In(tero)ception

What if you are living in a dream someone else created?

“Downward is the only way forward.”

- Dom Cobb

The two big ideas in this article revolve around two unfamiliar words:

“inception”

“interoception”

Most people have likely not heard the second term, “interoception”. Sadly, for all those desperately awaiting the start of football season, the word is not “interception”. But since I mentioned it, the NFL's all-time career interceptions leader is Paul Krause, who recorded 81 interceptions during his 16-year career with the Washington Redskins and Minnesota Vikings.

But I am not referring to that in this article. Toss an ‘o’ in the middle. I’m going to be discussing “interoception”.

The first term - “inception” - is also quite uncommon and unfamiliar. You’d probably be hard-pressed to create a sentence with it. Most people likely know the term because of the film.

Inception is a 2010 science fiction action film written and directed by Christopher Nolan. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a professional thief who steals information by infiltrating the subconscious of his targets.

The film’s plot revolves around a team of “extractors” who steal information through shared lucid dreaming. Dom Cobb (played by DiCaprio) is highly skilled in the dangerous art of extraction. His rare ability has made him a coveted player in the world of corporate espionage, but it has also made him an international fugitive. Cobb is offered a chance at redemption. One last job could give him his life back but only if he can accomplish the impossible, inception.

“Inception” is the act of implanting an idea into someone’s subconscious mind in such a natural way that the subject believes it originated from their own thoughts. Instead of extraction, Cobb and his team of specialists have to pull off the reverse: their task is not to steal an idea, but to plant one.

When Cobb steals information from another person’s mind, he is able to find a vault within the dream that safeguards a person’s most inner thoughts and protected secrets. Likewise, the act of inception requires finding this locked safe within a person’s mind and placing new information inside of it. In order for inception to work, Cobb must establish trust with the target in the real world so they won’t reject him in the dream world.

You might be wondering what Leonardo DiCaprio and Inception have to do with anything. I’m getting there.

{ Note to reader: This article is a rough draft of a book chapter I am currently writing titled, “Decon/Recon”. It’s quite dense and it might be useful to read it in a couple different sittings.}

Last week we started the latest training and certification course for Non-Religious Spiritual Directors and Existential Health Practitioners, through the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality. There are 60 people currently undertaking this 12-month course, which includes training in religious deconstruction and religious trauma counseling. I wrote about this in the article, The Spiritual Emergency: Can we solve the meaning crisis before it's too late?

Lately I have felt the need to plant some flags in the ground of religious deconstruction work. Too often the focus is swapping belief systems—say, trading evangelical Christianity for progressive spirituality or atheism. This can feel liberating at first, but it often leaves the underlying structures of meaning, authority, and identity untouched.

Because Swapping Belief Systems Doesn’t Work

Here are a few reasons why belief-system substitution in religious deconstruction falls short:

⚡Architecture Remains

The architecture of belief—binary thinking, external authority, moral absolutism—often remains intact. The content changes, but the form persists. Someone might reject biblical literalism but cling to its replacement. Post-religious frameworks can replicate religious epistemologies: science as infallible, trauma discourse as dogma, or spiritual bypassing dressed as enlightenment. These are new temples built on old foundations. The architecture often operates within Western, colonial epistemologies—privileging rationality, individualism, and linear progress over relational, cyclical, or indigenous ways of knowing.

⚡Psychological Reinscription

Trauma, shame and fear is stored in the body, not just the mind. It often remains lodged, even if old dogma is discarded and replaced with new beliefs. If not properly addressed, trauma, shame, and fear may simply be re-mapped onto new frameworks. In other words, you simply carry it forward into the next thing.

⚡Identity Dependency

Identity dependency refers to the way one’s sense of self is often entangled and overdetermined with inherited religious frameworks. Swapping beliefs doesn’t always address the deeper dependency, it just shifts it to a new tribe. Dependency on external validation and the search for an identity replacement results in an attachment to a new script. People often simply switch sides from a pro-religion identity to a anti-religion one. Or their identity shifts attachment from being a Christian to being a Buddhist.

