Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Your Neuroceptive Self
Your body knows things before your mind does. That uncomfortable feeling in your chest when someone walks in the room. The inexplicable dread about a perfectly pleasant social gathering. The tension that arises during conversations that seem fine on the surface. All of these sensations come from what we can call your "neuroceptive self" - the part of you that's constantly scanning your environment for signs of safety or danger without your conscious awareness.
Based on Dr. Stephen Porges' concept of neuroception from polyvagal theory, this internal surveillance system operates beneath language and logical thought. While your aware self wakes up in the morning and makes decisions, reads, reflects, and responds in full sentences, your neuroceptive self works silently in the background, interpreting every facial expression, tone of voice, and subtle cue around you. It doesn't weigh pros and cons - it simply reacts and feels, creating sensations that often leave us confused about our own emotional responses.
The disconnect between what we intellectually know and what we physically feel creates what coaching calls a "slippery brain." We say things like: "It's not like I think my friend doesn't care, but I get this pit in my stomach when we part ways." This happens because our aware self, trained to be rational and measured, rushes to explain away the pain without acknowledging it first. But real healing doesn't come from constantly rewiring your story to sound better - it comes from slowing down enough to honor what your body felt initially. By learning to decode these signals instead of dismissing them, you can transform confusion into clarity and begin to create genuine safety from within. When you understand that your felt sense of safety isn't found in escape or external circumstances but in your relationship with your body and with Allah, everything changes. Your neuroceptive self becomes not a source of confusion, but a sacred guide to deeper healing.
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Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, dr Kamal Aftar. Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you.
Speaker 1:In today's podcast, we're going to talk about a very fascinating topic of the neuroceptive self that's yourself. Beneath the self, there's an aware version of you that you're very familiar with. She wakes up in the morning and decides what to wear, how to respond to a text, how to behave at work, how to speak to your spouse. She's the version that's listening to this podcast, maybe while multitasking, and she operates in full sentences to be able to do this. She's the one who reads journals, explains, reflects. You might be very familiar with her, and she is your aware self, but underneath her, working constantly behind the scenes, is another version of you. That's your neuroceptive self, the version that never stops working, even while asleep. She doesn't use language, she doesn't weigh pros and cons, she just reacts, she just feels, without understanding where that's coming from. It's instant, intuitive, mostly without permission.
Speaker 1:So I based this term on a concept of neuroception, which is a term coined by Dr Stephen Porges of polyvagal theory. It refers to your nervous system's non-conscious detection of safety or danger around you. This happens without the involvement of your thinking mind. It picks up on facial expressions, tone of voice, clutter in the room, the presence of a closed door or the way someone exhales. The neuroceptive self uses these cues to determine if you're safe or not. And the answer does not come in words because, again, it bypasses your thinking brain. It comes in sensations a tight chest, a burst of warmth, a shallow breath, tingling arms, dry mouth, expansive shoulders. Your neuroceptive self only speaks in the felt sense. Now, most people in the world walk around completely unaware that this internal surveillance system even exists. They feel anxious, but they can't name why. They feel drained after a conversation that wasn't even that bad. They dread family gatherings, even though everyone is nice.
Speaker 1:This is neuroception at work. It's detecting what your conscious mind is not able to pick up. It makes meaning without your mind giving it language. Your neuroceptive self is a sacred, beautiful part of your design. It's the bridge between your body and your reality. If you don't understand yet what it's saying, or, worse, if you've been trained to dismiss what it's saying, you will live in confusion. You will keep asking why do I feel like this? What is my body telling me Because something doesn't feel safe, I don't know what's going on. This podcast is about making this voice audible and making sense of this experience, giving her a name, letting her teach you, Because once you do, you gain awareness, you gain access, you stop being confused by your emotions and you start leading by them, and that changes everything. Because there is so many teachings that blur together.
Speaker 1:I usually like to separate the neuroceptive mind with the subconscious mind. They very often work together. They both live below the awareness, they both influence your behavior before you consciously decide anything, but they're not the same thing. Think of your subconscious mind as a massive inner library. It stores memories, beliefs, learned behaviors, identity scripts. It's shaped by repeated experiences, imprints, emotional intensity. In NLP and in coaching, we access the subconscious through imagery, sometimes metaphors and language.
