autonomic vulnerability, autonomic nudity, autonomic alignment (rough draft):

("Autonomic" as in autonomic nervous system, sympathetic and parasympathetic including regulation of smooth muscle, organs, glands, hormones, digestion, immune function, healing, etc.)

Over time, sometimes intermittently and long-run eventually stably, oneself, the system, etc., has more “direct access” to autonomic functions, like heart rate, digestion, peristalsis, and more. It’s usually not like full-on skeletal muscle style “control,” there’s perhaps generally indirectness and vagueness, all things being equal, but it’s at least more in that direction than one would expect.

Usually pre all meditation, this level of "influence" is sort of buried, papered over, deep down, both (a) so we can't get at it and mess it up ourselves and (b) non-intimate outside influences can't mess it up either, too easily.

All of this is just an example: There's a chance that at some point you might have the (temporary!) experience of something rather dramatic, like having direct control over your heart rate, being able to dial it up and down. Everyone I've talked to about this found it rather unpleasant and stressful. (I did too.) Instead of this, you might that you're merely afraid of being able to control your heart (you have intimations that you might be able to), or you might feel like you have to manually keep your own heart beating. That latter is almost surely not true, even though it might feel that way, and you might find your attention magnetically pulled back to your heart, even though you'd rather forget about your heart and let it just correctly do its own thing. (If you're really concerned something's wrong, remember you can always get things checked out by the equivalent of of the emergency department or urgent care, etc., in your country of residence.) Anyway, if something like any of the above is going on, you might just be patient, as unpleasant as it is, and eventually you'll find both that your attention is elsewhere and also you're ok. (As one more example, things similar to some of the above can temporarily happen with breathing, cf. "Ondine's Curse.")

ANYWAY, generally, the kind of stuff doesn't happen at all, or it happens very briefly to the point of unnoticeably or unreflectively or, again generally, it's transient, generally harmless, and doesn't happen before you're ready for it to happen.

The PLUS side of all this is that on the other side, as interoception of viscera, and more, which most people are somewhat aware of, can become more and more integrated with everything else, and this leads to increased resilience and increased capacity for empathy, intimacy, self-care, self-awareness, and self-determination. There's just more and more costless bandwidth that means an experientially richer, experientially more full you.

To be fair, this can also look like a long tail of increased neuroticism, as things re-jigger as they're brought to light---the body can get more finicky about what it wants when it wants it.

And thereby one might find it harder and harder to "push oneself" in ways that they used to be able. The bodymind is having none of it, and this can be quite distressing if one is used to getting things done by pushing oneself.

But the flip side of this is sort of, long-run, increases in sort of "bottom-up grit"---self-alignedly the system can kind of settle into long-term projects, behaviors, goals over long-spans of time, that wouldn't have previously been possible. Especially at first, these may only be traceable in retrospect, and they come with hearty dose of "don't know what this is yet but I trust it," as well as a long process of bouncing around and re-jiggering.

It's sort of total homeostatic / telic integration, or something? ("Total" is too reified, as is integration; it might look quite haphazard, always evolving, always making mistakes and correcting, from the inside, and there's all sorts of mortality and meaning stuff to contend with, here, and more, but still.)

So this could be considered a sort of non-force-y "integrated grit," again not an increased capacity to push oneself, but more an ability to surrender to (even suffer into, especially initially) a perhaps sort of "ever re-settling" determination. Even, on the front-end you might not even like one's new choices, sometimes, at least just at first.

There's sort of ongoing, intermittent meta-modulation of autonomic self-regulating machinery, to some degree. And the rest of the time as it did, and as it should, as it will, it takes care of itself (while e.g. shimmeringly available as you, in some relevant sense, so you can have fun, create, strive, enjoy, relax, etc.

Some clarifications:

Again, this is not Ondine's Curse, and medium-run and further, it's not like “you” open up the access hatch, find the right knobs, on the right control panel, and fiddle with those knobs, and it's more like intermittent self-participating self-aligned spontaneous meta-modulation: it takes care of itself, always already having been prereflectively at your fingertips, as your fingertips, and sometimes it comes to awareness in a way that leads to its better taking care of itself, and then with that done "it" spontaneously then "leaves" awareness. (The whole system is long-run like this, cognition, everything, not just autonomic functions in particular. Stuff comes into awareness to be lightly sculpted in its self-modulation and then leaves again to do its own thing. Meditation / life isn't being aware of everything; it's being aware of what's fun, enjoyable, useful, etc. to be aware of, at the right times, in the right nebulous fractal sequential order, especially as things settle down long-run; more and more needs to be "tuned up"*** less and less, but any of it's always available if it does, as things change or new information comes in, etc.)

Also, maybe goes without saying if you're reading down here this is not pop mindfulness; of course you can deliberately check in and sometimes have good reason to, but the point is already-always-available pre-reflective accounting / input. Increased bandwidth, already costlessly a part of your phenomenal input. It's already a part of you. You don't have to do something "extra."

Notes:

* cf. taste is "cognitive" / cognitive, digestion is cognitive / "cognitive", defecation is cognitive / "cognitive', etc., etc.

*** translation note: tuned up, fixed, repaired, sculpted, massaged, corrected, helped, listened to(!)