Occupational Therapist Kelly Mahler on Understanding & Supporting Kids’ Interoception Experience

Debbie:

Hey Kelly, welcome to the podcast.

Kelly Mahler:

Thanks for having me, Debbie. I’m excited to be here.

Debbie:

Yeah, I’m really excited to get into this. I always get very excited when I’m bringing a brand new topic to the show. I’m kind of embarrassed that we haven’t discussed interoception as a full theme yet. But it’s time and you’re the perfect person to talk with about interoception. Before we get into it, I always ask guests to kind of give me a little bit of their story or who they are in the world and kind of connect that to your personal why. Why is this the work that you do and that you care about so much?

Kelly Mahler:

Yeah, that’s a good question, a very big question. But I am an occupational therapist by trade. I’ve been practicing for 21 years. Professionally, I’ve always been really interested in supporting mental health, sensory processing, and emotion regulation. Those were my three biggies, even from a young baby OT who really had no idea what I was doing. But I just knew I was interested in those areas. And as I grew and supported lots of clients in these areas, I always felt like there was something missing, but I had no idea what it was until I learned about interoception. And interoception has completely changed the last decade of my career and how I support my clients. And on a personal level, interception has completely changed my own life. I am so much more connected to my body. I understand myself a lot better. I am a work in progress in many areas, including interception. But I also am a parent to a 13 year old and a 15 year old girl. So I am thick in parenting and feeling lots of feels, which is what interception is all about.

Debbie:

That’s great. Yeah. 13 and 15 year old girls is a very real experience, I imagine.

Kelly Mahler:

Yeah, the rumors are true. Like the hormones and the big feelings and oh my, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but yeah, it is, like you said, it’s real.

Debbie:

Yeah, and a lot of opportunity to practice all the skills and kind of up level, right?

Kelly Mahler:

Absolutely. Yeah, it has been teaching me a lot about my own experience in the world. It’s been an incredible for sure.

Debbie:

Yeah, that’s awesome. So my tendency is I want to just kind of dive in and go really deep and I’m gonna just calm my brain down and say, let’s start with the basics because I don’t want to assume that everyone knows what interoception actually is. I don’t even know that I could give a great definition right now. So could you explain what it is for us?

Kelly Mahler:

Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, it’s kind of like a boring and fancy word, but the meaning behind it tends to be a little bit more practical, I would say. Interoception is a sense within all of our bodies and its main job is to help us to experience our inner sensations. So we all have very different inner sensations we might be noticing, but maybe if you’ve ever experienced like the feeling of like an empty stomach or a full bladder and you just gotta go, you gotta go. Or the way your body feels when you’re anxious or the way your body feels when you’re excited. Like all of those internal sensations, we’re experiencing them because of this sense we call interoception. So being able to notice our body sensations, understand what they mean, provides really important clues to helping us know not only what our body needs in the moment, like maybe our body needs food or it needs sleep or it needs, you know, I need to take a walk because I’m anxious. It also provides us with valuable clues to like our emotions, like what exactly are we feeling so that we know what to do to take care of our body.

Debbie:

So, and you were working as an OT and you talked about, I was picturing you as this young out of school occupational therapist working with these SPT kids. And I still have a very soft spot in my heart for Chris Johnson who worked with our family for years back when my kid was little. So I think about sensory processing and interoception. Is interoception kind of like under the umbrella of sensory processing or how does it kind of fit in with that?

Kelly Mahler:

Yeah, that’s a great question actually. It’s something that we’re still trying to figure out. We know that interception is the eighth sense. So it’s part of sensory processing. How it exactly fits in with sensory processing differences remains to be seen. We need to definitely have so much more research in the area of interception. We’ve learned a lot in the last 20 years, but it’s a relatively new field compared to all of our other sensory systems. But we also know that all of our senses work together to help us navigate every single thing we do and interception now is just another way that we understand how sensory, our sensory systems support our daily living. So yeah, I think we have some nice guesses about how interception fits in with it, but we don’t know for sure.

Debbie:

And so you said that you’ve really spent the last decade doing this and that this is a relatively new field. I’m just even curious how you came to learn about it and what was kind of like the thing that really connected and you had, oh, like it clicked for you that this is the thing. Can you talk a little bit about that discovery for you?

