Declining Interoception and the Somatic Roots of the Meaning Crisis

The decline of interoception — the capacity to sense the body's internal states — is structurally coupled to the Meaning crisis, not merely correlated with it. When cognition falls under what can be called the tyranny of the propositional, dominated by noun-based, object-property frameworks that privilege the products of thought over its living process, the body recedes from awareness. This is not only a cognitive narrowing but a somatic one. Without access to felt bodily flow, the deeper participatory knowing that Bohm described through his concept of the holomovement becomes functionally inaccessible.

Bohm himself came to this recognition in his final days. In conversation with Lee Nichol just ten days before his death, he acknowledged that dialogue practice alone was insufficient — participants needed preparatory somatic practices to ready their bodies for genuine thinking-together. The RheoSoma practices that emerged from this lineage address exactly this gap: attending first to the moving body, then aligning perception with natural flows — fire, water, clouds, trees — and finally tracking the micro-flows of meaning as they unfold in live speech. This progression restores continuity between bodily flow and cognitive flow.

This connects meaningfully to Bill Torbert's framework of triple-loop awareness and three-dimensional time: the capacity to inhabit a present poised between past and future, participating in the Emergence of meaning rather than observing it sequentially. The reduction of mindfulness to seated breath meditation — particularly in its corporate domestication — strips away both the somatic depth and the metacognitive reflexivity that contemplative practice requires. A revisioned contemplative path must recover the full progression: interoception, attunement, participatory dialogue, and transformative knowing.