EXPLORE THE SCIENCE

The brain maps the body and its relationship to space.

Your sense of where you are is built from multiple streams of sensory information.
This methodology uses focused attention, body mapping, and spatial referencing to consciously engage these mapping processes, with the body serving as the primary organizing reference frame.

THE BRAIN’S BODY MAP

The primary somatosensory cortex (S1) contains an organized neural representation of the body known as a somatotopic map.
Different areas of the cortex correspond to sensory information from different regions of the body. These representations are also highly neuroplastic, changing with experience, learning, attention, and sensory input.
Body mapping repeatedly directs awareness through the body using touch, proprioception, interoception, and other bodily sensations.

EGOCENTRIC SPATIAL MAPPING

Spatial referencing is part of the brain’s egocentric mapping system—the body-centered system used to represent spatial relationships relative to ourselves.
A sound, touch point, visual cue, internal sensation, or another part of the body can become a spatial reference point.
By relating sensory points to the body and to one another, the brain continually updates its map of body and space as one interconnected system.
The body remains the organizing anchor as those relationships change.

MULTISENSORY INTEGRATION

No single sense creates your experience of body and space.
The brain integrates proprioceptive, interoceptive, tactile, visual, auditory, vestibular, and other internal and external sensory information into an ongoing representation of where the body is and how it relates spatially to other points.
Body mapping and spatial referencing continually reinforce one another within this multisensory system.

MENTAL MAPPING & IMAGERY

The brain can also create and manipulate representations without relying only on immediate sensory input.
Through mental imagery, we can represent body position, movement, distance, direction, sensation, objects, and space in the mind.
RE-LAB uses imagery as another form of mental mapping while maintaining the body as the reference point.
This allows awareness to move through imagined and sensed information without losing the organizing anchor of the body.

THE CORE PRINCIPLE

The practice brings conscious attention to systems the brain is already using:

Body Mapping
Egocentric Spatial Mapping
Multisensory Integration
Mental Mapping & Imagery

Together, they support a clearer sense of:
“Here I am, in this body, in this space.”