Speaker 1:Your neuroceptive self, on the other hand, is not a library. She's a scanner. She's your body's built-in surveillance system, always on, always decoding your environment, always asking one core question am I safe? This is your internal threat detection system. She doesn't care about your thoughts. She doesn't care if you understand the trauma theory. She doesn't even care if you've done the work, if your husband exhales sharply and that tone matches something threatening from your past. It will make your body flinch, because that's what it neurocepts. If your boss pauses before speaking, your heart rate might spike long before you're able to make sense of it in sentences all because your neuroception works faster than your awareness.
Speaker 1:As a result of all of this, my clients sometimes say I know I'm safe, but my body doesn't believe it. I don't know why. I know my friend cares, but I don't feel like she's okay. After we talked, I know my marriage is fine, but I keep waiting for something to go wrong. This is not you being dramatic. This is not you being ungrateful. This is not emotional immaturity. This is your neuroceptive self, the part of nervous system that makes sense of things without the conscious mind catching up. Healing subconscious beliefs doesn't automatically calm your neuroceptive response. You can reframe your thoughts until you feel safe. You can journal, you can get coaching, you can get therapy, but you might still experience tension in your relationships if your neuroceptive self codes for danger.
Speaker 1:The biggest reason I wanted to bring this to your attention today is because, if you don't understand this distinction, you will start to shame yourself for being triggered. You'll think I've already worked on this, I've already forgiven them, or I thought I was past this. You'll assume that your recurrent pain is failure, when really it's just neuroception. It's your nervous system still doing its job, based on outdated cues. So yes, both the subconscious mind and the neuroceptive self operate beneath the surface. Both influence your emotional reality. But the difference is the subconscious mind largely holds beliefs. It stores them in the body. Neuroception delivers sensations to the body. It's like an antenna, always at work, and the healing isn't complete until you work on both.
Speaker 1:Your neuroceptive self is always making meaning, not just about big things like conflict or trauma, but about every eye contact, every pause, every tone, every argument. She's also interpreting this information that she's picking up and more often than not, all of this information is coming with a high emotional consequence. That's why you might feel rejected, even though no one said anything overtly unkind. In coaching I call this symptom a slippery brain, when a woman will come and say things like it's not like I'm broke. I know I'm fine financially, but I still freeze when I check my account. So this sentence of it's not like I'm broke has been interpreted by the neuroceptive self as, yes, you are broke, but the conscious mind doesn't let you acknowledge that pain. So the only thing that comes up is that slippery sense of I don't know what's wrong.
Speaker 1:Or they may also say it's not like I think my friend doesn't care. But I get this pit in my stomach whenever we part ways, whenever she doesn't reply to me, it's the same sentence. It's not like I think my friend doesn't care, when really your neuroceptive self is saying I think my friend doesn't care, when really your neuroceptive self is saying exactly that your friend doesn't care. My clients will say things to me like it's not like I think my husband means to hurt me. I just feel a wave of sadness after he walks away. It's not like I think I'm gonna fail, I just can't sit down and do the studying.
Speaker 1:And the clients are not confused, they are just trying to speak from the aware self, the one that trained to be mature, fair, rational, measured, the one that was trained to make sense and hide the pain. This self explains things very well. It gives people the benefit of the doubt. It avoids appearing needy or unreasonable. So if you come to me in coaching saying it's not like I think I can't travel alone, it's not like I think that I can't afford this or that I know in the background, that's exactly what your neuroceptive mind is making things mean.
Speaker 1:But your aware self is what hides it, just because it wants to hide the message that admitting to the husband not paying attention or the friend not responding or you not being rich enough to have the next travel adventure, the aware and conscious mind is going to suppress these painful stories. So then I have to coach on a condition I call the slippery brain, where the sentence start with it's not like fill in the blanks when the answer is it's exactly like that. So how it's working is that your neuroceptive self creates a painful narrative and you feel it before you can craft a narrative or words about it. But what comes out of your mouth is he's probably tired and you convince yourself that it's probably my old patterns. And what gets labeled as emotional reactivity is very often your neuroceptive self begging to be heard before she gets silenced by logic. And if you constantly override this felt sense, if you explain away the hurt without acknowledging it, you miss the opportunity to heal this slippery mind.
Speaker 1:Business is very tricky because it's the part where you're thinking that doesn't lie but slides too quickly into explanations. It rushes past the pain and lands in neat conclusions that keep you and everyone else comfortable. Well, it keeps you comfortable on the surface, but underneath you do have emotional turmoil that needs to be dealt with, and this is why many brilliant, thoughtful, spiritually committed women feel stuck. Brilliant, thoughtful, spiritually committed women feel stuck because their neuroception is still on very high alert and they have not been able to interpret those messages. The only thing they have done is trained themselves to explain away the alert before it can be honored. But the body, as it relates to your neuroception, does not want a tidy answer. It wants to be believed. Neuroception does not want a tidy answer. It wants to be believed, it wants to be witnessed, it wants to be led. That's what real healing is Not rewiring your story constantly so it sounds better, but slowing down enough to hear what your body felt first.