Kelly Mahler:

Yeah, I read a paper by this brilliant neuroscientist named Dr. Bud Craig, who has recently passed, but he just has contributed so much to our world. And he was studying interoception in his lab and started publishing papers on this sense. And the neuroscience community just went wild over his ideas. And so I was reading his first paper that he published on the topic. And I just thought, wow, this is really interesting. There’s a sense that he called it the physiological condition of our body, how we understand the condition of our body. And I thought, well, gosh, that’s not, I was body focused in a way, but when I was supporting mental health and motion regulation, it was a lot of cognitive strategies. We would teach all these coping strategies and like, okay, when you notice you’re frustrated, then take deep breaths or like here’s your five point scale. And when you get to a three, like do this, like these are all cognitive based therapies. Like I wasn’t really incorporating the body and I just started wondering like, well, I wonder like if there’s people that are really disconnected to these body sensations, if they’re so important in letting us know how we feel. Like, so I am a very curious person. In fact, my husband calls me the interviewer. I love to ask lots of questions. And so I went right to my clients and their families and started asking a lot of questions about their bodies. What are they noticing in their body? You know, all these different questions and came to discover through these conversations that interception was a really big deal for them. A lot of them were very disconnected to their inner world. They weren’t noticing those body signals letting them know when they were getting anxious or when they were getting hungry. Parents were reporting like, yeah, like I have to remind my kid to eat every day, or he doesn’t notice when he’s sleepy, or he doesn’t notice when he’s getting overwhelmed, or she’s getting overwhelmed, and she’s all of a sudden surprised by a meltdown. They’re just coming out of nowhere. So it really became clear that there was a lot of people very disconnected from their bodies, and this has been since fast forward 10 years very well documented in research, as well as lots of people with lived experience are talking about this.

Debbie:

It’s so fascinating. And now I’ve been writing notes as you’re talking, and I could go in many different directions. First of all, just to kind of back up, I think it’s really interesting, this five-point chart. I’m remembering the zones of regulation are like, where are you in your body? And is your engine running really fast? Well, then it’s time to do this. And I’m like, you’re expecting a six-year-old human to know how to do that? Like, I don’t even know how to do that. So I’d love to kind of explore this a little more. So you gave a couple examples, not knowing when you’re hungry, perhaps, or when you’re sleepy. Can you talk more about that disconnection piece and what it might look like in kids and what might be going on with the kids? you know, neurodivergence, neurobiology that is making that disconnection kind of so pervasive.

Kelly Mahler:

Yeah, so I hear two good questions there. So I’ll start with like kind of the underlying disconnect. And we talk about that more formally as what we call like, intraceptive awareness extremes. So we know that we all have a certain level of awareness of our bodily sensation. So there’s this range of awareness. Some of us might be more aware, some of us might be less aware, but then there’s these extreme end points on that range of awareness.

So we know that for some people they have a muted inner experience where they just completely miss body signals. Like they just never notice they’re hungry or never notice they’re full or never notice they’re sleepy or overwhelmed. Or for some people that have been muted in our world, they do notice body signals, but only when they get to a really big point. So my like my teenagers, my teenage clients talk about like hangry, right? Like so they don’t know, they only notice that their body needs food when they are like hangry and it’s an emergency feeling like I need food right now. Or they only notice they’re getting overwhelmed when they’re in a meltdown. So it’s a little too late to be able to self-regulate. You’re required, you’re relying on those caregivers in your world to meet your body’s needs. And then if I’ll just shift over to the other end of that range of awareness really quick, because this is the side of the range of awareness that we don’t talk a lot about we’re trying to get better at this, but it’s where people have an intense inter-ceptive experience where they might notice a lot of different body signals happening at once. They describe their inner world as like chaotic. They’re not sure which body signal to pay attention to, what is important right now, what does this all mean to my body? Or they might have like one or two body signals that are so intensely strong that it’s just distracting from everything else. And the biggest example, I always give this example because it’s probably one of the most poignant examples is a client I supported a few years ago who every time he ate a meal, he could feel that meal moving through his digestive tract and digesting. So that was a really intense experience. Yeah, it was really hard for him to shift his attention away from that sensation to everything else in his world.

