Courting our Inner Radiance: Exploring Somatic Meditation

Somatic Meditation & Our Unique Situation

Let’s discuss some general and somewhat lofty context to set the stage for understanding the purpose of somatic meditation. We’ve come into this life having much forgotten who or what we were beforehand and what we’re supposed to be doing here, what our reason for incarnating is, if there is one. If our family, elders, school, culture, or government knew what that was, they could potentially help guide us, but often these influences are still searching for existential meaning themselves, and at worst they harm us and teach us harmful views that damage our trust in ourselves, others, and our world. Many of us turn to spiritual and religious traditions to provide meaningful answers to the questions of who/what we are and what the hell we’re supposed to be doing here anyway, but nowadays, with rampant charlatanism and issues of misconduct, who can we trust with our heart-questions, who do we feel we can turn to? And we are each so different, our needs so nuanced and specific to our unique experience. How do we know a prescribed teaching or practice is actually relevant for us, or do we run the risk of blindly adopting spiritual beliefs and behaviors, hoping that if we just believe, do, or say the right thing we will be fixed, saved, absolved, liberated?

A little heavy-handed, I admit, but you get the picture. The unresolved issues we each carry with us,

the heavy life situations we feel bound up in, the repeating ones we feel cursed by – unravelling these

knots in our psyches and bodies and destinies is no small feat and requires such fine-tuned guidance

to be effective. Fortunately, I haven’t led you all this way just to say it’s hopeless. In fact, we all already

have the BEST guide with us we could possibly ask for, the one who already knows our unresolved

stuff and the best way to unfold it, our most trusted friend and constant companion, the one who can

not only free us to be ourselves but who will guide our path through this life with the utmost care,

who literally holds the inevitability of our destiny within: our very own body.

Tree of Knowledge, 1913 by Hilma af Klint

Our Existential Wholeness

The world’s mystic traditions have different cosmologies to describe the workings of reality and the

natural or enlightened state of the human being, but one thing they agree on is that there is a way to

reconnect with the existential wholeness we feel we have lost. If we can understand that our natural

or original state is actually whole and in harmony with the cosmos and reality, then it is not an

impossible or even improbable task to get back to that harmony – we are simply unlearning how not

to be in harmony with ourselves, others, and the world. Many traditions also align in breaking down

our human instrument into three parts: mind, breath/speech/energy, and body. This triplet is often

mirrored on micro and macro levels in their cosmologies. For instance, Taoists consider the Cosmos

as composed of Heaven (mind), Earth (body), and Humanity (breath), and the human microcosm is

composed of shen (mind), qi (breath/life energy), and jing (substance/essence/body). Tibetan Tantric

Buddhism conceives of reality as the body, speech, and mind of the deity, or taking the ultimate as

the nature of awareness, then there is a mind (dharmakaya), speech/energy (sambhogakaya), and

body (nirmanakaya) aspect to that fundamental awareness. Christian teachings say God (heaven/mind) molded humans out of clay (earth/body) and breathed His Spirit (breath/life force), the spark of life into them. I’m sure there are other examples out there. But why do we care about what these traditions say?

Because something in us feels unresolved, unsettled, uncomfortable, misaligned, not integrated, etc.

There is something off, and we can’t quite put our finger on it. Maybe we’re just born with sin, cursed

by negative karma from our endless past lives, possessed by demons or imbalanced chemicals in our

brain; maybe it’s seeing an evil and ugly world that has caused us to lose hope, to internalize that

unworthiness, that unloveability. Whatever we think it is, the fact remains that there is a wholeness

that is ours, that is our birthright, and we have glimpses of it all the time – in the sublime beauty of

nature, the unbridled joy of the newborn or excited curiosity and imagination of the young child, the

love and peace of the sage, the loving-acceptance and appreciation we feel with the select few in our

lives, even if it’s just our dear pets, the giddy joy of crawling into clean sheets after a long day. If we

were tasked with creating a perfect self and a perfect world out of imperfection, that would be

impossible. Luckily, we have only to discover and reveal the perfect wholeness that we are made of,

and that is why it is not only possible but inevitable, and the body is what makes this so.

Why the Body?

If we are made of body, breath, and mind, why emphasize the body? Isn’t the mind, or awareness, the ultimate, the one that continues after the death of the body? Here’s the thing: since we developed our capacity for abstract thought at a very early age, we have been using our mind more and more to dissociate from our bodily experience. Naturally, the body and mind are a coherent harmony – just look how embodied young children are! Emotions are processed in real time, play is full-bodied, imagination is unbound by rigid concepts, new understanding is sought constantly. If you are sensitive you can see and feel how free their energies are, how free their mind is.

