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Why do you no longer trust yourself?
Using the PIE framework to build your own inner expertise.
Welcome to Stretch—I’m Charlotte, a Breath Science and Body-Oriented Coach. My mission is to live my life to the fullest potential of my brain and body, and to inspire you do the same!
⏪ Your imagination can work for you, or against you. Given our hardwired negativity bias, if you don’t train it, it’s likely working against you. In previous Stretch, we dug into the skill of visualization and how to use it to finally make progress on your goals.
⏩ In this Stretch, I’m sharing a simple framework to explore your nervous system, and discover senses you likely didn’t know you had. Let’s stop relying on experts so much (it’s exhausting!) and start developing our own inner expertise.
In 2025, the most useful question is not “Which expert should I trust?” The more powerful question is: “Why do I no longer trust myself?"
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, one of the top UK podcast hosts, talking about the importance of becoming an expert on your own body and nervous system.
I have long stopped following podcasts and am very selective in what I listen to, simply because the sheer volume of “expert advice” has become absolutely overwhelming.
I mean, just look at this:


These are two of the most listened to podcasts in the UK.
STOP THIS.
DO THAT.
YOU’RE A LOSER IF YOU DO X. YOU’LL NEVER MAKE IT OF YOU DON’T DO Y.
YOU’LL PROBABLY DIE IF YOU… Aaahhhh!!
It’s insanity. No wonder we’re all lost and confused, desperately grasping for vagus nerve massage oils and energy bracelets.
I vividly remember scrolling through one of these podcast libraries, saving one episode after the other to “one day listen to.” I suddenly saw myself as if outside of my body—my face and body tense, hunched over my phone, feeling anxious and overwhelmed—and realised this needed to change. But that’s a story for another time (or for right now if you want to read more about it here.)
The story for today is about learning how to listen to ourselves. How to focus less on external input, and focus more on our internal experience.
Our bodies are astonishingly deep sources of information, and when we learn to listen to them properly, everything shifts. I've experienced it firsthand, through breathwork and movement. It's been pretty incredible and I've never felt as certain, clear and creative as in the last couple of years.
So how do you develop this self-trust? Where do you start?
Even that can be an overwhelming question, I know. There’s just so much advice out there.
Here’s a very simple framework to start with. You don’t need anything or anyone, just your body.
🥧 The Presence PIE
I’ve just learned about this framework in my Body-Oriented Coaching training (*) at The Somatic School.
Listening to our body requires presence. We do that by focusing on these innate sensory systems we all have access to:
🍅 Proprioception: How am I holding myself?
🥕 Interoception: How am I feeling inside?
🥒 Exteroception: What am I noticing around me?
Let’s slide into each piece (please indulge me with this pie analogy a little bit longer!)
(*) If you’d told me a few years ago I’d train to become “a coach”—I’d have massively cringed. Now, I know this training is going to be a superpower for the rest of my life!
Proprioception
This is the unconscious perception of movement and spatial orientation, often called our "body position sense."
It works through sensory input from skin, fascia, muscles, and joint receptors to help us understand where our body is in space
A simple and effective way to explore proprioception is to:
close your eyes
raise both hands above your head
then touch the fingertips of your opposite hand
and then attempt to touch your nose with your index finger
Your ability to sense position of your hands, fingers and nose with your eyes closed—that’s proprioception.
You tap into this sensory system by asking yourself:
How am I holding myself?
How am I sitting?
Where are my feet in relation to my knees?
Where are my hands in relation to my shoulders?
How is my posture?
Interoception
Have you ever felt your stomach growl? Your head pound? Your heart race? Your eyes grow heavy?
Your ability to notice, sense and understand these feelings in your body is called interoception.
Much more detail here but basically: lots of research shows that people with higher interoceptive capacity are better able to regulate their emotions and better at making decisions, simply because they’re able to spot what’s going on in their body very quickly.
So to train your interoceptive skills, you start by simply paying attention and asking yourself:
How am I breathing right now?
