The Awakening Body - by Reginald A. Ray

At present, we do not really know this true life of ours; we do not know who or what we actually are; and so we approach our life from the wrong end of the stick, by trying to think about it and figure it out. But we are trying to fit something that is truly boundless into the grain of sand of our own conceptual capacities. Of course that can’t work. No wonder we feel so much discomfort, dissatisfaction, anxiety, and pain in our life; no wonder we struggle and struggle, and often seem never to get very much of anywhere. Try and try as we may, we can’t contain the infinity and eternity of who we actually are in some neat little package of our thinking mind, no matter how sophisticated our thinking may be. So we fall back on our habitual default and observe our life from the external standpoint of our conceptualizing, judging mind. When we do, it seems to be something we can stand apart from and look at, a quantifiable thing that we can label, categorize, and ruminate about. We can judge it, compare ourselves with others, and think well or poorly of ourselves depending on what we find. But in a way, we are caught in an endless loop that just keeps circling back on itself, with no exit: we sense this fragile body of ours; we are haunted by our more-or-less afflicted, uncertain, and unsatisfactory karmic situation with all its limitations; and though we try to make the best of it, basically we have a subtle or not-so-subtle feeling of being trapped in our own web.

But we could take another approach: we can look at our life from the inside. How would one do that? The first step is to realize that the mechanism of our logical, linear, linguistic mind may not be the only way of knowing something; it may not be the only way or even the best way to know ourselves or our life. “Knowing from the inside” involves setting aside the bright daylight world of the thinking mind and learning to view—to viscerally sense—our life from within the half-light of our body. In the imagery of the ancient masters of Chan Buddhism, we need to “take the great step backward” into the shadows, into the semidarkness of our body. We simply set our consciousness backward and down. And in that territory, the thinking mind is worse than useless; it is only going to get in the way.

We could look at it this way. There is map; and then there is territory. The map is the conceptual representation. It is the function of the left brain, thinking mind to create maps of our life, maps of who we are, maps of other people and the world, maps of the universe, maps of everything. But maps, as the saying goes, are not territory. The abstract, conceptual maps of our conceptualizing left brain are not—are worlds away from—the rugged, unknown terrain, the actual visceral territory of our lived experience. The mental map is a small and limited thing; the territory of the body goes on forever. When we set aside, temporarily, the maps and enter directly into the limitless domain of our body, we begin the amazing, unexpected journey of uncovering our deepest, most authentic being and our true life; and in the process, we discover the depths of being of the universe and our place within the whole.

The somatic tradition in which I was trained, tantra or Vajrayana Buddhism, coming from Tibet, is all about discovering our true existence—which is lying in wait for us within our actual, present life—and making this most important and most fundamental of all human journeys.

PART ONE: Somatic Spirituality

Somatic Meditation

The Awakening Body is about the practice of meditation when it is approached as an essentially somatic discipline—that is, when the body rather than the mind becomes the fundamental arena of meditation practice. What might it mean to engage in this type of “Somatic Meditation”? Most simply put, rather than trying to develop meditation through our left brain, thinking mind in a “top-down” manner, as is the case with most contemporary approaches, Somatic Meditation involves a bottom-up process; in this bottom-up approach, we are able to connect with the inherent, self-existing wakefulness that is already present within the body itself. In contrast to contrived, conventional approaches that emphasize entry into the meditative state through the intentional thinking of the conscious mind and by following conceptual instructional templates, maps, and techniques, Somatic Meditation develops a meditative consciousness that is accessed through the spontaneous feelings, sensations, visceral intuitions, and felt senses of the body itself. We are simply trying to tune in to the basic awareness of the body. Put in the language of Buddhism, the human body, as such, is already and always abiding in the meditative state, the domain of awakening—and we are just trying to gain entry into that.

Meditation approached as a somatic practice involves two aspects. The first involves paying attention to our body, bringing our conscious intention and focus to and into our physical form. Sometimes we pay attention to individual parts of our body, even very minute parts; other times, what we are attending to is our body—or our “Soma,” as I prefer to call it—as a whole. Sometimes our attention will be on physical sensations, other times on body-wide events and patterns, others again on the subtle energies that flow through our body, other times the spatial environment of our body, other times still on the physical boundary of our body, the envelope of our skin.

The second aspect of Somatic Meditation is exploring—with openness and acceptance, and without any prejudice, judgment, or conscious agenda whatsoever—what we discover when we are paying attention to our body in this manner. This is no simple thing, especially since our entire conscious life as humans is typically maintained and protected by the “ego thing”—by not paying attention in this open and unrestricted way.