So we have these IA extremes that many people are talking about. They are documented in literature, so they exist. What do they look like on a practical level, I think you were asking, like how can parents or even professionals see some of this? Definitely, like, toileting is a huge clue for me. Like, if someone is experiencing any bowel or bladder differences, I want to get curious about their interceptive awareness. It doesn’t mean that interception is the only thing at play, but it makes me highly curious. Because if you think about like from your own personal world, like how do you know when you need to go to the bathroom? It’s usually a sensation coming from our body because of interception, right? And you might be able to feel the difference between needing to pee and needing to poop because that’s oftentimes a different sensation in people’s body the eating we have already talked about, but if your child’s not seeking out food or they’re not noticing they’re hungry until they’re hangry, or maybe they could even be really sensitive or that feeling of hunger can be really intense. So they are a frequent grazer eater and they need food in order to function. Thirst is a big one too. Are they seeking out drinks and staying hydrated? Body temperature, another big one I hear from parents a lot, like their child might not notice when their body is getting overheated or when they’re cold and they could go out like in the winter, you know, with no clothes on and seemingly like not even notice the way their body feels. And then we also have like all of what we call the affective emotion signs where like your kids might be memorizing emotion regulation programs, but they can’t put it into place like in the moment like you need interception, you need to notice the way your body feels in order to know like when it’s time to use a coping skill that you’re learning. They might not notice when they are, you know, getting overwhelmed, they miss those subtle signals, and then they’re just surprised by shutdown, by meltdowns, etc. There’s a lot of other clues, but hopefully that gives you some ideas.

Debbie:

Yeah, and it gave me like 10 more questions. Just one question before we kind of pivot, I wanna talk more about ADHD, autism, and kind of a relationship between those neurodifferences and interoception differences or challenges. I’m not sure what the right word is. But you, as you’re describing this, I wrote down sensory seeker, sensory avoider. Like, that’s kind of where my brain automatically goes. Like, in my…Is there really no connection or can you use those kind of, I don’t know why I’m like, I’m stuck on this SPD thing, but that’s just been a way I’ve been interpreting and understanding sensory experiences for so long. But is it kind of, can it be akin to that?

Kelly Mahler:

Yeah, I mean, again, we don’t have the scientific backing yet, but I definitely think there’s a connection. Like, for example, if someone is a sensory seeker, they’re obviously noticing something in their body that they’re just innately responding to. We want to help and empower each child and adult to understand, okay, like, what are you feeling in your body? How are the things that you’re seeking out? Like how  is your body feeling when you’re seeking these things out? Is it a regulating experience for you? Or can we find maybe even some more experiences that could be potentially even more regulating to you? Because we know that some sensory seekers, when they’re seeking out that input, it is regulating to their body, and it works. But other times, they seek and seek and seek, and it’s just not meeting their body’s needs. For sensory avoiders, again, I think we could say the same thing, like respectful guessing, especially for kids that can’t yet tell us. Like, they probably, they are responding in a way that is based on the way their body feels. They might again not understand exactly what’s happening. And as they grow, we want them to help. We want to help empower them with like information. I’m like, what exactly is your body responding to, for example, in this environment? Is it the bright lights? Is it, you know, the loud noises? And many times my clients, they know that a certain situation is overwhelming and they want to avoid it, but they’re not sure exactly what in that environment is causing them distress. And that’s what the interception work a lot of times is all about, is just discovering that about your body so that you can be your own advocate. You can improve your self-regulation skills.

Debbie:

Okay, that’s great. So I wanna talk a little bit about ADHD and autism. I mean, those are the things that are coming to mind for me that it seems like there would be a high co-occurrence of interoception challenges and those neurodifferences. Could you talk more about that? Cause I think about even like ADHD, sometimes that hyper-focus means you’re not paying attention to anything else. So can you talk about that relationship?

Kelly Mahler:

