Meditative practices can teach individuals to deliberately move along the interoceptive-to-exteroceptive continuum by increasing interoceptive or exteroceptive awareness.

“The key element here is to step yourself through a practice deliberately so that you are flexibly and dynamically able to engage in conversation, then disengage and focus, or focus and then disengage from the work you're focusing on and actually have a conversation or be in the world and move out of that interoceptive awareness to one in which you are dynamically engaged with the things around you.”

“Again, the default mode network is where you land on this interoceptive-exteroceptive continuum. It's going to lead to more mind wandering, whereas when you encourage or we could even say force yourself a little bit to anchor your attention to either inside your body or outside your body, and you make that decision according to what you are doing less easily, well, then you are actively training up the neural circuits. You are engaging so-called neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to change in response to experience. You are deliberately engaging a shift along that continuum.”

“My read of this book and the literature that follows is, again, that when you sit down to meditate, it is going to be most effective to do that interoceptive, exteroceptive bias assessment. Ask yourself whether or not you are more in your head or outside your head, if you will, and then to do a meditation practice that runs counter to where you happen to be at, that is, that pushes you more externally if you're in your head, and if you're more focused on what's going on around you, that pushes you more internally.”

“And much of what we talked about in that paper earlier, the one where they asked people, what are you doing and what are you feeling and how happy or how unhappy you are, what they discovered was that most people are sort of in their head a lot. They're not really present to what they're doing, which leads me to the statement that I believe, at least based on the data, that paper included, that most people have an interoceptive bias. They're focused more on what's going on internally than they are focused on what's happening externally.”

“So for instance, if you are somebody who is very much caught in your own head, right, we talked about this earlier, or you're in a moment where you're really stuck in your head and you want to get out of your head, well, then that meditation practice that you do really should be focused on exteroceptive bias, you should really focus on something external to you, and I would encourage you to use a natural cyclic pattern of breathing where inhales follow exhales follow inhales follow exhales.”

“I think it also ought to be very useful for people that tend to be overly exteroceptive, more on the dissociative end of the continuum, and need to bring in a bit more of interoceptive awareness, but either can't do that or are uncomfortable doing that because they're simply not interested in or comfortable with feeling so much of their internal state because that can either be overwhelming or that's just simply not the way they want to feel.”

“Just do the opposite of where your bias lies. That is, if you're tilted towards interoception, do an exteroceptive focused practice. If you are more dissociative and you're... That sounds sort of pejorative, it sounds bad, right? But, again, if you are somebody who is more focused on events outside your body and you want to gain more interoceptive awareness and feeling state, if”

“I actually believe, based on the data that I've covered, and we'll get into a few more papers about this, and my lab is actively working on this as well, that a meditative practice can be made far more effective, that is, it can invoke more neuroplasticity, more shift in brain states and brain circuitry if we do not take the easy path, that is, we go against the grain of what our brain would naturally do in a given moment.”

“Some people may opt, in fact, I would say some people ought to opt for a meditative practice which involves more exteroceptive awareness, actually a meditation like a walking meditation or even a seated meditation where they are bringing their focus to a place outside their body as opposed to inside their body.”

“a meditative practice done regularly, because it can allow us to become more interoceptively aware or it can allow us to become more exteroceptively aware, which is really just another form of dissociation, again, dissociation isn't always bad provided it's not at the extreme, a meditative practice can actually teach us to deliberately move along this continuum.”