These two aspects of Somatic Meditation I have just described correspond to what are traditionally called “mindfulness” (shamatha) and “awareness” (vipashyana), found in virtually all forms of Buddhist meditation.

When we approach meditation as an essentially—I would almost say “purely”—somatic discipline, then everything changes. Most important, the spiritual journey is now seen not as separating oneself from “samsara,” from all that is physical, worldly, impure, and problematic, but (quite to the contrary) as a process of deeper and deeper entry into those very domains of our existence. When we do, we discover that it is precisely within the interior reality of those aspects of our fully embodied, visceral life that our most important discoveries occur, our true spiritual journey can unfold, and lasting, all-inclusive transformation is able to come about. In fact, authentic realization, we see, can only happen when we abandon the outside standpoint of our left-brain, judging, ego mind and plunge into the innermost depths of our ordinary, unprocessed human experience.

To Be a Body

One single concept best characterizes the instruction that Rinpoche received from his teachers and that he wanted to pass on to his students: “embodied spirituality.” But in using this term, what are we talking about? The somatic approach teaches that the spiritual is already, from the beginning, implicit within what we call the material—not only in our own physical body but also (as we shall discuss further below) in the larger body of our incarnate situation in the cosmos. This means that the essential nature of our incarnational materiality, both what is inside (body) and what is outside (cosmos), is already primordially and inherently spiritual. Trungpa Rinpoche taught that authentic spirituality cannot exist apart from embodied reality because disembodied spirituality is exclusive, separationist, and incomplete. Any attempt to present spirituality as disembodied is a bogus spirituality, a conceptualized, self-serving construct; at the end of the day, it is simply ego’s game, all over again, just on a subtler and more hidden level, what Trungpa called “spiritual materialism.”

When I talk about embodied spirituality in this book, then, I mean that connecting with our body and our ordinary life are not add-ons: they are the practice of spirituality; they are what the spiritual journey is all about. The somatic point of view is that the spiritual journey can only really begin within the depths of our incarnation; that we make the full journey only by exploring our own actual experience as an incarnational being, as it progressively discloses itself in our practice and our life; and that, in the end, this body is what we realize in all of its dimensions, in all of its subtlety and depth. This is the ultimate spiritual illumination, the long-sought elixir of life, the realization of nirvana. There isn’t anything beyond this for, as I hope to show you, this is the illumination of the Totality of Being.

The somatic teachings see the spiritual life as a journey toward ever fuller and more complete intimacy and even identification with our human incarnation—and we are not talking about just the “nice” parts. This means surrendering our separate spiritual stance, our “spiritual” self, and falling into contact, communication, alignment, and, finally, union with the most ordinary, basic aspects of our human existence, as they are. These include everything we go through, our whole somatic existence, with its sensations, bodily perceptions, feelings, and emotions—including all of our ordinary mental life, the ups and downs, the confusion, the pleasure and pain, everything. For somatic spirituality, our problem is not, as in conventional spirituality, that we are too close to these mundane features of our life but rather that we are too far away from them; our problem is not that we are too embodied (the disembodied approach), but that we are not embodied enough. The only place we can truly, authentically, and fully wake up is in the midst of life—right in the middle of our quotidian life, exactly as it is. The somatic lineage is thus life-affirming to an absolute degree; it is, in Trungpa Rinpoche’s words, “ultimate positivity”: we walk the path toward realization by abandoning any sense of distinction between our spiritual journey and our life journey that consists of the specific, gritty realities of our ordinary existence; in fact they are one and the same.

Consider Your Body’s Mind

Until quite recently it has been the assumption in Western cultures that mind and body are two distinct and separate realities. This belief is, of course, inseparable from the presumption that spirituality is based in the mind and involves separating and distancing oneself from the body and all things earthly. Largely through the discoveries of neuroscience and neuropsychology, a consensus has emerged that this dualistic way of looking at mind and body is invalid. We now know that the body itself is intelligent and aware, down to the cellular level. So there is no body that is in some sense not equally and at the same time “mind.” And the mind, rather than being a separate entity, is intimately connected with, if not reducible to, the collective awareness of the neurological network of the body; so there is no mind that is not, at the same time, the body.

Some neuroscientists are now talking about two “functions,” rather than two hemispheric locales, of the two ways of knowing. One is the function of the conceptualizing, abstracting, executive, conscious ego mind, which is primarily associated with the left hemisphere, and the other is the function of the holistic, nonconceptual awareness of the body, which is more closely associated with the right hemisphere but includes our entire subcortical neurological system. Following this functional way of looking at the brain, neuroscientists are also speaking of “top down” versus “bottom up” knowing. “Bottom up” functioning refers to the way in which direct, unmediated experience arises out of the unconscious domain of the body (“right brain”). “Top down” refers to the conscious, ego mind’s function of conceptual processing of what arises from the body, whereby we select from our inventory of labels, abstractions, judgments, and preconceptions those most fitting to “knowing conceptually” and mapping a selection of the nonconceptual experience that is arriving at the boundary of consciousness (“left brain”).

