Interoception is a high-leverage skill to develop.

One benefit is that you can start having conversations with parts of your body, like your heart, to help you navigate challenging situations.

It's the language of your body.

You can also speak with your gut!

A fun experiment to try: 

Ask your gut a simple yes/no question and wait for a response via an image in your mind's eye or a feeling that signals its answer.

At first, the response will be hazy, but if you experiment more, you will learn how to interpret it over time.

My running hypothesis is that our frontal lobes (mental image) essentially translate our guts response, rendering them more useful upon further contemplation -- but you're right, if you cut out the middleman, then why wouldn't you.

Isn't this simply intuition if you keep it visceral?

Channeling it to the mind's eye seems like adding an unnecessary step which would add noise to the original signal.

I can see the need for mind's eye for people who are more visual than kinesthetic.