But something starts to happen at quite an early age: certain intense experiences that are too much for the developing self-identity to fully experience, that feel too threatening, confusing, or overwhelming to process fully, are dissociated from partially or fully. The child goes into abstract thought to explain the situation in a way that makes sense to their child’s logic, and the energy and emotion of the experience is repressed, pushed down into the sub- or unconscious. This is commonly understood trauma theory nowadays. What we may not understand or appreciate fully is just what is the repressed material – do we actually know it’s the trauma, i.e., the harm we experienced? When we release our repressed experience, what surfaces isn’t the traumatic experience, per se, but the feelings, sensations, responses/reactions, and knowledge that was unsafe to feel or express at the time. Since our experiences are not purely psychological but are also deeply sensory, rich with feeling and somatic depth, our repressed and dissociated material is also not purely thoughts and stories.

The body is highly intelligent, and in fact, this whole dynamic is highly intelligent. What we have come to demonize in modern (and ancient) spirituality as the ego is actually a self-protective mechanism whose charge is the fledgling identity developing in the growing child. The experience that was too much to feel fully at that current stage of development is saved by the body to be experienced at a later time. There is a naturalness and beauty to the functioning of this system – no experience is lost in time; every moment not felt fully eventually returns to be wholly experienced. And not just the trauma and pain, but, more impactfully, the wisdom within the experience is what also returns to us, the sensations, feelings, emotions, and responses that were not safe to feel or express at the time, returning to us when we have softened our guard and, whether we know it or not, opened our inner receptivity again.

However, we live in fast-paced times, lead busy lives, and have so much to manage and plan for and

remember. The sensational feeling-depth of our experience is often not convenient for us or for our families, and so already as adolescents we develop proficiency in repressing much of the inner substance of our experience of our life. And we wonder why so many of our teenagers are depressed and in emotional turmoil – we’ve literally shut down the crucial part of ourself that could healthfully feel and process the developing richness of our inner world! By the time we are adults we have learned to manage our experience very well, thank you very much, and use our managerial mind to “rationalize” or explain the necessity of our chronic dissociation from our annoying inner world, one of the most common reasons being “I don’t have time for this right now.” The body’s communication has been silenced, or so we think, yet it always creeps in around the edges, in feelings of unease, paranoia, aggression, strange aches, pains, and tensions.

We may later (or earlier) in life go to therapy and may experience great benefit in surfacing our buried stories, parsing out the child-identity’s survival logic from the holistic context of the situation, but if the emotions and energies are not allowed to be released, if the reassociation with the experience occurs only in the mind and not also in the body, then the healing is often only skin deep, the felt experience not fully resolved. When people truly feel a situation has been resolved, there is always both a mental and a bodily dimension to the experienced resolution, and of course the breath is involved as the energy, emotion, and speech or other vocalization that occurs. In other words, a resolution or release is total and includes all of ourselves in its process, and you not only think but feel differently about yourself and your life as a result.

The long story short is that we are chronically dissociating from inhabiting the depth of our somatic experience, our body’s experience, and in place of direct experience we have filled our world with the

ideas we have gathered along the way. We know our idea of someone else is not who they truly are,

who they feel and know themselves to be. So too with our body. There is a life that our body has, and

it is rich and deep and rewarding. I promise it is not all trauma down there, and in fact, as we have explored, it may not even be trauma down there at all but a deep well of wisdom that has been boarded over. If we have been repressing things for a short or long time, then beginning to inhabit our somatic experience may very well surface what we have not allowed ourselves to feel and express. It can be incredibly helpful for those experiencing difficulty and overwhelm to utilize the help of a good therapist or counselor, or if there is a loved one or friend you feel safe to speak with, who will listen with loving-acceptance and open support and not judge or analyze. An open, safe, accepting, understanding, supportive space is one of the most healing environments in the world, and it is this very space we (re-)learn how to offer ourselves through somatic meditation.

Beyond Our Unresolved Experiences

Oftentimes meditators who have practiced quiet sitting, meditating on the mind, for decades still have not found the radical transformation promised by the meditative traditions. We may conclude such major or even minor transformations are truly difficult to achieve and rare, reserved for the gifted or the chosen. Yet the truth is that in these times we are more dissociated than ever, and many meditators practice in a chronically dissociated state. How can radical and holistic transformation occur if we are not bringing all of ourselves together in our meditation? Maybe we hope that our meditation will eventually just lead to our reassociation, that the mind’s incessant wandering will eventually exhaust itself and it will come to settle and rest naturally within the body. But this approach sounds haphazard, and exhausting dissociation sounds, literally, exhausting. We need a way forward in spiritual practice that addresses and remedies this dissociation from the start. Thus somatic meditation offers us its key: from the start we bring our attention, our mind, to inhabit and settle within the body, using the breath as a bridge to help settle our dynamic mind and enter more deeply into our body. This is known as dual cultivation, cultivating mind and body together.