Other neuroscientists are using terms (very interesting in the present context) that suggest the experience of these two levels or modes of knowing (rather than geography or function). I want to draw attention to that approach here, because this distinction in the experiential quality is especially important for understanding the somatic journey. In particular, the terms they use for these ways of knowing are “exogenous” and “endogenous.” “Exogenous” means “arriving from the outside,” and it points to “right brain” or bottom-up knowing, an experience of utter unfamiliarity: we feel as if information is arriving from outside of the domain of our familiar, conscious, ego world, coming as new and as yet unprocessed, undomesticated (by our ego). Exogenous refers to phenomena that arise naturally and spontaneously from the darkness and the unknown (i.e., subcortical and largely unconscious) regions of our body: feelings, sensations, intuitions, “felt-senses,” visceral impressions, somatic memories—arriving in our awareness in a direct, fresh, immediate, and naked way. Neuroscientists speak of “exogenous stimulae.” By contrast, “endogenous” means “coming from the inside,” which refers to coming from within the already existing and known database of the “left brain,” the self-conscious, self-referential ego. Endogenous thus points to what we recognize as familiar—experience mediated by and filtered through ideas, concepts, assumptions, judgments, conclusions that already exist in our consciousness, based on the past, through which we process our present experience in order to “know,” manage, and control it. Endogenous involves top-down application of the familiar so that we can label, conceptualize, and pin down the unfamiliar and—to ego—potentially threatening and destabilizing influx of the unknown. Neuroscientists refer to “endogenous control.”

I will be discussing these two modes of knowing but, following a more somatic, experiential way of speaking, will distinguish them as the “left brain,” on the one hand, and as the “Soma,” or body (rather than the “right brain”), on the other. I prefer these terms because, while the functions of the conscious, ego mind are indeed primarily located in the left hemisphere, the functions typically associated with the “right brain,” as already suggested, are in fact distributed throughout the entire body: though largely unconscious in most of us, they occur through a vast network of somatically known and knowing experience and processing, of a system of awareness that includes aspects of the right cerebral hemisphere, the limbic system, the brain stem, the heart, the gut, the organs, the bones, the fascia, and, as mentioned, extending down to each cell in our body.

Through the methods of Somatic Meditation, we learn how to extend our awareness into our body and we begin to sense what is there—although “extending our awareness into” doesn’t quite catch it. In fact, through the Soma-based practices we are softening the boundary between our highly intentional, restricted, conscious ego mind and the limitless, unconscious domain of the body. When we do this, our conscious mind begins to tap into and connect with the somatic awareness that is already going on—mostly unbeknownst to us—in our body. In this larger field of consciousness, we are still conscious but in a very different way. It is as if we are waking up, within our Soma, and we suddenly find ourselves in a new world. We are uncovering a completely different experience of what our body is. We begin to see that what we formerly took to be our body was just a made-up version with little correspondence to anything real. We find in our body previously unimaginable vistas of spaciousness, experience arising that is ever surprising and fresh, an endless world of possibilities for ourselves and our lives.

PART TWO: The Six Core Somatic Practices

An Overview of the Somatic Protocols

This part of the book provides the written instructions, along with important explanations and clarifications, for the six basic somatic practices. But for you, the reader, this is just the beginning, for these instructions only lay the groundwork for a full, somatic understanding of the protocols. In order to help you take the next step, we are providing audio guided meditations for each of these six protocols on the Shambhala Publications website at www.​shambhala.​com/​theawakeningbody. In order to fully assimilate what this book offers, it will be essential that you listen to the guided meditations and follow their practice instructions as you do so.

The written instructions and the oral instructions offer complementary but also quite distinct means of access to the practices. The written instructions provide a conceptual map of the territory to be explored. As maps, they are most important because they give us the basic coordinates and steps of each practice. But, to say it again, the map is not the territory. The oral, guided meditations uniquely provide a way for you to actually enter directly into the territory of the body itself, so that we can know, experientially, what these practices are really about, how they feel, and what they accomplish.

Practice One: Ten Points

Somatic Meditation, no matter what aspect we may be practicing, unfolds in several steps that we will look at more closely below. Briefly, these include the following:

1. Making contact with the body by directing our attention there. Most of the time, it is going to be one part or area we are attending to.