⚡Lack of Embodied Integration

Cognitive shifts don’t always translate into somatic healing. The body may still carry the imprint of religious conditioning, even if the mind has moved on. Religious deconstruction is often a rush toward intellectual clarity or ideological repositioning. The lack of embodied integration in religious deconstruction means that while beliefs may shift, the body remains a silent witness to unresolved trauma, ritual absence, lack of structure, and spiritual dislocation. Deconstruction often privileges the mind: theology, philosophy, critique. But the body—where trauma lives—is rarely invited into the process. People may “understand” their religious harm but still suffer from it.

This may be a good spot to offer a short explanation of “somatic healing”. Somatic healing is a body-centered approach to emotional and psychological recovery that recognizes how trauma, stress, and emotions are stored not just in the mind—but in the body itself. It’s rooted in the idea that healing must engage the nervous system, physical sensations, and movement patterns to truly release what’s been “trapped” inside.

Core principles of somatic healing include:

• Mind-Body Connection: Emotions manifest physically—tight shoulders, shallow breath, clenched jaw. Somatic healing helps you tune into these signals.

• Trauma Storage: Trauma can lodge in the body, creating chronic tension, pain, or dysregulation. Somatic practices aim to gently release this stored energy.

• Embodied Awareness: Healing happens through noticing and working with bodily sensations, rather than just talking about experiences.

⚡Colonial Echoes

Belief-swapping can replicate colonial patterns—adopting new systems without metabolizing the cultural, historical, or embodied roots of the old ones. The modern concept of “religion” was shaped by European colonial powers to classify and control indigenous and non-Western spiritualities. Even the concept of “deconstruction” is anchored in European philosophy. This can flatten cultural nuance and e dismissive of indigenous cosmologies or embodied rituals. Even on a secular level, the dream of a “post-religious” world can mirror colonial fantasies of cultural homogenization.

Deeper religious deconstruction requires more than swapping ideologies, including:

🌿Metabolizing inherited frameworks

Not just rejecting them, but composting them—turning dogma into soil for new growth. To metabolize is to:

• Break down inherited structures (beliefs, rituals, roles)

• Extract what’s nourishing (symbolism, community, ethical wisdom)

• Release what’s toxic (shame, control, binary thinking)

• Reintegrate what remains into something embodied, plural, and life-giving

🌿Decentering belief itself

It’s not just about changing beliefs, it’s about questioning the centrality of belief as the axis of spiritual life. This involves moving from belief-as-identity to practice, presence, and relationality.

In post-Enlightenment thought, belief became the cornerstone of religion, especially in Protestant traditions. Faith was reduced to assent to propositions (“I believe X about God”), rather than embodied practice, relationality, or mystery. Even in deconstruction, the conversation often revolves around which beliefs are rejected or retained. But this keeps belief at the center, rather than asking: What if belief isn’t the point?

In high-control religious systems, belief is tied to belonging, salvation, and moral worth. Decentering belief threatens identity itself—unless we build new symbolic, relational, and embodied anchors.

Here are some examples:

🌿Rewilding the sacred

Reclaiming nature, embodiment, and pluralism as sources of meaning beyond institutional religion. It’s not a rejection of the sacred, it’s a re-rooting. A few examples include:

Returns the sacred to the body, the land, and the moment

Decenters institutional authority and reclaims intuitive, relational knowing

Remixes archetypes and rituals from myth, ecology, and ancestral memory

Honors ambiguity, multiplicity, and cyclical time over linear dogma

🌿Creating symbolic lexicons

Designing new rituals, archetypes, and communal languages that honor complexity and mutual liberation. Why symbolic lexicons matter in deconstruction:

• Symbols Outlive Beliefs

Even when doctrines collapse, symbols linger. The cross, the altar, the fire, the veil—these motifs carry emotional and cultural weight. Without intentional reworking, they can trigger trauma or remain inert.

• Language Shapes Reality

Inherited religious language often encodes binaries: pure/impure, saved/lost, male/female, sacred/profane. A symbolic lexicon offers new metaphors that honor ambiguity, multiplicity, and transformation.

• Ritual Needs Symbol

Ritual without symbol is hollow. Symbol without recontextualization is dangerous. A rewilded lexicon allows for ritual design that heals rather than reenacts harm.

