A Pilot Study Exploring The Relationships Between Interoception, Mindfulness and Exceptional Experiences

This project sought to explore how mindfulness and interoception correlate with different forms of exceptional experience (ExE) and to one another. Exceptional experiences (ExE) refer to a range of unusual but not uncommon ways of experiencing the world, including experiences that are often labeled as “paranormal”. Belz and Fach (2015) note that there are four main ways in which people experience ExE. These occur as anomalies in the self-model (internal), anomalies in the world model (external and on the body); dissociative phenomena (self and world are dissociated) and coincidence phenomena (unusual coincidences between the self and the world models). To date there is little research on the correlates of these different ways of experiencing ExE.