Electrochemical energy, primordial feelings and feelings of knowing (FOK): Mindfulness-based intervention for interoceptive experience related to phobic and anxiety disorders.

This article presents a hypothesis that primordial feelings (e.g., pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral) may be created by the cognizing and categorizing of brain electrochemical activity. The realization of action potentials generated by neurons that cause electrochemical signals to be released and cross synapses may create primordial feelings. A primordial feeling may precede image making and mark the first moment of subjectivity while thinking. It may produce a Feeling of Knowing (FOK) that when associated with physical sensations originating within the body (i.e., interoception) cause a broadly heightened awareness of thought and become a risk factor for certain aspects of mental afflictions. The strategy outlined in this article is to use mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) and exposure activity to break up the automaticity of habitual reactions to primordial feelings as FOKs associated with interoception and do something different. Thus the individual does not move away from the unpleasant interoceptive experience but instead stays with it and learns to not push the not right experience away but instead just let it be. Through mindfulness-based interventions unpleasant interoception is used to focus one's reactivity to unpleasant primordial feelings and FOKs and break up the automaticity of being driven by them. Thereby, one decides to approach these internal sensations though exposure to the interoceptive not just right sense instead of engaging in neutralizing activity.