The last few months I have published several major articles on religious deconstruction and spiritual reconstruction:

✔️ Love Letters to the Recently Departed: An Ode to Those Done with Religion (Discusses the six places people often find themselves after leaving religion)

✔️ Going Through the Big 'D' and Don't Mean... A Subversive Guide on How to Deconstruct Everything (Covers five mindsets to guide your belief-system deconstruction and reconstruction)

✔️ More-Than-Human Deconstruction: Exploring Nature's Way of Rewilding Spirituality (Examines nature’s way of religious deconstruction and spiritual reconstruction)

✔️ Breaking Bad (Binaries): When Walter White is Your Deconstruction Counselor (Discusses how to apply spectrum thinking to your religious deconstruction process)

✔️ Rewilding A Mary-Less Christianity: Confronting Toxic Religious Patriarchy (Exposes toxic religious patriarchy and how it wounds and victimizes women and men, and how to recover.)

✔️ An Atheist Guide to Spirituality: Rewilding Unbelief as a Post-Religion Pathway (Explores the world of atheist spirituality and what it offers in religious deconstruction and spiritual reconstruction.)

In today’s piece, I want to discuss the issue of “religious inception”, which is an ideological inception. Toxic religious leaders are Dom Cobb types - planting ideas in your mind for the purpose of fulfilling their agenda. Like Cobb, these religious leaders are quite skilled at doing this.

Religious Inception

Religion can function in remarkably similar ways to the dynamics in the film Inception. In the film, the goal is to implant a belief so deeply that the subject thinks it originated from within. Many religious systems do something similar through the following dynamics:

• Early conditioning: Religious ideas are often introduced in childhood, before critical faculties are fully developed, making them feel “natural” or self-evident.

• Layered reinforcement: Through ritual, community, sacred texts, and emotional experiences, beliefs are embedded across cognitive, emotional, and somatic layers.

• Internalized authority: Over time, the belief system becomes self-policing. Doubt feels like betrayal. The implanted idea defends itself.

Religious ideological inception is based on unquestioned trust. A child or young person is prone to implicitly trust their earliest authority figures such as their mother or father, pastor or priest, Sunday School teachers or catechists. Trusting them in the real world translates into faith in the religious dreamworld these figures teach.

Religious inception can also occur with adults. People are often attracted to a faith community because they perceive the benefit of receiving love and belonging. For example, a religious cult often attracts people through “love bombing”. Love bombing creates a euphoric high, especially for those who are vulnerable, grieving, or spiritually hungry.

The initial love becomes a hook. It’s a tactic often coordinated by leadership to flood newcomers with affection and belonging, making it harder for them to leave once they begin to notice control, abuse, or doctrinal rigidity. This mirrors narcissistic abuse cycles, where affection is weaponized to destabilize boundaries and enforce loyalty.

The deeper the layer of indoctrination, the harder it is to distinguish reality from construct. An outside observer may be baffled at how a person might hold and defend a religious view that seems patently absurd, indefensible, and irrational. But through the process of ideological inception, these beliefs become deeply planted and unquestionably accepted as real.

Religion often creates a harmful dreamworld, constructing layered dreamscapes that feel real but are built on flawed logic. Religious dreamworlds are particularly dangerous because they serve as portals to supernaturalism, which can be used nefariously under institutional control.

The scaffolding of religious dreamworlds are often built with many layers. I’ll mention a few.

Mythic literalism

Mythical literalism is the tendency to treat mythic narratives - creation stories, miracles, divine interventions - as historical fact rather than symbolic truth. It’s not just about believing the Earth was made in six days; it’s about collapsing metaphor into dogma.

Mythic literalism transforms open-ended symbols into closed truths. Doubt, nuance, and plural interpretation are seen as threats. Philosophers of religion advocate for metaphorical interpretations of dogma, but institutional religion often resists this, defending literalism as orthodoxy

Some examples include:

➡️ Fixes fluid symbols into literal claims (“Virgin birth” becomes a biological event, not a symbol of radical emergence.)

➡️ Turns archetypes into historical figures (Jesus as mythic redeemer becomes Jesus as only-and-exclusively divine savior.)

➡️ Replaces interpretive play with doctrinal policing (“Resurrection” must be bodily and factual, not metaphorical or mystical.)

Contrary to popular belief, literalism is relatively recent, largely a product of Protestant fundamentalism in the U.S. In traditional exegesis, scripture was read through multiple lenses - literal, allegorical, moral, and mystical. Literalism flattens this richness. Literalism often becomes a tool for control, used to enforce purity codes, gender roles, and eschatological fear.