Yeah, that relationship is supported in published research that ADHDers, autistic people, do have higher chances of having these introspective differences. But more importantly, like, my work is largely based on lived experience and reports of lived experience. And I know a lot of my clients, my neurodivergent colleagues, friends, etc., they do talk very widely about the impact of these introspective differences. And we know loosely, and again, this is another area that we need more research that there are people born into this world, including neurodivergent people that just are wired, interoceptively differently. Like they might just be born with IA extremes, like a muted or an intense inner experience, but what we also know is that, um, the interception experience can be derailed, um, through lived experience. So whether someone’s experiencing trauma, and that can even be neurodivergent trauma, which we talk a lot about is a little bit an expanded version of the traditional causes of trauma that we might talk about. Also neurodivergent people tend to be, have higher exposure to things like gaslighting and misunderstandings and invalidation of their inner experience. So people like, and I have to say, like, I am guilty of some of these things, like I was trained to label my clients emotions that will help them understand how they’re feeling. So I would walk around saying like, Oh, it looks like you’re getting frustrated right now. Right now. How can I help? Like, and when what we’re finding is that when we label someone else’s experience, we’re at high risk of being wrong. So if you are a neurodivergent people, or person where someone is continually labeling your emotions, and you’re like, wait, that’s not like what I’m feeling, you start to doubt yourself, you start to like, develop this body mistrust you you’re like, well my inner experience must be wrong If all these other people are saying it’s one thing and I feel like it’s another Or people say things like and again, I think it’s out of love and you know encouragement sometimes but it’s like oh you’re fine It’s not that loud in here. We’ll get through it, you know, that’s like really invalidating to a person’s experience so again, they begin to doubt themselves they do they start to like disconnect sometimes even from their body. Like their body is still responding, but they’re masking how hard it is because everyone around them is saying like, it’s no big deal. You should just be fine with this. I’ve said a lot of things. I’ll take a break there. There’s a lot of things that can derail. Can I say one more thing that derails the interception experience? Compliance approaches. Like, so behaviorism, and this is, you know, rampant everywhere, even in parenting, but compliance approaches condition us to ignore our body’s needs in order to please other people. So day in and day out, all of us are subjected to these compliance approaches, but neurodivergent kids are some of the highest people that will be exposed to compliance approaches on a daily basis. And like, oh, sit still and get your token, even though their body’s saying, I need to move in order to do well in school, you know, conditioning day in and day out to ignore the body to please other people.

Debbie:

Yeah, I mean, this, the example that’s coming to mind for me kind of that maybe listeners, if they haven’t experienced this specifically could, um, could relate to is this idea of where so many of us are taught not to listen to our body signals, like you finish the food on your plate or you want the dessert. So you eat it even though your body is like, um, I’m totally done here. So, um, yeah, so I can see how we’re just like kind of like training ourselves to ignore what’s really going on. And that is kind of terrifying actually. Like when you think about all those examples you gave, especially with the emotional labeling, that is such a big thing, especially if you have a younger child who struggles with emotional regulation, with maybe reading social cues, with expressing their feelings in a quote unquote appropriate way or whatever. We’re always trying to name that. Like I’m remembering charts. Like, pointing at, you know, that kind of thing. So it’s, this is kind of blowing my mind a little bit, all that to say. I wanna talk a little bit about what we actually do and how we support kids. And we’ll do that right after this quick break. This is so fascinating to me. Okay. Sorry, let me just look at my notes here because I am scribbling everywhere.

Kelly Mahler:

Yeah.

Debbie:

Okay, so I know that your work is centered around supporting families and educators and really understanding how to, you know, be aware of the, the IA stands for Interoceptive Awareness. Is that right? Okay, just so I got that right. So and I’m thinking this must look different at different ages because if you’re starting with a young kid, you’ve got kind of maybe like a blank or slate. I don’t know if that is appropriate to say, but if you’re working with an older kid who maybe has been on the receiving end of some of these more compliance-based, behavioral-based approaches, and they are really even more cut off, perhaps, than their internal experience than they were before, that must look really different. So again, I’ve just asked three questions, but could you start by maybe telling us how do we even begin to support a child who has poor IA in kind of developing those skills.

Kelly Mahler:

Yeah, so I’ll give you some of my favorite like practical strategies. So first for caregivers, I encourage you if you feel safe enough to do so to start talking out loud about the way your body feels, just putting that interception vocabulary out there modeling that your body is important to pay attention to. And doing so in a way that emphasizes inner differences. We, we talk about a lot, like it’s just how highly unique each of our introspective experiences can be. And so like what your body feels like when you’re hungry is probably different than what your child’s body feels like when they’re hungry. So if you have the luxury of multiple people talking out loud about the way their bodies are feeling and pointing out like, look how different we all are, you’re sending a message to your child, like that there’s no right way to feel like their way is the right way. So that can be really helpful to just kind of get the ball rolling and then as your child Might be ready for it start inviting that curiosity to their body. So instead of labeling and assuming to understand their experience. One of the things I love to do is I wonder statements, So like I see you like dancing back and forth and wiggling your body. I wonder what that means I wonder what you’re feeling in your body so just using I wonder statements and you might not get a response and that’s okay. It’s a curiosity statement without expectation of response. You’re just nurturing that curiosity. Or I see you doing this with your hands, like I wonder what that means. But what we’re trying to really do is nurture that body curiosity during times of play and regulation. I wouldn’t recommend it, in fact, this could work for some people, but usually this work isn’t successful when you start during periods of dysregulation. Because I don’t know many people that want to pay attention to their body when it doesn’t feel good. Like, you know, it’s uncomfortable when we’re dysregulated many times. So we want to make sure we’re doing it during times of play. So there’s lots of opportunities to invite your child to notice their body, like when they’re washing their hands or when you’re running around on a playground or, you know, just when you’re playing and their body might be experiencing a slightly more intense sensation but in a regulated way and invite them to pay attention to that.