The body is made up of alive and intelligent energy, existing on the same spectrum of awake aliveness as the breath, the mind, and everything around us, and there is an innate coherence to this intelligent energy – it functions as a whole while each piece performs its unique part. When an environment is healthy, every part benefits every other part. When an environment is unhealthy, some parts benefit at the cost of others. Just look at our bodies: what astounding intelligence made this body out of sperm and egg, designed each piece to grow where and what it needed to be, maintains the constant functioning of every cell, organ, and system, not alone and separate but in coherent communication and collaboration altogether, all body and mind coalescing and integrating as the simple experience you are having right now!

Yet the intelligent functioning of the body is not only observable from “outside,” like we just considered, but is also observable from within, as in, within your inner experience. When we bring our attention into the inner sensations of the body, we discover a vastly alive and communicative world, with endless richness and depth to explore. As the mind settles and merges more and more with the inner domain of the body, we do experience ourselves coalescing into a more coherent whole. We become familiar with the intelligent presence within the body and its unique way of communicating, and it feels good to inhabit the body. There is a kind of bliss, subtle at first and later more obvious, that arises when the mind is deeply settled within the body. This is one of the ways we know that the field of intelligent energy discovered within the body is our true home. And yet not just within a separate body, as the body itself arises from the larger coherent field, and so too we feel more and more that the whole Cosmos is our true home.

Tying It All Up with a Bow

There is great intimacy and sensitivity to cultivate in our meditation – we don’t want to be too forced

or come with too much agenda. Our body is an incredibly sensitive creature, attuned constantly to

our environment, always in process breathing, digesting, circulating, shedding, regenerating. The

somatic meditation tradition maintains that our body is actually receiving the total experience of reality, the entire cosmos, at all times. For this reason Hakuin Zenji, an 18th century Zen master, could claim, “This very body, the buddha,” because the body is the awakened one, the one who has always been awake, every cell, every moment, perceiving. We have spent most of our lives dissociating from the intensity with which our body experiences, like a light too bright to look at, but we can gradually begin to reconnect to that inner radiance, by taking our body as a dear friend and guide who we would like to communicate and commune with.

As we begin to inhabit our body’s somatic dimension, a whole host of sensations will begin to come

alive for us. Through our dissociation, our energy has been held in a sort of stasis, and our body has

become tense and numb in places and patterns throughout our muscles, tendons, fascia, bones, even

down to our cells. Yet through the practice we will inhabit our body from the inside, breathing into

the interior of our body, using our proprioception, our inner “felt sense,” to awaken feeling and

sensation, relax and clear tension, restore energetic movement and flow, and discover a deeper

connectedness to ourselves and the world around us. If the highly dissociated mind experiences a

numbed and deaded world, devoid of feeling and meaning, filled with depression, hopelessness, and

despair, imagine what the opposite of this must be like, as we reassociate more and more with the

depths of our body, leaving behind the body we think we have to discover the body as it experiences

itself: connected, awake, vibrant and vital, full of rich and delightful sensation and inexpressible

meaningfulness.

There is a lightness and yet a grounded aliveness to people who are more embodied, and we need not

envy them. We, too, can discover the wisdom our body holds for us, and this is exactly what our path

inevitably brings us to. This tradition views that the intelligent energy which we are, which has

shaped this exact body and holds our unresolved experiences for us, which communicates to us how

we are dissociated and welcomes us with well-being when we return, which returns our experiences

to us so that we may grow and mature through them – this intelligent body also carries us from life to

life, making sure that we always have exactly what we need to become more and more fully who we

are. The beauty of this is also that you can trust yourself completely: once you and your body have

reestablished trust and communication, which takes very little time with sincere practice, you will be

amazed at the guidance it offers, the encouragement, the inner resources you need. Ultimately, you

will feel that you are not separate from your body, that your body is not separate from others or from

the web of existence, and you will know that the greatest fulfillment comes from being yourself, the

simplest and most natural thing to be, fully embodied, fully awake.

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Daniel Perea is a guest writer on The Spiritual Rogue. He offers a live, guided somatic meditation monthly in the Imaginal Collective, helping members to sink deeper into the safety of their own being to allow the upwelling of wisdom a clear and open channel through which to flow. His contribution is part of the greater teaching within the collective of claiming the sovereign ground of your own being as the origin point from which conscious action arises: this is the path of the mystic and magician, orienting from the unchanging space of Being to consciously participate in the artistry of being who you truly are and most naturally want to be in this precious life you're living now. Daniel also teaches locally in Kansas City, offering guided meditation, inner alchemy instruction, and continuing education for yoga teachers to go deeper within their own practice, as well. To inquire further of his services, reach out.