The religious deconstruction process of critically examining and unraveling inherited beliefs opens up new possibilities. Instead of discarding mythic stories, deconstruction offers the possibility of reinterpreting them as archetypal, poetic, or psychological truths.

For example, take what is commonly referred to as “the Fall”, which is often taught as a real historical event. This literalist interpretation serves as the basis for the Christian doctrine of “original sin”, which is said to result in the estrangement of humankind from God. Virtually every toxic Christian doctrine (i.e. separation from God, human depravity, blood sacrifice, Hell, etc.) is anchored in a literal interpretation of the Adam and Eve story.

Let’s shift from the literalist interpretation to a symbolic one. Rather than “the Fall”, let’s call the story, “The Descent into knowing”.

Rather than a tale of shame and exile, what if it was a mythic invitation to embodied awakening. In this remix, we treat the Eden narrative not as historical failure, but as symbolic rupture: the moment consciousness blooms, the body awakens, and inherited innocence gives way to lived experience.

You could diagram the shift this way:

Mythic literalism is one layer in the formation of harmful religious dreamworlds. Rather than being a launching pad for exploring spiritual truths, the Bible is a landing strip to arrive at rigid religious dogma.

Purity and shame scripts

Religious purity and shame scripts are also a dynamic that fortifies a harmful religious dreamworld. These internalized narratives equate bodily control with spiritual worth. Purity scripts emphasize virginity, modesty, and sexual restraint (especially for women), often tied to divine favor or moral superiority. Shame scripts encode guilt around desire, pleasure, anger, or deviation from religious norms. These scripts often persist even after doctrinal belief fades.

They’re not just ideas - they’re somatic imprints, shaping how people feel in and relate to their bodies. As a result of these scripts many learn to distrust or suppress bodily signals—pleasure, hunger, anger, grief, which results in numbness or disconnection.

The title of this article is “In(tero)ception”. Interoception is your brain’s ability to sense and interpret signals from inside your body. Interoception helps maintain homeostasis, which is your body’s internal balance. It’s also deeply tied to emotional regulation, self-awareness, and mental health.

When religion becomes harmful through body-denying, shame-inducing, or patriarchal frameworks, it can distort this internal sensing system in profound ways. This means that when religion teaches people to distrust, shame, or ignore their bodily signals, it can interfere with their ability to regulate emotions, recognize trauma, or make healthy decisions.

Here’s how damaging religious conditioning might disrupt interoception:

⚡Body Shame: Teachings that frame the body as sinful or impure can lead to dissociation or numbing of bodily sensations.

⚡Suppression of Desire: Moralizing hunger, sexuality, or emotional expression can cause people to misinterpret or ignore internal cues.

⚡Authoritarian Control: External authority replacing inner knowing can erode trust in one’s own bodily wisdom.

⚡Trauma Responses: Religious trauma—especially from purity culture or patriarchal control—can dysregulate the nervous system, making interoceptive signals feel unsafe or confusing.

Religion can profoundly distort a person’s relationship to their body. These distortions often begin early, are reinforced through ritual and doctrine, and can persist long after someone has intellectually deconstructed their beliefs.

The impact of purity and shame scripts include:

➡️ Psychological Fragmentation (My body can’t be trusted.)

• Body as threat: Many religious systems teach that the body is a source of temptation, sin, or weakness—especially in relation to sexuality and desire.

• Split self: This creates a dualism where the “spiritual” self is elevated and the “bodily” self is distrusted, leading to internal conflict and dissociation.

• Chronic shame: Natural bodily experiences - pleasure, anger, curiosity -are often moralized, causing people to feel guilt simply for being embodied.

➡️ Somatic Suppression (I must control my body.)

• Interoceptive disconnection: People learn to override or ignore bodily signals (hunger, arousal, fatigue, grief), which can lead to numbness or trauma.

• Sexual dysfunction: Especially in purity culture, individuals may experience fear, pain, or shame during intimacy due to years of conditioning.

• Modesty and control: Clothing, posture, and movement are often regulated - especially for women - reinforcing the idea that the body must be hidden or controlled.

➡️ Gendered Harm (My body causes harm.)

• Women as gatekeepers: Female bodies are often framed as responsible for male desire, leading to victim-blaming and internalized shame.

• Men as lustful by default: Male embodiment is often reduced to impulse, reinforcing toxic masculinity and emotional repression.

