy and @relic_radiation, explained this thin connective tissue surrounds and supports all parts of the body—every organ, muscle, bone, nerve fiber, and blood vessel.
I knew about fascia, sure. I understood it as saran wrap around muscles, something that got knotted up sometimes, that you’d have to foam roll into submission. But no, it’s way cooler and integral than that. Fascia is one continuous layer of slippery, flexible collagen, interwoven and connected literally everywhere inside the body. There’s “superficial fascia,” just beneath our skin, enveloping each nerve and blood vessel like sausage casing. “Deep fascia” is thicker, cradling and supporting our muscles, bones, and organs like netting. Deeper still is visceral fascia, surrounding the heart, lungs, and intestines to safeguard and anchor them in place. With the help of the skeleton, fascia keeps us standing, allowing everything to glide and stretch as we move.
You can easily touch your fascia, turns out, which was what this workshop was all about. Our teachers coached us how to use light pressure to move the layers of fat and skin. With a firmer grip, we could pull the fibers of fascia. JhanaEnjoyer tightened his fingers around the bulk of my quad and placed his hand on my belly. As he pulled down on my leg toward my knee, I could feel the tug all the way up into my ribs, a stretch across the myofascial girdle.
The sensation was wild. A revelation.
I know, I know, it’s all connected. Duh. But have you ever really felt it? It’s transformative to feel this global network of fascia moving under your skin. And under that, the solidity and vitality of your bone. It’s so deep and visceral, it freaks you out. This subtle touch reminded me that I’m just a bunch of slippery, fibery, ropey, squishy, boney components. And through a little investigation, I could understand how they worked together in miraculous concert.
That revelation answered the question “does feeling my skeleton really matter?” Moving my fascia and bones showed me that feeling deeply was integral to my healing and agency.
I was lucky to interview @embryosophy, aka Bex Nagy, for this article. When we talked, she taught me the word “interoception”—the sense of what’s going on inside the body. This includes everything from digestion and breathing to temperature and emotional states. She said that fine tuning your interoception is the key to being better at feeling your bones, and beyond.
Outside of being an organizer and presenter at Vibecamp, Bex is a yoga and somatic movement educator. Her sense of touch is her profession. In her life as a dancer, artist, art handler, DJ, yoga teacher, and somanaut she’s been trained to feel deeply.
“A lot of corny things about yoga really worked for me,” she admitted with a laugh. “Yoga gave me the time to slow down and start noticing.”
Bex became a yoga teacher kind of by accident, while she was searching for relief from her high-stress work environment as an art handler in New York City.
“When I started yoga teacher training I was freaked out. I had a lot of trouble with anxiety and depression back then, and learning to watch my breath triggered panic attacks,” she said. “The way out was the way through for me. Now my breath is this respite of safety, but at first I was really scared.”
When you start to really feel, she said, you realize there’s a lot of sensation. Maybe too much. Areas such as the fingertips and tongue can have as many as 100 pressure receptors in one cubic centimeter.
“So when we start paying attention, there's a lot of stuff we might read fearfully.” Bex waves her hands around her body, “It's busy in here!”
Our senses are being bombarded. Not only do we have pressure receptors in our fingers and tongue—called mechanoreceptors—our whole body is wired to pick up the vibrations and frequencies around (and inside) us. Electric pulses are morse-coding through our nervous system to the brain at all times—even when we sleep.
Equilibrioceptors in the ear are responsible for balance. Thermoreceptors in the skin, cornea, and spinal cord detect temperature changes. There are nociceptors, our pain receptors, and chemoreceptors for detecting the chemicals in taste, smell, and blood gases. Magnetoreceptors, previously found only in animals like birds, bees, and fish, can detect the earth’s magnetic field. But we’ve recently discovered that humans have magnetoreception too.
Touch is not just what we feel with our skin, it’s a deep internal sense that never turns off.
It sounds scary because it is. So, how do we get in touch with touch, without being overwhelmed by it?
How do you “contact a bone”? What is the “mind of the bone”? Follow along in this clip of Bex coaching how to feel bones and fascia, and stay tuned for the full interview coming next week.
How We Tune Out
Like Bex, I was fearful too—not of my breath, but of pain. I didn’t want to feel my body because being in touch would give me too much information. I was experiencing crippling health anxiety at the time. Every ache, pain, or twinge was more evidence I was falling apart. It was better to turn down all those signals completely.
