Rebuilding Body Awareness in Hypermobile and Neurodivergent Bodies
- Ines Illipse
- Jun 4
- 5 min read

Many people with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder (HSD), or neurodivergence describe the same experience:
“I feel disconnected from my body.”
You might struggle to feel where your limbs are in space. You may find it hard to sense hunger, pain, or posture. Movement might feel clumsy or distant. If this sounds familiar, you're not broken — your nervous system is just working differently. And awareness can be rebuilt.
In this blog, we’ll explore proprioception, interoception, and body awareness, how they’re impacted in EDS, HSD, and neurodivergence — and how to rebuild a felt sense of home inside your body.
🧠 What Is Body Awareness?
Body awareness is the felt sense of your body in motion and stillness. It’s how you:
Know where your arms and legs are without looking
Sense your breath, heartbeat, or digestion
Adjust your posture or movement automatically
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This awareness comes from a blend of systems:
Proprioception: sensing your body’s position and movement in space
Interoception: sensing internal states like hunger, fullness, pain, or calm
Exteroception: sensing the environment through touch, temperature, and pressure
Together, these systems form your body map — a constantly updating picture of where you are and how you feel.
❓ Why Is Body Awareness Disrupted in EDS, HSD, and Neurodivergence?
1. Joint Instability and Lax Connective Tissue
In hypermobility conditions, joints move too much or without clear limits. This overloads confuses the proprioceptive receptors in the joints and fascia. As a result:
Movements can feel vague or hard to control
You may not feel small shifts in alignment or muscle activation
The body may rely on visual cues rather than internal sensing
2. Fascial Dysregulation
Fascia — the connective tissue web around muscles and organs — carries many sensory nerve endings. In EDS/HSD, fascia is often too lax or dehydrated, reducing sensory input and dampening the sense of internal shape or containment. For a full understanding of Fascia, please read our blog : The Fascial Web: Understanding Fascia in EDS and HSD
3. Nervous System Dysregulation
A chronically upregulated or dysregulated nervous system (common in both hypermobility and neurodivergence) makes it harder to process or prioritize sensory signals. You might:
Miss subtle bodily cues (like tension or imbalance)
Experience delayed pain or overwhelming sensations
Struggle to feel grounded or “inhabiting” your body
4. Neurodivergent Sensory Processing
Autistic, ADHD, or otherwise neurodivergent individuals may experience:
Hypo- or hyper-sensitivity to bodily signals
Challenges filtering or interpreting sensory information
Difficulty integrating multiple sensory streams (touch, movement, pressure)
All of this makes “feeling your body” harder — but not impossible.
🌀 Rebuilding Body Awareness: A Layered, Sensory Strategy
Reconnecting with your body isn’t about trying harder or doing more — it’s about listening differently. Body awareness, especially when disrupted by hypermobility or neurodivergent processing, is something that can be gently re-learned. The key is to build safety, clarity, and sensory feedback — one layer at a time.
Here are the principles and strategies that support this process, with examples of how you might explore them.
✨ Start Where You Can Feel Something: Breath as a Sensory Anchor
For many people, the breath is the one place they can still feel some internal movement. That makes it a powerful starting point, not because it's “correct,” but because it’s available.
Breath moves the fascia and organs. It creates rhythm and flow. And it offers a two-way connection — you breathe, and your body responds.
Rather than forcing “diaphragmatic breathing,” you might simply begin by noticing:
Where does the breath move in your body? Chest? Ribs? Belly?
Can you feel the pressure shifting inside your torso?
What changes if you hum or exhale slowly?
This isn’t about breathing right. It’s about re-opening a conversation.
From this simple beginning, breath can help create internal shape and containment — especially valuable when the body feels vague or diffuse. It also helps downregulate the nervous system, making other forms of awareness more accessible.
🌐 Use External Contact to Build Internal Clarity
When internal signals are faint or confusing, the nervous system benefits from external structure — something it can “push against” to define the body’s edges. This might include:
Lying on a firm surface so you feel pressure points
Pressing your hand into a wall or placing a ball between your knees
Wrapping your limbs in resistance bands or light compression garments
These tools don’t just “add resistance” — they help the brain locate your body in space by making its boundaries clearer. They also reduce the “noise” of excessive joint motion or sensory overwhelm.
This can be particularly helpful for people with EDS or HSD, where the joint receptors are less reliable, and for neurodivergent people who need simplified input to organize perception.
🔄 Repeat and Refine Movement With Focused Attention
Movement becomes meaningful when it’s paired with awareness. Rather than doing exercises for strength or flexibility, consider movement as a form of sensory education.
The most useful movements here are:
Small (to avoid overcompensation)
Slow (so you can feel them unfold)
Repeatable (to build patterns the brain can recognize)
You might gently roll your pelvis, shift your weight side to side, or trace shapes with your arms. The goal isn’t perfect posture — it’s clear sensory feedback.
Changing one variable at a time — like direction or effort — helps your brain track cause and effect. This builds precision over time and enhances your body map.
🗣 Bring Sensation Into Language and Context
Awareness becomes stronger when you can name it.
You don’t have to be poetic or precise — just start labeling what you feel:
“There’s tension in my ribs.”
“My right foot feels fuzzy.”
“I feel more solid when I press into this side.”
You might say it out loud, write it down, or share it with a practitioner. Over time, this language builds your sensory vocabulary — which deepens the connection between body and mind.
🧭 Let the Process Be Fluid, Not Perfect
Rebuilding awareness isn’t linear. Some days you might feel more, some days less. That’s okay.
Think of this work like learning a new language or tuning an old instrument. It takes practice, repetition, and a willingness to be curious. If you try to “do it right,” you may shut down the very sensitivity you’re trying to grow.
So instead, stay with what’s interesting, vague, or new — and let your awareness unfold.
🌀 In Summary
Body awareness isn’t about mastering techniques — it’s about building a felt relationship with yourself.
That relationship can begin with something as simple as breath. From there, using the environment, refining your attention, and creating sensory context helps make your internal world feel more vivid, safe, and real.
Especially for hypermobile and neurodivergent bodies, this kind of layered, sensory strategy allows you to reclaim your body as home — one gentle moment at a time.
🦓 At ParaMotion, we take this into account in our movement programs, education and consulting so that you are guaranteed results with our no pain, no strain method customized for the hypermobile body. Ready to take the next step? 👉 [Book your Free 15 mn call here!!]
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