• Queer and trans erasure: Non-normative bodies are often excluded entirely, causing deep identity fragmentation and spiritual exile.

➡️ Spiritual Alienation (My body is not spiritual.)

• God as surveillant: The divine becomes associated with judgment and control, rather than intimacy and embodiment.

• Disembodied worship: Practices may prioritize belief and obedience over felt experience, reinforcing the idea that the body is irrelevant or dangerous.

• Fear of pleasure: Joy, sensuality, and emotional expression are often suppressed, leading to spiritual dryness or existential confusion.

➡️End-Time Eschatologies (Salvation is escaping my body.)

• Embedding urgency: “The end is near” becomes a lens through which all choices are filtered - career, relationships, ethics.

• Hijacking hope: The promise of salvation or rapture is framed as the ultimate reward, devalue the present world in favor of a promised afterlife.

• Internalizing surveillance: Believers often self-monitor thoughts and behaviors, fearing divine judgment or exclusion from the “elect.”

➡️ Authoritarian Epistemology (My authority is outside my body.)

• Externalized truth: truth is located in scripture, clergy, or tradition, rather than felt or discovered.

• Hierarchical authority: Clergy, tradition, or divine revelation are positioned as the sole arbiters of truth.

• Obedience over inquiry: Doubt is framed as rebellion, and questioning is spiritually dangerous.

The fear-based teachings of toxic religion override bodily signals. Constant warnings about sin, hell, or divine punishment train individuals to distrust natural impulses—like desire, anger, or curiosity. The body’s signals become suspect, leading to chronic suppression.

Religious guilt and shame disrupt emotional regulation. Toxic doctrines often equate bodily sensations (e.g. sexual arousal, hunger, fatigue) with moral failure. This creates internal conflict, where the body is experienced as dangerous or sinful.

Authoritarian control undermines self-agency. When spiritual authority is externalized to pastors, scriptures, dogma, individuals lose confidence in their own felt sense. They may ignore pain, anxiety, or intuition in favor of obedience.

Toxic religion causes dissociation and emotional numbing. To survive in rigid religious environments, many learn to dissociate from their bodies. This can result in numbness, disconnection, and difficulty recognizing basic needs or emotions. It causes somatic confusion and hypervigilance. The body becomes a battleground. People may experience chronic tension, hyper-awareness of “impure” sensations, or misinterpret anxiety as spiritual failure.

This is Your Brain on Toxic Religion

Religious dreamworlds can feel comforting, but they often function as epistemic enclosures. An epistemic enclosure is a closed system of knowing where truth is tightly controlled, dissent is pathologized, and alternative perspectives are excluded. In authoritarian religious frameworks, this often looks like:

• Inerrant texts: Scripture is treated as infallible, immune to interpretation.

• High-control authority: Truth flows from clergy or tradition, not from lived experience.

• Obedience over inquiry: Questioning is framed as rebellion or spiritual danger.

Religious shame can be profoundly damaging especially when it’s embedded in fear-based, authoritarian, or purity-centered teachings. It doesn’t just shape beliefs; it rewires how people relate to their bodies, emotions, relationships, and their sense of self.

Some of the core harms of religious shame include:

1. Emotional Suppression and Self-Alienation

• Shame teaches people to distrust their own desires, instincts, and emotions.

• This can lead to chronic self-monitoring, dissociation, and a fractured sense of identity.

2. Trauma and Mental Health Struggles

• Persistent shame linked to sin, punishment, or divine wrath can trigger anxiety, depression, and PTSD-like symptoms.

• Scrupulosity, a form of religious OCD can emerge when guilt becomes obsessive.

3. Sexual Dysfunction and Body Shame

• Purity culture often equates sexual desire with moral failure, leading to repression, guilt, and difficulty forming healthy relationships.

• Teachings that frame the body as sinful can disrupt interoception, making it harder to feel hunger, pleasure, or safety.

4. Loss of Autonomy and Intuition

• High-control religious environments discourage critical thinking and personal agency.

• People may struggle to trust their own intuition or set boundaries, especially if obedience was equated with virtue.

5. Social Isolation and Identity Loss

• Leaving a religious community can result in rejection, disownment, or deep grief.

• Many experience a loss of meaning or purpose after deconstructing beliefs that once defined their identity.

