Welcome to the Island

Feeling, Knowing, Healing

There’s a small island hidden deep inside your brain.

It’s not on any tourist map. You won’t find it listed alongside the amygdala or hippocampus in casual conversations about trauma or anxiety. But it’s there. Tucked between folds of neural tissue, where the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes meet, lies the insula—Latin for island.

It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t hijack. It listens. It translates. It feels.

The Island That Feels the Weather

The insula is your body’s weather station.
It reads the barometric pressure of your gut. It registers the tidal shift of your heartbeat. It notices when your breath shortens, when your stomach flips, when your throat catches.

These sensations aren’t just noise—they are data. Data about safety, connection, threat, delight.

This is called interoception: the capacity to sense the internal state of your body. The insula is its hub, its lighthouse, its translator.

The Compass for the Soul

Antonio Damasio called it a somatic marker. A sensation—a flicker in the chest, a tightening in the belly—that helps you make decisions without knowing why. You feel before you think. And sometimes that feeling is what saves you. Or betrays you. Or brings you home.

Damasio’s work reminded us: emotion is not the opposite of reason. It’s the groundwork for it. And the insula? It’s where the groundwork feels real.

Empathy, Disgust, and the Borders of the Self

The insula doesn’t just let you feel your pain. It lets you feel mine.

When you flinch watching someone stub their toe or choke up when someone shares their shame, it’s your insula at work. It's not just a mirror neuron echo. It’s embodiment.

The insula activates not only when we experience physical disgust, but when we witness it—when we recoil from injustice, recoil from cruelty. It doesn’t distinguish sharply between physical and moral pain. It just says, this feels wrong.

Not a Siren, But a Whisper

If the amygdala is the fire alarm—quick, hot, and blaring—the insula is the whisper that says:

something’s off.
slow down.
this matters.

And unlike the amygdala, which thrives in the murky depths of the unconscious, the insula escorts emotion into the light of awareness.

That flutter in your gut? That ache in your throat when you can’t speak your truth? That’s the insula. It doesn't just sound the alarm. It asks: Do you hear yourself?

Where the Self Lives

In one of his most haunting stories, Damasio described a patient who lost all internal sensation—no heartbeat awareness, no hunger cues, no bodily intuition. And with that loss came something deeper: a loss of self.

But another patient, with damage everywhere except the anterior insula, retained a vivid sense of who she was. Even when she couldn’t feel her own body, she knew herself.

Perhaps identity doesn’t live in our thoughts or our memories.
Perhaps it lives in our sensations.

Perhaps the insula is where the self says: I am still here.

For the Therapists, the Thinkers, the Feelers

This island matters. Especially if you sit across from someone in pain. Especially if you want to understand your own pain.

The insula reminds us that healing is not just about insight. It’s about sensation.
Not just what we think, but what we feel through.
Not just changing minds, but listening to bodies.

So here’s your gentle task:
Get to know your island.
Let it speak.
Let it guide.

And if, tonight, in your dreams, you find yourself walking along a quiet shore with no map and no destination—
you’ll know where you are.

With curiosity and care,

Tess from the Moody Project