Debbie:

So I’m remembering a time actually in the car on the way home from OT when my kid was maybe five and they, I’m certain they were dysregulated at the time, but they said that they had this bubbly head feeling. And I remember being like, oh, bubbly head. Like that became like an anchor, like, okay, this is what it feels like for you. So I’m realizing that was kind of an example. I don’t know that I did anything with it other than be aware of it. I probably tried to interpret it and figure out what do we do to calm down the bubbly head feeling. I probably went right to fix it mode. But what I’m hearing is that this is really about almost learning a language, like the language of your body. Would you describe it in that way?

Kelly Mahler:

Absolutely. Yes. And I love that example of your child sharing the bubbly head. And for so many of our clients, including my neurodiversion clients, what we’re finding is that bubbly head feeling when they start to be able to connect it and share it with you, that becomes, like you said, the anchor for self-regulation instead of muddying the waters with all these emotion words. I do think emotion words have value when we want to share our experience with other people and have our experience understood. But when we’re just starting out and nurturing the self-regulation, if it’s bubbly head and that’s what we’re using, then let’s go with bubbly head and let’s try to explore different strategies that might increase your bubbly head and make it more intense or decrease your bubbly head and really work with their experience.

Debbie:

And so you said doing this during times of play and regulation, which totally makes sense. I remember my husband suggested I meditate once when I was really angry and I was like, do not tell me to meditate right now, that is a hard pass, you know. So I totally get that. But so is the idea that we’re just over time, like building up that vocabulary and we’re just making it become more and more of the way our kids move through the world is with we’re just growing this awareness. They don’t even have to be cognizant of the fact that they’re doing it, but that we’re like, is it actually happening in our brains or their brains that they’re making connections? And yeah, talk a little bit about what’s happening in our kids’ brains.

Kelly Mahler:

Well, how I talk about it would depend on how old the child is. Like if they’re young, I’m probably just doing it like kind of naturally, implicitly. I’m not like really talking about this is interoception. But as they get older, like I think understanding like that there is the sense called interoception and you know, and what it is and how it can help them is really empowering. And what is happening in the brain when we’re paying attention to how our body feels in a present moment we know that an area of our brain called the insula is shifting, it’s changing. In fact, the insula, first of all, I should say, the insula is the interception center of the brain. It’s where all of our incoming messages about how our body is feeling is being processed. And so for example, people that they’ve studied like the insula of frequent meditators, so body meditators, people that are continually paying attention to how their body feels have thicker insula levels. They have more activity in their insula. And that insula activity and thickness of the insula is shown to improve after a, even like an eight week intervention of body mindfulness. Now that that’s in adults. And so I think the same is true for kids, but we don’t have any brain imaging studies to show what exactly is happening in their brain.

Debbie:

That’s super interesting. And so going back to the maybe older kids who maybe, again, have been on the receiving end of some compliance-based or other-based things that have actually reinforced this disconnection, how would you go about trying to decondition those kids?

Kelly Mahler:

Mm hmm. Yeah, we talk about a lot of times for many people. It’s about undoing before doing so just have a lot of patience Patience is key with this work Keep in mind like if you see someone like if you’re offering like we have a strategy Called focus area experiments where we pick a body part and we do lots of experiments to try to like evoke stronger Sensations in that body part to give practice noticing to give practice describing And if you see hesitation in a child, it most likely has a very real reason. Interceptively, it could just mean they feel unsafe connecting to their body, or they’ve been conditioned to not listen to their body because it’s unsafe to their experience in the world. They survive in a compliance-based method most of the time, they are disconnected from their body. And so it can be a lot of undoing, helping them to feel safe to connect and listen to their body. And a lot of times, some of my older clients, they wanna try to figure out how to give you the right answer. Well, what are my hands feeling right now? What is the right answer? Because they’ve been, again, subjected to all of these approaches that you should A, always be clear on exactly how you feel, and there is always a right way to feel. And sometimes, I did this, I would teach an emotion feels one set way for everyone. Anger means when your heart is racing, when your fists are tight. And that again, it’s not true for everyone. So they’re undoing a lot, a lot of their journey before they can discover their own. But it’s really cool when they start to learn about themselves. And some of our adult clients talk about how validation is some of the, I think one of the best parts of the interception journey is that someone’s actually validating your authentic experience. They’re showing curiosity as to what you’re experiencing and that is powerful stuff.