When shame is internalized through religious conditioning, it doesn’t just live in the mind, it embeds itself in the body, in symbols, in rituals, and in gendered expectations. It becomes a kind of invisible architecture shaping how people move, speak, desire, and even breathe.

Shame distorts self-perception, creating loops of guilt, fear, and self-surveillance. But that’s just the surface. The body absorbs the shame. Shoulders tense under the weight of “unworthiness.” Breath shortens in moments of desire. Pleasure feels dangerous. Many survivors of religious patriarchy describe feeling “cut off” from their bodies—as if their flesh were foreign or suspect.

Religious shame is encoded in symbols, purity rings, modesty codes, and hierarchical language (“fallen,” “unclean,” “redeemed”). These symbols don’t just communicate, they discipline. They shape identity through metaphor and myth, often reinforcing binaries like sacred/profane, male/female, leader/follower.

Women are often cast as temptresses or vessels of sin, while men are burdened with control, suppression, and dominance. Shame becomes gendered choreography. For women: silence, modesty, self-erasure. For men: stoicism, control, disconnection from vulnerability. These roles are ritualized and repeated until they feel like truth.

Addressing Inception through Interoception

In my training of religious deconstruction counselors, we discuss the necessity of addressing human development deficits in those who leave religion. Harmful religious conditioning stunts human development across multiple domains: cognitive, emotional, relational, and existential. Human development deficits left behind by toxic religion include:

• Suppression of critical thinking

• Delayed emotional development

• Gender role rigidity

• Inadequate knowledge base

• Impaired sexuality

• Social skills gaps

In the remainder of this article I want to address the human development deficit of interoceptive suppression.

As mentioned, interoception is your brain’s ability to sense and interpret signals from inside your body.

Here’s how it works:

➡️ Sensing: Specialized nerve receptors throughout your body (in organs, muscles, skin) detect internal changes.

➡️ Interpreting: These signals travel to the brain—especially the insula and thalamus—where they’re decoded into feelings like hunger, anxiety, or fatigue.

➡️ Integrating: You consciously or unconsciously respond—grabbing a snack, resting, or calming yourself down.

Interoception—the ability to sense internal bodily states like heartbeat, breath, hunger, and tension—is a powerful gateway to emotional regulation, trauma recovery, and embodied awareness. It’s like the body’s inner compass, guiding us through the terrain of feeling, safety, and self-understanding.

Interoception helps us notice and name our emotional states before they overwhelm us. People with strong interoceptive awareness can detect subtle shifts—like a racing heart or tight chest—and respond before emotions spiral. This early detection supports reappraisal (rethinking emotional triggers) and self-soothing strategies.

Interoception is foundational to feeling “at home” in your body. It cultivates a coherent sense of self, where thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations are integrated. It also supports agency—the ability to act from a place of felt truth rather than inherited scripts or dissociation.

Trauma often disrupts interoception, leaving people disconnected from their bodies or overwhelmed by internal signals. Disruptions in interoception are linked to conditions like anxiety, depression, and eating disorders.

Poor interoception, such as ignoring hunger or emotional pain, can increase the risk of eating disorders, suicidal ideation, and emotional dysregulation. Conversely, enhancing interoception helps people reconnect with their bodies, making healing more holistic and less dismissive of lived experience.

Religious Deconstruction as Building a Somatic Foundation

The somatic foundation refers to a set of principles and practices that center the body, not just as a biological system, but as a source of wisdom, healing, and transformation. It’s the groundwork for somatic therapies, embodied spirituality, and trauma-informed healing modalities.

There is a vital connection to explore between interoception and religious deconstruction and post-religion spirituality. Interoception is not just a physiological sense; it’s a gateway to felt meaning, inner truth, and somatic wisdom. Some ways of thinking about this include:

🌿Interoception as Spiritual Compass

• Embodied Awareness: Many spiritual traditions emphasize “listening to the body” as a way to access intuition, divine presence, or inner knowing. Interoception is the mechanism that makes this possible.

• Ritual Presence: In nature-based or post-religious rituals, tuning into breath, heartbeat, or gut sensation can anchor participants in the moment, creating a sacred container for transformation.

• Emotional Discernment: Interoception helps distinguish between fear and intuition, anxiety and awe, which are crucial for navigating spiritual deconstruction and reconstruction.

