From Phone Coaching to Interoception: What Teaching Without Seeing Revealed to Me the Body

Sometimes, old objects remind us of who we used to be.

Not long ago, I found an old yoga practice fan in storage. It was basic, with illustrated poses, simple anatomy, safety tips, and short routines for daily use. There was nothing fancy about it—no app, no algorithmic approach, and no AI customization.

Holding it took me back to the early 2000s, when I was leaving the business world and starting a career in health and wellness.

Before Yoga Therapy.
Before graduate school.
Before, people in yoga started using neuroscience language regularly.

I began as a personal trainer and fitness coach because it permitted me to use my strengths in leadership, organization, communication, planning, systems thinking, and discipline in a field that truly interested me.

Yoga eventually became my second modality.

But lately, one detail from those early years keeps coming back to me:

I was teaching people over the phone.

No Zoom.
No cameras.
No demonstrations.
No visual feedback.

Just my voice.

At the time, I did not realize how much I was learning from that experience. I just knew I had to be very clear with my words and help people feel aligned without showing them in person.

I had to listen carefully to pauses, breathing patterns, uncertainty in tone, and the way someone described sensation.

I had to trust that people could develop real movement awareness from within, not just by seeing it.

Now, almost thirty years later, I see that those experiences quietly developed my deep respect for interoception, even before I understood it in scientific terms.

Today, people often define interoception as the ability to notice signals inside the body, like breath, heartbeat, tension, pressure, temperature, gut feelings, emotional changes, and nervous system states. Research now links interoceptive awareness to emotional self-regulation, stress resilience, nociceptive perception, trauma recovery, and self-regulation.

But before it was a neuroscience term, many of us saw it in practice and through experience.

We were watching people learn from themselves.

That difference is important to me now as I teach Anatomy and Kinesiology in Yoga Therapy programs.

One of my biggest challenges as a teacher is helping students slow down enough to really notice:

• Foundational anatomy

• Movement variability

• Compensatory patterns

• Breath behavior

• Nervous system responses

• And the actual experience inside the body.

Now that artificial intelligence is everywhere, students can quickly create pose descriptions, sequences, lists of contraindications, and even explanations that sound clinical. But having information is not the same as truly understanding it in your body.

A student can read about hip flexion.
That does not mean they can recognize guarded movement in a real human being.
They can generate a sequence online.
That does not mean they understand why a client cannot feel their breath.

This is why learning anatomy through experience is so important.

The body is not purely a structure to memorize.
We learn it by building relationships, feeling, observing, adapting, and exploring through our own experience.

Maybe that is why I am still so passionate about teaching interoception, not as a trend, but as something people truly need in both clinical and everyday life.

Because when people begin sensing themselves more clearly, something alters.

Their movement changes.
Their decision-making changes.
Their self-awareness changes.
Sometimes, even their relationship to suffering changes.

Artificial intelligence will likely keep changing healthcare and education in big ways. I am not against new technology. In fact, I often use it myself.

But I also think we need to protect the slower skills, like:
Presence
Discernment
Attentive observation,
Moral judgment
And the ability to truly listen to another human being.

Looking back, teaching people over the phone years ago may have taught me this lesson before I even knew it.