2. Trying to feel what physical sensations are going on there.

3. Beginning to notice tension in that place or area or, if we are working with the body as a whole, as a total body phenomenon.

4. Learning how to place our awareness within the tension, experiencing it and inhabiting it from within.

5. Discovering that when we do so, we begin to gain agency over what might have previously seemed to be autonomous tension, outside of our conscious reach.

6. Beginning to soften, dissolve, and release the tension in question.

7. Then noticing what happens when we do, what we discover on the other side of the tension.

One thing that tends to occur in Ten Points is that we begin to notice how our bodily sensations actually feel, their insubstantial quality; how they are impermanent, fluid, ever changing and even, eventually, intangible and ineffable. Step seven is where the body work proper begins; step seven opens the gate of the body in its largest sense and the somatic journey is our exploration once we step through this gate.

We’re going to direct our attention to various parts of our body, beginning with the feet, and try to feel, to be aware of, what is going on there. The basic principle is that when you put your awareness into a part of your body, something important happens. Though you may feel completely numb at the outset, you begin to develop an increasing ability to feel, in a direct, visceral sense, what is happening in that part of your body. What we are doing, in fact, is consciously tuning in to an awareness that is already present in that part of the body—say, the feet. It is just that, up until now, because we weren’t paying attention, we didn’t notice. Because we weren’t attending the neural pathways connecting our conscious awareness with the somatic awareness of our feet, our sense of our feet went into the “sleep” mode and so we feel numb. But now, by paying attention, those pathways begin to awaken really quite quickly. The more we practice, the more sensitized we become and the more we notice.

As we become more and more aware of the parts of our body, at a certain point we will notice something else: the tension in each part. The more we explore this, the more we begin to sense that our entire body is actually riddled with tension. We are talking here not about the natural, healthy tension that is part of being human, but instead we are talking about neurotic tension, elective tension, superimposed tension—superimposed by our conscious orientation, our ego.

Tensing up is a way of avoiding the unadorned experience and the discomfort it brings ego, whether that discomfort is physical or psychological; tension is our way of closing down experience and shutting off awareness. It is the somatic expression of us holding on to our small ego concept, our restricted, left-brain identity. On the one hand, physically freezing and contracting in tension, and, on the other, psychologically shutting down and hanging on doggedly to our small sense of self are actually the same thing, just manifesting in these two different modes.

THE PRACTICE

Begin by taking a lying-down position, on your back, with your knees up and your feet flat on the floor. It is best to lie on a firm surface and the floor is ideal, although some cushioning will likely be needed—having a rug, a blanket, a yoga mat, or some combination of these underneath you will help you be more comfortable. In my teaching, I recommend tying a cord (yoga strap, belt, etc.) around your legs just above the knees so that the knees are just touching; this will allow the psoas muscles to relax and take any strain off your lower back, thus enabling you to relax completely and without any effort at all in the posture. Now place your hands, palms down, on your lower belly. You can cross your hands one over the other, left hand underneath, right hand on top, or just place them on either side of the lower belly, whichever is more comfortable. Our somatic awareness is rooted in the lower belly and this hand position, owing to the qi, prana, or knowingness that radiates from the hands, enhances and heightens our general somatic sense. In Ten Points, hands on the lower belly additionally enables the elbows to rest on the earth, which we will need in this practice. Generally, for this and the other protocols carried out in a lying-down position, having eyes closed is best, as that enables you to focus on the internal sensations of your body enhancing your interoception.

This position enables us to work with the “ten points” of our body that are in contact with the earth: the two soles of the feet (points 1 and 2), the two side of the buttocks (3 and 4), the mid-back (5), the two shoulder blades (6 and 7), the two elbows (8 and 9), and the back of the head (10). These are points of energetic contact with the earth, and it doesn’t matter if other parts of your body—say your sacrum or mid- to upper back—are also touching the ground under you. The body work practices are generally first learned and practiced in a lying-down position (the infant position), which I am guiding you in here, and then brought into a sitting-up posture (the adult posture).

Now try to feel the earth under you, solid and supporting, letting your body settle into the feeling. Take a minute or two, just trying to relax into the earth.

When we lie in this way, we are notifying the body that it can completely let go, release whatever tension it is carrying, and surrender back into that earliest and most open of all post-birth human states. Reconnecting with this posture and reawakening that somatic sense will be essential throughout all the body work practices that involve lying down. As we shall presently see, feeling—in a concretely and tangibly somatic way—the support of the earth under us is key to the whole meditative process at whatever stage; the more grounded we feel, the more naturally and effortlessly relaxed and open our body will be, and hence the more open and accepting of our experience we are able to be. By contrast, when we feel disconnected from the earth, the more we feel ungrounded, the more we feel we have to hold ourselves up by sheer ego strength and control our experience. And that breeds the kind of subliminal fear and tension that is counterproductive to meditation. Even when we’re lying on the ground, if we’re not connecting with the earth, we’re still perching, energetically, above the earth; so at this point, please make an effort to open and connect.