🌿Interoception as Somatic Archive

Interoception is your body’s ability to sense internal states—heartbeat, breath, gut tension, hunger, emotional shifts. It’s the felt sense that often gets suppressed in rigid religious systems that prioritize doctrine over experience.

In religious deconstruction, interoception becomes a somatic archive:

• It stores the emotional residue of religious trauma (e.g., shame, fear, guilt)

• It signals truths that were silenced by dogma (“this feels wrong,” “this feels safe”)

• It becomes a compass for spiritual rewilding, guiding people back to embodied wisdom

🌿 Interoception as Integration

• The body becomes a truth-teller

• If a literal belief causes shame or anxiety, it signals dissonance.

• Rewilding begins with sensation.

🌿 Interoception as Counter-Inception

The felt sense of the body can disrupt ideological inception.

• Somatic dissonance: When a belief causes anxiety, shame, or numbness, the body may signal that something’s off, even if the mind is still loyal to the doctrine.

• Embodied truth: Reconnecting with breath, sensation, and intuition can help surface buried contradictions and catalyze deconstruction.

In this sense, spiritual rewilding becomes a kind of reverse inception—not planting ideas, but excavating what was buried beneath them.

🌿 Interoception as Deconstruction

Leaving a religious system often involves relearning how to feel. Belief systems formed early in life are stored unconsciously, and their impact only surfaces when we seek safety outside the system. That surfacing is interoceptive.

Examples would be:

• Disorientation (anxiety, tight chest, racing thoughts) is felt from a loss of theological or existential certainty

• Emergence (gut instincts, emotional clarity) become trusted as a result of reclaiming inner authority

• Integration (calm breath, embodied rituals) is the result of a rewilded spirituality rooted in felt truth

Interoception also aids recovering from religious trauma or patriarchal conditioning. Reconnecting with the body’s signals becomes a form of healing. Tuning into interoception can be a way of reclaiming embodied spirituality—one that doesn’t bypass the body in favor of abstract doctrine.

As a reminder, “embodied spirituality” is the practice of experiencing and expressing spiritual life through the body—not in spite of it. It’s a radical shift from disembodied belief systems that prioritize abstract doctrines or transcendence, toward a spirituality that honors breath, sensation, movement, emotion, and relational presence as sacred.

One can incorporate interoception into reconstructing healing practices and rituals:

• Breathwork to access archetypal states (e.g., grief, courage, surrender)

• Body scans to locate spiritual wounds or intuitive clarity

• Nature-based practices that attune to seasonal rhythms and internal shifts

These become post-religious sacraments—not mediated by clergy or scripture, but by the body’s own knowing.

Deconstruction involves critically examining inherited beliefs, often dismantling systems of control, purity culture, and disembodied theology. Much deconstruction starts intellectually, but without interoceptive integration, it risks becoming disembodied. The body must be part of the epistemic shift. Many post-religious frameworks lean into nature, ritual, and symbolic archetypes—each of which invites interoceptive attunement.

Interoception isn’t just a healing tool, it’s a method of knowing that challenges patriarchal, dualistic, and disembodied religious systems.

Interoception Recovery in Religious Deconstruction

One could outline the process of interoception recovery in the religious deconstruction process as follows:

Stage One: Interoceptive Suppression (The Body as Collateral)

In harmful religious dreamworlds, the body is often mistrusted or bypassed:

• Pleasure is suspect, especially for women or queer bodies.

• Grief and anger are pathologized, labeled as lack of faith.

• Somatic intuition is overridden by doctrine (“Don’t trust your feelings”).

This leads to interoceptive dissonance—where the body signals distress, but the belief system insists everything is fine. Over time, this can result in trauma, dissociation, and spiritual numbness.

Stage Two: The Limbo Layer (When the Dream Collapses)

Deconstruction often begins when the dream world starts to glitch:

• A crisis, contradiction, or embodied awakening disrupts the narrative.

• The person begins to question not just beliefs, but the architecture of belief itself.

• This is the liminal space—where inherited meaning dissolves, but new meaning hasn’t yet formed.

Stage Three: Rewilding the Dream (From Ideological to Embodied)

To exit the harmful dream world, one must:

• Reclaim interoception as a source of truth.

• Re-symbolize inherited myths, turning them into personal metaphors.

• Engage nature and ritual as tools for reconstruction.

• Build pluralistic frameworks that honor ambiguity, multiplicity, and embodied wisdom.

