Sensation Is Not a Problem
On the seam between the simulation and the body it forgot it had
Inside Attunement · Sarah Martinez, LCSW
Try this.
Bring your awareness to your feet right now. Not to change anything. Just to notice.
What’s there?
For a lot of people — more than will admit it — the answer is something like: I don’t know. Numb. Far away. Or, when they actually look: cold. Tight. Twisted. Something I haven’t thought about in a long time.
Try your thighs. If you relax them or notice them. Is there sensation. Is that sensation. Does that sensation register as a problem at all?
Sensation, especially to areas of the body that are normally quiet, is often registered my the mind as a “wrong” in some way.
Mentally: “I should not be clenching,” “I should not be wearing these shoes,” “I need to move," “I need a better chair”
Physically: uncomfortable/painful/unpleasant, needing attention, movement, touch, release, ect.
The sensation is felt as a problem.
That’s the thing I want to talk about. Not the sensation itself. The verdict that arrives with it.
The nervous system runs predictions at every level. Most of them resolve below awareness — the body adjusting, regulating, maintaining, protecting — without ever surfacing into consciousness. You don’t feel your liver working. You don’t feel your immune system. You don’t feel the thousands of micro-corrections your posture makes every hour.
You don’t feel them because they resolved locally. The system handled it. Nothing needed your attention.
But some predictions don’t resolve locally. Some get flagged as meaningful. Some cross threshold and surface — into awareness, into the simulation, into the experience of being you.
And here is what we were taught to do with that:
Treat it as a problem.
The body sends a signal. The signal reaches consciousness. And the default mode network — the part of the brain that constructs the self, assigns meaning, routes everything through identity — captures it immediately. Names it. Locates it. Makes it evidence of something.
Pain means something is wrong. Tension means you are failing to relax. Heaviness means you are weak or tired or not enough. Pleasure means something you should probably feel guilty about. Disgust means your body is disgusting.
The sensation arrives. The verdict follows. So fast it feels like the same thing.
But they are not the same thing.
Here is what I have spent a long time not understanding about myself.
My body has been having experiences my mind was not invited to.
While the simulation was running upstairs — thinking, planning, analyzing, producing, managing — my body was doing something else entirely. Guarding. Bracing. Protecting. Holding. Running chronic tension through my legs, my stomach, my neck, my jaw. Squeezing against a world that learned very early might require squeezing against.
I didn’t know. Because sensation — the simple physical fact of having a body — had been captured as a problem signal for so long that I had learned to not feel it. Resolve it locally. Keep it below the simulation. Don’t let it surface.
The prediction: feel nothing. Feeling something means something is wrong.
Not this sensation or that sensation. Sensation itself. The having of a body. The reality of being physical.
When you grow up in a body that was surveilled, corrected, shrunk, overcome, abandoned as the noble act — when reason was superior and the body was the obstacle — sensation becomes associated with exposure. With wrongness. With something requiring management.
So you stop feeling it. Not as a decision. As a survival strategy. The nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do.
And then someone says: feel your body. Drop in. Be present.
And you try.
And what arrives is not peace. Not presence. Not the embodied intelligence everyone is describing.
What arrives is: this is wrong. Something is wrong with me. I am doing this wrong. My body is wrong.
The sensation surfaces and the DMN captures it immediately as confirmation of everything it already believed. Pain is evidence of failure. Tension is evidence of not being healed. The physical reality of a body that has been bracing for decades — the frozen feet, the twisted legs, the stomach sucked in — all of it arrives as verdict.
And you try to relax. And it hurts. And it feels disgusting. And it feels like melting, like losing your edges, like something dangerous.
Because relax means calm down. Regulate. Make the body smaller and quieter and less. And the body knows — at a level below language — that smaller and quieter and less is exactly what got it into this.
So it braces harder.
Here is what I think is actually happening.
The seam is not just between the head and the body. It is between the simulation and the body it forgot it had.
The simulation — the self the DMN constructed — has been running upstairs while the body has been living a parallel life downstairs. And when awareness finally arrives at the body — when you feel the frozen feet, the tight jaw, the held breath — the simulation does not recognize what it finds.
It calls it a problem.
But it was always there. It was always doing this. It was always a body.
The tension in your legs right now is not evidence of wrongness. It is the body doing what bodies do when they have learned that the world requires guarding against. It is protection. It is armor. It is a prediction that has been running for a very long time — feel nothing, hold tight, keep the world away — and it has been working. In its way. At great cost.
And when you bring awareness to it, the sensation that arrives — the pain, the tightness, the strangeness of legs that feel like they belong to someone else — that is not a problem surfacing.
That is the body finally being in the same room as the mind.
That is the seam becoming visible.
The move I want to suggest is the same one that changed how I relate to emotion.
Before the emotion, call it pressure. Neutral. Pre-moral. Not good or bad. Just action readiness — the body getting ready to do something before the story arrives to tell you what it means.
Before the verdict about the body, call it sensation. Neutral. Pre-moral. Not pain or tension or wrong or disgusting. Just: the body having a physical experience right now. That is all. That is always what it was.
Sensation is not evidence of a problem. It is evidence of a body. And bodies have sensation. That is what they do. The sensation in your legs right now is not wrong. It is not a failure. It is not something you caused or something you need to fix. It is just what is here when someone finally looks.
Notice it. Without the verdict. Where is it. Does it move or stay still. Does it have edges. Is it the same everywhere or different in different places.
Not to fix it. Not to relax it. Not to make it different than it is.
Just: the body is here. It has been here. It has been doing this whole time something the simulation did not know about.
And it is allowed to be felt.
You are allowed to have a body.
Not the body you were supposed to have. Not the body that is regulated and thin and held in and not leaking and not taking up space. The body you actually have. Heavy or light. Soft or braced. Frozen or moving. In pain or not.
You are allowed to feel it. Not because feeling it will fix it. Not because awareness will relax the armor. But because the body has been living a parallel life for a long time and it deserves to be in the same room as the mind that forgot it was there.
The sensation is not the problem.
The verdict was.
The practice:
Bring awareness to one part of your body. Not to change it. Just to notice it is there. Call what you find sensation — not pain, not tension, not wrong. Just sensation. The body having a physical experience.
Stay with it for one breath. Not to relax it. To acknowledge it.
That is enough. That is the beginning.
Sarah Martinez, LCSW · Inside Attunement · insideattunement.com © 2026 Inside Attunement. All rights reserved. For educational purposes only. Not a substitute for professional clinical care.