Become a Detective of Your Own Body: Mastering Interoception for Early Disease Prevention
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
Release Date: 10/13/2025
Interoception: The 8 Dimensions of Body Awareness
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ In this Lights On course coaching session, Dr. Pedram Shojai guides students through week three: interoceptive awareness training. Most people have been trained their entire lives to ignore their bodies—overriding tiredness with caffeine, hunger with schedules, and pain with pills. This disconnection means missing early warning signs before they become injuries or burnout, and struggling with emotional regulation. Dr. Shojai breaks down the eight dimensions of internal awareness and explains that emotions are your brain's interpretation of body states—when you can sense your heart...
info_outline
How Your Environment Is Hijacking Your Brain: The Science of Spatial Awareness
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Dr. Pedram Shojai explores how your physical environment is actively shaping your mental and emotional state every single moment. He breaks down the neuroscience behind environmental influences on your nervous system, explaining how clutter increases cortisol by 25%, how specific colors affect mood, and why silence has become medicine in modern life. He guides listeners through a comprehensive environmental audit covering visual chaos, acoustic pollution, olfactory triggers, spatial dynamics, and energetic residue, offering practical strategies to optimize your space for mental...
info_outline
Pain as a Teacher: What Your Body Is Trying to Tell You
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Most people respond to pain with one goal: make it stop. But Dr. Pedram Shojai reveals that pain isn't a mistake—it's a message your body is desperately trying to send you. Drawing from decades of treating patients and studying traditional medicine, he teaches you how to separate pain (the raw sensation) from suffering (the story you tell yourself), and decode the specific signals different pain locations are sending about what's breaking down in your system. Through a guided practice using witness consciousness, you'll learn to read your body's language with precision, track...
info_outline
From Overwhelm to Awareness: The Witness Practice for Healing
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Dr. Pedram Shojai guides listeners through developing witness consciousness—the ability to observe your thoughts, emotions, and sensations without being consumed by them. Through practical examples and a guided meditation, he demonstrates how cultivating this observer perspective creates the essential space needed for healing, behavior change, and breaking automatic reactive patterns. 🎯 What You'll Learn: The three simultaneous experiences and why most people never develop the witness—that awareness observing both your thoughts and experiences The tremendous costs of missing...
info_outline
Why You're Still Sick: The Victim Trap Destroying Your Health
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Dr. Pedram Shojai delivers a no-holds-barred wake-up call about victim mentality and its devastating impact on your health. Drawing from real cases of people sabotaging their own healing while blaming everyone else, he breaks down the biological prison that victim consciousness creates—from nervous system freeze responses to chronic inflammation—and provides a four-step process to break free, reclaim your power stance, and take radical accountability for your health choices. 🎯 What You'll Learn: The biological cost of victim consciousness: nervous system freeze, cortisol...
info_outline
Voice as Medicine: Frankko Vivo's Journey from Basketball Court to Mountain Temple
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ In this intimate conversation, Dr. Pedram Shojai sits down with Frankko Vivo, a musician and ceremony guide who transformed from a basketball player into a guardian of sacred space. Frankko shares how an 82-year-old violinist named Sol changed his life's trajectory with a single gift, leading him to carve a temple into a Brazilian mountainside over 13 years. Through stories of water infiltrations that forced him to listen to the mountain's wisdom and ceremonies where improvisation trumps performance, Frankko reveals how voice activation, deep breathing, and authentic frequency work...
info_outline
The Breathing Crisis: How Modern Life Stole Your Breath and the Ancient Practice That Gets It Back
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Most people breathe 20,000 times a day, yet modern life has systematically broken this fundamental function. Dr. Pedram Shojai reveals how collapsed posture, chronic stress, mouth breathing, and lost body awareness have created a breathing crisis—leaving us in survival mode with shallow, chest-based breathing that signals constant danger to our nervous systems. In this essential episode, discover the four ways modern life has stolen your breath and why dysfunctional breathing creates cascading physical consequences from chronic anxiety and brain fog to digestive issues, immune...
