Body Occupancy
- Jun 26
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 6
Andrew Graham McKay, Lisbon, July 2026
This post is intended for people who may be interested in practicing healing themselves or improving their touch skills in whatever context, it describes a cornerstone of this work. You first need to attain this in yourself then learn to read it/perceive it in another.
Ultimately, occupancy is the word we use to describe a state in which the self is experienced as the registering of sensory information itself in the nervous system. In layman terms, its being aware of what’s happening inside of you or just being inside your body. It's crucial in healing because, once you accept that the thinking mind doesn’t know, it's the only compass you have to guide you. It’s also the case that any change in our mental/emotional composition needs to be anchored in a corresponding change inside the physical body to have a chance of sticking and manifesting in “real” life.
It’s funny how people often express a fascination for “out-of-body” experiences when that’s just how we’ve all lived all of our lives. Here the idea is to facilitate the opposite, the genuine novelty - an “in-body” experience.
Three simultaneous sensory channels
As a rule of thumb, being simultaneously aware of at least three sensory channels is a good metric for occupancy. So if you can feel tactile (the touch of your clothes against your skin), kinaesthesia (the movements of your abdomen and thorax as you allow your body to breathe) and you have auditory (you can hear the ambient noises in the room, both those closer and further from you), all three consistently, without losing one or the other, then congratulations you’re occupied!
Now we want to attain this state without a lot of efforting. There’s a naturalness to it and a flow that comes with experience. You’re allowing yourself to do this. Concentrating mentally doesn’t help.
If you prefer, you can can use other channels as part of your three. Proprioception, locating your body parts in space relative to one another (ie. you can feel where you’re arms and legs are without having to look) is also good. It's great to be aware of olfactory and taste too but they tend to be intermittent so not so good as one of your three, let them come and go. If you are using vision, it has to include peripheral vision, or more specifically, that you are seeing the whole of your visual field without prioritising any part of it. We tend to habitually prioritise the central field to the exclusion of the rest.* Allowing your eyes to be gently unfocused may help, closing them altogether is also good option.
You may experience a hint of synesthesia. The feeling that sensory data is all being processed in the the same way regardless of the channel from which it came. You can hear colour or touch sound, you can hear through the skin of your whole body (not just with your ears) etc. Here we’re entering into a perceptual world which is the norm for babies and young infants and may somehow also feel strangely familiar to you.
It might be helpful to point out here that that gravity is your friend, so along with the other senses, you are aware of the weight of your body - your butt on the chair, the soles of your feet on the floor etc.
This is a non-mental state, in which you feel centred and present. You are able to move and talk and function normally. You feel more at home here, more present, more yourself than when you are in your mind.
If this is painful/uncomfortable for you, or brings up process, or makes you dizzy or feel weird, then you are working on yourself. That’s great, keep going and when you can get occupied and have it be a comfortable, even enjoyable, experience then you’re ready to consider working with others. Don’t be hard on yourself if this starts out as difficult, there is absolutely no cultural understanding or reference for western people here, you’re breaking new ground.
So from this place of occupancy being no big deal, you'll soon be ready to contact/touch another person. Just be sure that nothing changes when you do. In other words, you don’t suddenly go into performance or feel that you have to do something for/to them, give something to them/take something from them, that you don’t feel that you are going to be judged or that you are going to judge, you will be touching from a place of curiosty with no agenda, with unconditional neutrality.**
Being a healer is much much more about occupying your own body than it is about doing something to someone else. In fact you could say that the act of healing is perceiving occupancy (or lack thereof) in the the body of another without losing it in yourself.
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*Information from our central visual field tends to be processed by the primary visual cortex, a small area at the back of the brain which is linked to fight and flight responses and judgment/projection. The peripheral field tends to be processed by the much larger secondary visual cortex which happily is free from such associations.
**This doesn't mean that you don't care, or that you distance yourself or anything like that, it just means that you're OK with whatever happens and that you're clear about your responsibilities.
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Practise Exercises
If you have a quiet place and some time when you know you're not going to be disturbed, try experimenting with the following. In a relaxed position, sitting upright on a chair/stool...
Choose three sensory channels and see how long you can hold them simultaneously in your awareness. Try a different combination of three. Can you hold more than three?
How familiar does proprioception feel to you? Do you normally include it in your experience of yourself?
Can you find the edges of your visual field? Which areas of your visual field are you habitually prioritising/excluding? Can you see the whole room?
Do you feel very different depending on whether your eyes are open or closed? Can you allow it to feel much the same?