Can I notice my heartbeat? Does it feel fast or calm?
Is there any tension anywhere in my body?
Am I hungry or thirsty?
What else do I notice when I turn my attention inward?
A fun fact: the vagus nerve (the longest nerve in our body) has 80% afferent nerves (sending info from the body to the brain) and 20% efferent nerves (sending info from the brain to the body). So there’s A LOT of information coming from the body that impacts our state of mind. When we learn how to tap into this flow of information, everything shifts.
If you’re a very rational, skeptical person (like I am): read this.
Exteroception
Exteroception is all about processing stimuli from the outside environment through sight, sound, smell, taste and touch—the five senses we know so well.
We tend to put a lot of focus and priority on the visual system and need to put in conscious effort to activate our other senses as well:
As I bring my attention out, what do I notice?
What can I hear?
What can I smell?
What am I aware of in my surroundings?
What do I notice as I perceive this person in front of me?
I love these Expanding Awareness cues I learned from Michael Ashcroft to use my senses to further expand my awareness.
↪️ If there were an aircraft going 10,000 ft overhead, just check that you could hear it.
Could is an important word here. Don’t look up or imagine a plane, but become aware of the space above you. Do you feel that space opening up?
You can do the same with the space behind and around you.
↪️ If there were a conversation happening in the other room, just check that you could hear it. Listen for the furthest away sound you can hear in any direction.
These are simple triggers to expand your awareness to the space above and around you, creating that feeling of expanded awareness—keeping you present in the here and now.
Baking your own Presence PIE
So how do you now use this?
I recommend taking a couple minutes every morning, or throughout the day, to run through these sensory systems.
You start with just a few cues, so it doesn’t become overwhelming. Pick the ones you like. It could look like this:
What’s my posture like? What does my body feel like right now?
How’s my breathing? Any tension anywhere?
What can I see, hear and smell?
Write these out on a post-it, until the sequence becomes automatic. This could literally take as little as 30 seconds.
Now, this is simple but not easy.
This takes effort, and consistent practice. Most people won’t have the patience to do this. Sitting still, even for just 30 seconds, eyes closed and focusing on the body, has become an impossible task for most.
It’s not our fault necessarily. We live in a fast-paced, hyper-vigilant world, constantly checking our phones, looking at our watch, moving fast. Our attention and focus have become so fragmented that sitting in a chair and just breathing makes us feel unproductive and guilty, maybe even physically uncomfortable.
But I promise you it does get easier as you practice.
And the more you do it, the more attuned you become to your body. Over time, you even start craving those little moments of just sitting and sensing.
I’ve experienced this over the last couple of years. (I’ve been using breathwork, meditation and movement without knowing the helpful PIE acronym yet.)
I used to be incredibly overstimulated, reactive and anxious.
Now, as soon as I spot an unhelpful, repetitive, or self-sabotaging thought, I know what to do:
Focus on my breath.
I don’t try to think my way through. I don’t resist. I don’t argue. I don’t feel bad for myself. I don’t look up a video on YouTube on what to do.
I’ve become increasingly masterful at noticing subtle elevations in my anxiety (thank you Interoception!) and then shifting to a deep, slow breathing. I just focus on the air going in and out through my nose, the slow rise and fall of my belly.
I shift my awareness from collapsed (what’s right in front of me—usually a screen) to expanded (what can I hear, smell, feel, see, and touch in all directions around me?)
And that does feel unnatural at first. We’re so conditioned to believe that “more thinking” and DOING DOING DOING is the answer to everything. How can focusing on my breath and body be helpful in any way?
I think this is where you have to take a bit of a leap of faith and trust in your biology. Trust in the science. Experiment with it so you can experience it for yourself. And a simple, easy, low-stakes way to do that is… the PIE framework 🥧🙂
I help fast-moving professionals reconnect with their nervous systems and these inner sensory systems to build resilience and manage stress. Here are all the details of my 8-week Breath Science and Body-Oriented Coaching program.

What else I’m up to…
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