Speaker 1:If you're the kind of person who enjoys travel, the version who relaxes on a trip, all of a sudden you're a person who wears brighter colors, take up more space, you feel like yourself again. You say things like this is so relaxing, I'm so easy going when I'm traveling. I didn't realize how much I needed this. In this case, your neuroceptive self is finally registering safety from your environment. She feels the absence of clutter, of being needed, of keeping everything together, and interprets it as safety. She notices that your time is yours. Your surrounding of novelty, lightness and space is something to be accepted and liked and enjoyed. Your nervous system, the neuroceptive self, doesn't call it vacation or a trip. It codes it as relief.
Speaker 1:The reason I wanted to give this example for neuroceptive self is the danger is, if you don't recognize what's really going on, you'll start to believe that your everyday life is a problem If you're not constantly traveling, you're at home, stuck. That your home is a prison, that your routine is suffocating, that your marriage is draining, that your obligations are too much, that your only access to aliveness is to leave and escape. And you won't say it that way. What you'll say is I just need a break. I'm looking forward to my next vacation already. What your body means is I don't feel safe in the life I've created. And that's what needs to be addressed, because you're welcome to take all of the vacations and all of the trips you want, but if you use them as an escape, your body will always have that sense of dread and this contrast becomes a trap.
Speaker 1:If you don't address it. You start chasing environments that signal freedom because they make your body feel like opposite of what it usually does Not responsible, not observed, not tight. You scroll Airbnbs like it's a lifeline and you plan trips not because you want to explore, not because for the love of it, but because you want to escape that neuroceptive self that detects danger. In the now. The relief of travel is very real, the aliveness is real. But if you don't realize that your neuroceptive self is doing the work, you will start building an entire identity around needing to be somewhere else to be okay, and that in itself is not true, because you can create safety exactly where you are, and that is the whole work.
Speaker 1:If you don't come to this recognition, your real life becomes the enemy. You resent your children's needs, you resent work, your colleagues, your routine. It is never your location that changes you. It is always your nervous system responding to cues that changes you. If you can learn to decode those cues, you can learn what your neuroception loves about certain places and learn how to recreate those signals inside your daily life, even if they're on a microdose level. The question that needs your attention is can you bring home the version of you who exists when you're away. Can you teach your nervous system the same level of safety when you're folding laundry or when you're paying bills? How are you going to get to feel the freedom inside devotion, inside the life you've already chosen?
Speaker 1:You can train your neuroceptive self not through lectures but through felt experience. The sigh of a parent, a slam of a door, an unpredictable mood of a caregiver all of that brings early childhood programming into you. Then neuroceptive self when it interprets things it says love can disappear without warning. Being seen is risky. Connection always ends in rejection. Silence means danger and as an adult, you go through your entire life believing that those things are absolute truths. And I have a podcast on imprints exactly for this reason, because these repeated patterns become imprints, very deeply wired subconscious beliefs that seem like truth, repeated on a somatic level, absorbed over and over by your nervous system. And now, as an adult, even if your relationships are stable, even if you have an abundant financial life, even if you're trying your level best to be spiritually sound and faithful, your body might still be on alert. This is why so many high-functioning women are exhausted. They're constantly trying to fix something in the present that's actually coming from the past. Your neuroceptive self is a beautiful design, but all you have to start thinking and believing is that you're no longer a child, you're no longer in survival mode. Your neuroceptive self still expects to be blamed, abandoned, dismissed and hurt, but that isn't necessarily always what's going to happen.
Speaker 1:Your felt sense of safety is not anywhere else. It's inside your relationship with your body. Safety is not anywhere else. It's inside your relationship with your body. It's inside your relationship with Allah SWT, and when you rebuild that relationship, your entire life begins to respond to it. With that, I pray to Allah SWT. O Allah, the turner of hearts and the knower of what is hidden, turn my inner signals towards peace. Soften my reflexes of fear and replace them with a sense of safety that you have provided me through your mercy, ya Allah, replace my survival with the gentleness that is around me, my constant fears with the thoughts of your memory and your dhikr. Replace my confusion with clarity of trusting you. O Allah, ameen, ya Rabbul Ameen, please keep me in your du'as. I will talk to you guys next time.