I was once sitting with a senior executive during a strategy session.
Everything on the surface looked fine. He was articulate, composed, and made good points. But something kept pulling my attention. His jaw was slightly tight. His breathing had moved up into his chest. Every time a particular colleague spoke, his left hand would close, almost imperceptibly, into a loose fist, and then open again.
He had no idea he was doing it.
After the session, I asked him privately how he felt about the direction of the meeting. “Fine,” he said. “I think it went well.”
His body had been telling a completely different story for ninety minutes.
Your Body Knows Before Your Mind Does
We live in cultures that have made thinking the most prestigious thing a human being can do. The mind is celebrated. The body is tolerated, fed, rested, exercised when necessary, and otherwise largely ignored in professional contexts.
This is an expensive mistake.
Your nervous system processes information faster than your conscious mind by a significant margin. Before you’ve formed a coherent thought about what’s happening in a room, your body has already registered threat, safety, attraction, resistance, or unease. It has already begun preparing a response.
The body is not slow. The body is first.
Embodied Intelligence: Why Intuition Is Data
What we call intuition, that sense that something is off before you can explain why, or that a person isn’t quite saying what they mean, is largely your nervous system doing its job. It has read the room. It has tracked micro-signals in posture, tone, facial movement, and breathing. It has run the calculation.
It is waiting for you to listen.
Most professionals don’t. Not because they’re unaware that the body carries information, but because there’s no formal permission — and no training — to take it seriously in professional life.
So the signal gets dismissed. I’m just tired. I’m overthinking this. It’s nothing.
And then three months later: I knew something was wrong. I felt it from the beginning.
You did. You just didn’t have a framework for it.
Interoception: Learning to Read the Signals Within
In somatic psychology, we call this interoception — the ability to perceive signals from inside the body. Heart rate, breath, muscle tension, gut sensation, temperature shifts. These are not metaphors. They are data points. And like any data, they can be learned to read.
In my clinical work, and in corporate contexts, I train people to do exactly this. Not to become more emotional. To become more accurate.
There’s a difference.
Emotion without awareness is what floods a boardroom when something goes unspoken too long. Somatic awareness with metacognition — the combination of body literacy and the capacity to observe your own internal states — is what gives a leader the ability to read what’s actually happening in a room, not just what’s being said.
These are different skills. Both are trainable.
What the Body Remembers Beyond Conscious Thought
In my own journey — and I’ll be honest here, because this newsletter is not going to pretend I only know this from textbooks — some of the deepest expansions of somatic awareness I’ve experienced have come in non-ordinary states. In a ceremony. In carefully held therapeutic work with psychedelics.
What becomes immediately obvious in those states is how much the body holds. Not metaphorically. Literally. Emotions that were never fully processed. Tensions with no remembered origin. Patterns of contraction that have been running quietly for years.
The body keeps the score, as Bessel van der Kolk famously documented. But it keeps something else too, it keeps the wisdom. The unspoken knowing. The parts of experience that never made it into language but never disappeared either.
Learning to access that, in ordinary life, in professional settings, without altered states, is part of what the Dynamic Equilibrium System is built around.
So here’s a practical starting point.A Simple Practice to Develop Embodied Intelligence
This week, pick one meeting — just one — and split your attention. Half of it goes to the content of what’s being said. The other half goes to your body.
Notice where you’re holding tension. Notice when your breathing changes. Notice what happens physically in the moment someone says something that lands differently than expected.
Don’t analyze it in the moment. Just notice. Let the data accumulate.
After the meeting, sit with one question: What was my body tracking that my mind was too busy to register?
You don’t need to do anything with the answer yet. You just need to start hearing it.
The Competitive Advantage of Listening to Your Body
The executives I work with who develop this capacity don’t become softer. They become sharper. More precise in their reading of people, situations, and risk. Less surprised by what happens, because they’ve learned to catch the early signals before they become crises
The body was always speaking.
We just weren’t listening.
Next issue: The Map Is Not the Territory — and why two people in the same room can live in entirely different realities.