Thus, I broke my foot. I was running during COVID. “Jogging” is more accurate, really. Not fast, just kind of loping along with a graceless, lopsided stride. It was one of those desperate pandemic hobbies, taken up as an attempt get off the couch and enjoy life again. Then, thanks to bad form and running through the pain, the repetitive stress snapped a bone in my right foot.
When I hobbled home from the doctor, newly strapped into a plastic boot, I sobbed helplessly for days. Trapped in the house again, I realized how dependent I was on exercise to feel good. And yet, I was using movement as a blunt instrument.
I wasn’t jogging to feel my body, it was to soothe my mind. If I didn’t have that outlet, I would go crazy. How would I keep the intrusive thoughts at bay?
I had been protecting myself by turning my attention outward—toward exercise, perfectionism, and people pleasing, to name a few. Now, looking down at my foot coffin, I was trapped. Going inside was the only option.
“For a lot of my life I was so over-focused on other people and what they thought and felt that I couldn't feel myself,” Bex said.
After training in breath, yoga, and anatomy Bex was able to turn inward, which vastly improved her life outwardly. “Now I'm better at knowing what I want and making decisions and respecting my own boundaries,” she said.
And Bex means boundaries literally: the boundaries of your own body, where your physical form begins and ends. We’ve got to reach out, touch our own arm, feel our own foot, know where we are in relation to gravity.
“We have to learn where our boundaries are, and where the limits of ourselves are in order to understand how to act,” said Bex.
Fixing My Foot
In that room with bodyworker Miles, I worked to carefully place the metatarsals of my foot on the floor, feeling the bounce of my arch, the zip of my knee stacking over my ankle, the lateral glide of my pelvis. It took all of my concentration to move five steps forward.
This was True walking. Aristotelian capital “w” Walking. The walkingness of walking. And it gave me my agency back.
I learned the mechanics of my ankle and knee. I imagined them as I padded slowly across the floor, feeling the articulations in each footstep (maybe not all 100 muscles—but nearly).
If I felt a weird twinge, I could reach down and twist the bones of my foot knowledgeably, massage the arch, stretch the joint, or gently squeeze a pressure point. I could glide my knee cap over the patella and feel the fluids of the joint circulate. I was able to treat myself with kindness and understanding, rather than relying on ambivalent doctors and X-rays to tell me about myself.
I was able to ask my body what was going on, and receive an answer. Understanding my bones affected way more than my physical body, too. Bex told me, “There's something that happens under the level of awareness through touch that's deeply important. It changes your apprehension of those parts of yourself.”
For example, have you ever been asked the infuriating question, “Where do you feel that emotion in your body?”
This is annoying, I know, but swear to god, I got good at that too. Turning up my interoception had that effect.
Take hunger for instance. It’s an inner state that creates surprising emotions.
“I can look at my high school self who would get suddenly hysterical, and see, oh, I was hangry,” laughed Bex. “These days I feel the signal and I'm like, ‘I'm getting panicky. I'm not focused. I’m grouchy. I should take a break and have a snack.’ I can notice the reactions I'm having in the outside world more adeptly and then link it to whatever's happening inside.”
Physically locating emotions in the body is like that. For hanger, it’s a literal grumbling in my stomach that makes me feel angry and out of control. Anger also shows up as heat in my chest or the base of my neck. When I’m feeling grief or sadness, it’s a heaviness on my sternum. When I’m irritated, it’s a tightness in the throat. But it’s real, and I couldn’t have gotten there without feeling my bones first.
Feeling my skeleton walking through space, feeling gravity with each footstep—these sensations changed me. Much like feeling fascia stretch under my skin, it gave me a new awareness, a curiosity to look closer. And by working on my physical states of interoception, I developed a deep inner sense of myself, my needs, my emotions.
“It's all such a continuum,” Bex said. “Talking about my ‘self’ as ‘separate’ doesn’t always make sense. But we have to learn that differentiation before learning the interwovenness of everything.”
That’s what season two of The Ick is all about: becoming embodied, rather than disassociated. Instead of filtering out the stimuli that make us feel weird, out of control, or icked out—we’re turning up the volume. We’ll be delighting in the qualia and interwovenness of the senses. We’re letting the glory of touch, sound, vision, smell, and taste make our experience of the world more joyful and alive.
The only way out is through.
Really enjoyed this and look forward to the whole interview! Thanks also for introducing me to the word "qualia." :)
I've put a lot of effort recently into becoming more mindful in my day-to-day life. This was both a great read and great reminder that the potential impact of being "bodyful" is just as much. Thank you.