Waking From the Religious Dreamworld

How does one awaken from the religious dreamworld they were indoctrinated into through inception?

For those recovering from rigid or disembodied religious systems, embodied spirituality offers:

🌤️ A return to self-trust through bodily awareness

🌤️ A reconstruction of meaning through felt experience rather than inherited dogma

🌤️ A path to liberation that includes pleasure, grief, and relational depth

It’s not just about what you believe—it’s about how you feel, move, and live.

Once can remix the film Inception as a metaphorical framework for religious deconstruction, which becomes a layered, somatic, and symbolic journey through inherited belief systems. Instead of dreams within dreams, we explore beliefs within beliefs, each layer revealing deeper conditioning, trauma, and potential liberation.

Remixing the concepts from the film for religious deconstruction could include:

Given this metaphor, you awaken from the religious dream through:

🌿 Dream Mapping: Investigating the ideological architecture of the religious belief-system you are deconstructing. This involves identifying the layers of the dream (mythic literalism, moral conditioning, purity codes, eschatology, etc.)

🌿 Interoceptive Awakening: Use the body to disrupt ideological loops. This could include:

• Breathwork: 3-part breath (inhale belly, ribs, chest) to reclaim space in the body.

• Somatic inquiry: Ask, “Where do I feel this belief?” and “What does my body say instead?”

• Movement: Shake, stretch, or walk barefoot to rewild the nervous system.

• Totem activation: Hold your totem (choose a symbolic object like a stone, feather, scent) during these practices. Let it become a sensory cue for waking up. Let it represent your “truth-check”—something that grounds you in your own reality.

🌿Nature as Mirror: Experiment with symbolic rewilding, and let nature reflect back your deconstructed self. This could include:

• Elemental ritual: Choose an element (earth, water, fire, air) to represent your liberation. Engage with it physically—bury something, burn a symbol, whisper into wind.

• Archetypal invocation: Call on wild archetypes (e.g., Trickster, Weaver, Rooted One) to guide your reconstruction.

Optional: Create a nature altar with symbols of your new cosmology—stones, leaves, bones, poems.

🌿 Dream Disruption: Do narrative rewriting, replacing inherited scripts with new language and imagery. For example:

• Write a “dream journal” from the perspective of your conditioned self. Then annotate it with your awakened voice.

• Create a sigil or mantra that encodes your reclaimed truth.

• Ritual dialogue: Speak aloud the old belief, then respond with your body—through breath, gesture, or sound.

🌿Collective Waking: Cultivate a communal praxis. Deconstruction is rarely solitary. Invite others into the ritual. For example:

• Host a “dream wake”—a gathering where people share the beliefs they’re shedding and the truths they’re reclaiming.

• Create a shared totem or ritual object that travels between participants.

• Build a toolkit zine or visual map together, remixing symbols and practices.

Optional: Use your mapping skills to curate a visual framework for collective liberation—one that honors pluralism and embodied truth.

A book to read and video to watch. A couple resources worth exploring:

• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk

• A YouTube video by Maren Clifton, Practiced Interoception; How to Improve Health, Emotional Regulation, and Spiritual Well-Being.

In Summary

• “Inception” and “interoception” are uncommon words but they provide unique insights into religious deconstruction and spiritual reconstruction.

• I’m pretty sure I’m the only person who has ever connected Paul Krause, Dom Cobb and Captain Jean-Luc Picard into one article.

• Religion often creates a harmful dreamworld, constructing layered dreamscapes that feel real but are built on flawed logic.

• “Embodied spirituality” is the practice of experiencing and expressing spiritual life through the body—not in spite of it.

• Swapping belief-systems in religious deconstruction falls short.

• There is a vital connection to explore between interoception and religious deconstruction and post-religion spirituality because Interoception is not just a physiological sense; it’s a gateway to felt meaning, inner truth, and somatic wisdom.

• Thank you for reading this article. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber at $5 monthly or $50 for a year. Your support allows me to continue my research, work and writing in these areas. Perks for paid subscribers include a full free membership to the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality, and two of my books on religious deconstruction and spiritual reconstruction. I probably should have paywalled this article but I hate doing that. I’m counting on enough people believing in my work to support it. Thank you :)

“Our dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake we realize things were strange.”

- Dom Cobb, Inception

YOU HAVE TO WAKE UP