Debbie:

Mm-hmm. As you were saying that, I’m just thinking like validation seems to be like the, in the neurodivergent space, like the word of the year, because, you know, I’m just I’m sure you’re hearing this too. So many adults are discovering their own neurodivergence, and it’s validating this experience they’ve lived their whole life and didn’t understand. And just to touch and I’m being cognizant of the time, but I do want to just talk about for a moment you know, you talked about adults and you work with adult clients and the importance of parents modeling this for their kids, but so many adults are completely disconnected from their bodies. And it might be the way we grew up, this wasn’t modeled for us most likely by our parents. So is it the same process for parents to get reconnected?

Kelly Mahler:

It is, yes, and I invite parents to do the interception work alongside of their child to say out loud, like, this is hard if it is hard for you, like, or I can’t figure out how my feet feel right now, you know, just demonstrate how tricky it is, because it’s not, interception is not perfect, and, you know, we don’t always know exactly how we feel. That message is out there, though, that we should always know, like where you’re at on your stress thermometer, where you’re at on your five point scale or what zone you’re in. Like not all of us know how we’re feeling at all times. So just, you know, be patient with yourself too. And if you feel safe enough to do so, do the work alongside of your child and talk about how hard it might be. I learned something new about my body every single time I’m doing this work with my own kids, with my clients. It’s just really cool stuff.

Debbie:

So now I want to ask like somatic therapy, body work, like are there, and that’s probably a whole other episode. So I’m not going to ask those questions because I, unless you have a very succinct answer, but do you have a succinct answer about?

Kelly Mahler:

I think those approaches are really targeting the introspective sense, just they don’t sometimes talk about the science behind them. But the interception work that we have developed is really more in line. I mean, I started out in pediatrics, so it’s for kids, but we’re using with adults now, but it’s also very, it’s not as abstract, I would say. It’s like we tried to make it as concrete as possible for those that need more concrete learning like neurodivergent, my neurodivergent clients. So we tried to make a really abstract process as concrete as possible.

Debbie:

Yeah, great. Thank you. And so could you share some of the resources that you have available or you know, listeners, this might be like sparking a lot of ideas and maybe even excitement about how this might support their family. So how do you work with families and what resources do you have available for them?

Kelly Mahler:

Yeah, we have a lot of free resources on my website. So you can check that out at kelly-moller.com. I don’t know if you need me to spell my last name, but it’s M-A-H-L-E-R, but I’m sure it’s in the show notes somewhere. And so check out our free resources. And one of our most popular paid resources is something called the interception curriculum. And it’s being used in like 30 some countries and we’re having such success, both, you know, people reporting their success in their daily lives, but also in research. So that’s something that you can check out. And there’s a lot more professionals starting to get trained in it and using it. So it’s not something like using a curriculum in my family life right now probably wouldn’t go well, but having an outsider therapist support me or educator works really well. So hopefully you can find someone to help support you if that’s something that you need.

Debbie:

Yeah, that’s great. Thank you. And yes, of course, listeners, I will have extensive show notes pages, I have links and Kelly does have a ton of great resources and videos and introductions to concepts on her website. So thank you for that. Any kind of last thoughts? Is there anything I’m sure you’re interviewed all the time that we didn’t touch upon that would be really important for our listeners to know.

Kelly Mahler:

I think we’ve touched on everything. I just hope that the message came across at just how important interoception work can be in all of our lives and that it really represents a paradigm shift of just helping us get more curious about each of our inner worlds.

Debbie:

That’s great. Thank you. Curiosity is like my most favorite word. And I just love getting to chat with people like you who are so in alignment and are Doing this important paradigm. It is paradigm shifting work and it’s just so exciting. So thank you so much for everything you shared today for the work that you do in the world. It was such a pleasure to talk with you.

Kelly Mahler:

Thanks, Debbie.