info_outline
Breaking the Sympathetic Spiral of Doom with Dr. Scott Sherr
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Dr. Pedram Shojai sits down with integrative medicine physician Dr. Scott Sherr to unpack one of the most overlooked health crises of our time: the sympathetic spiral of doom. When your nervous system gets stuck in fight-or-flight mode, your mitochondria desperately try to produce more energy but lack the resources to sustain it. The result? Plummeting energy, skyrocketing stress, and a body that can't heal itself. Dr. Sherr explains the intricate dance between sympathetic nervous system activation and mitochondrial dysfunction, revealing how this vicious cycle begins and, more...
info_outline
The Exhaustion Medicine Can't Find
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Dr. Pedram Shojai addresses one of the most common yet dismissed complaints in modern medicine: chronic fatigue that conventional doctors can't diagnose or explain. He reveals why standard medical tests fail to identify this multi-system breakdown and presents a comprehensive, phased recovery approach spanning 6-24 months. Drawing from his experience treating thousands of patients, Dr. Shojai explains the seven interconnected systems involved in energy production—from mitochondrial function to gut health to nervous system regulation—and why treating just one piece never works. If...
info_outline
Your Best Shot: The Truth About GLP-1s and Natural Weight Health Hormones
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Registered dietitian Ashley Koff joins Dr. Pedram Shojai to unpack the truth about GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy. While these drugs mimic hormones our bodies naturally produce, they don't solve the root cause of why our own weight-health hormones aren't functioning properly. Ashley explains how gut health, the vagus nerve, stress, and digestive function all play crucial roles in our body's natural hormone production. She shares her personal journey from childhood obesity to understanding that healing weight health isn't about what you eat or avoid—it's about optimizing...
info_outline🎙️ Dr. Pedram Shojai delivers a transformative guide on developing interoceptive awareness—the ability to sense and interpret your body's internal signals before minor symptoms become major health crises. Using the powerful analogy of a car's check engine light, he reveals why most people ignore their body's warning signs and choose to "tape over" symptoms rather than investigate root causes.
🎯 What You'll Learn:
- Why modern culture has systematically disconnected you from your body's intelligence through "no pain, no gain" mentality, stimulant dependence, and symptom suppression
- The four-phase warning system: from subtle whispers weeks before crisis to full-blown alarms requiring intervention
- Your body's five communication channels: energy patterns, digestive intelligence, inflammatory signaling, nervous system regulation, and hormonal cycles
- Three-level framework for reclaiming body awareness: daily 2-minute body scans, weekly pattern recognition, monthly deep-dive investigations
- How catching issues at phase one could prevent a health crisis years down the road
🔑 Key Insights: "Your body doesn't send false alarms. Every symptom is information and communication. Most people only pay attention at phase 3-4, but symptom detectives catch issues at phase 1."
"80% of vagal signals travel from body to brain, not the reverse. Your gut feelings and intuitive knowing are physiologically wired through interoceptive networks."
"Nine out of ten people show inflammatory markers before becoming 'sick.' The goal is to nip problems in the bud years before they become a medical crisis."
💡 Action Steps:
- Tomorrow morning before touching your phone: 2-minute body scan (energy, sleep quality, gut sensation, mental clarity, emotional state, physical tension, breath quality)
- Start a weekly trigger map: when do symptoms appear, what precedes them, what makes them better or worse
🎧 Perfect for: Anyone experiencing chronic low-grade symptoms without clear diagnosis, those seeking to prevent disease rather than manage it, or anyone tired of the "pill for ill" approach to healthcare.
📚 Mentioned Resources:
- Dr. Shojai's new book (features extensive interoception content)
- Academy programs focused on gut health, oral health, and hormonal health
🌐 Connect with Dr. Shojai:
- Website: theurbanmonk.com
- Books: The Urban Monk, Inner Alchemy, Focus
- Documentaries: Interconnected, Gateway to Health, Trauma
#UrbanMonk #Interoception #BodyAwareness #FunctionalMedicine #DiseasePrevention #VagusNerve #HealthDetective #WellnessWarrior