In this practice, we are going to use our breath as an aid. We will do this by imagining we are breathing into whatever part of our own body we are working on. We will be visualizing we are breathing into the pores of our skin in that place and bringing the breath—and our awareness—into that place. So beginning with the feet, put your breath into your big toes, and just try to feel them. Breathing into all the pores of your big toes, feel into your big toe on both feet, and see what you notice. What sensations are there? It doesn’t matter how much or how little is there for you; just try to feel more and more into whatever it is.

As you breathe into your big toe, at some point you will notice that you’re actually anxiously holding on or gripping, even in your toes! So breathe your awareness into your big toe and begin to feel where you may be holding; where do you feel tension? As you open your awareness into the awareness of the big toe, you will find you can begin to relax the tension that you find in your big toe and let that tension just drain downward into the earth. So the process of release is also the process of relaxation, and through the process of relaxation, through letting the energy into the earth, we connect with the energy of the earth.

As you move along, you can always come back to the big toe and the second toe and see if you can release and relax a little bit more. And, as you begin to do this, you’ll find, again, elsewhere in the body, opportunities to relax and let go. The body itself wants to release, and the minute we begin to invite that release in our feet, it begins to happen elsewhere.

Now we move on to the next two points, the buttocks on both sides, and then on to the rest of the Ten Points. The process we just went through with the feet and lower legs is the same for the other eight points.

See where there’s tension. See where you’re holding on, and release. Let go. You can notice the emotional tone as you do this work. There are many, many discoveries to be made right here, and they all lead in the direction of greater awareness and integration, greater health and well-being. Go slowly and gently, listen to your body—pendulate!—but have confidence in what you find. Your Soma wants to set you free, to live, for your sake and for the sake of Life.

Now we are going to practice all Ten Points together. Let your awareness permeate your body and try to feel your body as a whole. To help you, try to breathe into all the pores of the skin of your entire body, all at once. See if you can find any other places that your body is calling to you to relax and release. And as you scan your body, notice your awareness. Can you sense a stillness in it? Attend to your body with a lot of energy and commitment and devotion. If your mind wanders at any point in the practice, which it is bound to do, just come back to your body; you’re putting your whole attention in your body. You’re feeling your body as a whole. Just being there. And keep relaxing. Keep letting go. It’s almost as if your body is continually melting into the earth, under you. We’re developing an attitude of intense listening to the body right now. Listening. Listening, relaxing, relaxing, letting go completely. Open, receptive to what may come back to you.

Take whatever time you would like, and just lie there feeling whatever you are feeling, exploring whatever is coming up. And then, when you feel ready, you can sit back up. As you resume a sitting posture, try to bring your present state of relaxation and somatic openness with you; be mindful of not freezing when you sit up. It is best if you can sit on something firm, with no back support, such as a meditation cushion, a meditation bench, or a flat chair with a firm bottom, in order to support you in making the transition from lying down to sitting up. This is a vulnerable and delicate moment, from the lying-down posture to the sitting up, and we want to bring with us as much of the somatic awareness we have just developed as we can; so we want to sit up very slowly, mindfully, and resist the temptation to lock up, space out, or shut down.

When you feel familiar with Ten Points lying down, you can adapt this practice to sitting up and carry out the whole practice in a seated position, either in your meditation or just in the course of daily life—for example, sitting in a meeting or at the dinner table. No one around you need know. You may just seem a little more present and a little more interesting to them. In sitting-up Ten Points, the principles, steps, and procedures are the same although you will be making adjustments such as using whatever points of your body are in physical contact with the earth. Trust your experience and be willing to follow the lead of your body, whether lying down or sitting up, in terms of how it wants to use this practice as part of bringing you into its sphere and leading you on in your journey.

Practice Two: Earth Descent

As we practice and make the somatic journey, we need to feel like a mountain that rises up, but only out of a broad base that merges down into the infinite depth of the earth. Through Earth Descent practice, we begin to come into that kind of awareness, where the majority of our somatic “self-awareness” is in the earth below and the rest is up here on the surface, living out our sometimes stormy and uncertain life. Like the mountain, so profound and peaceful is our anchor in the earth beneath that the storms of our life can be experienced not only with no overwhelming alarm, but with appreciation of their power, majesty, and beauty. In this practice, we are not leaving our body behind. We are not dissociating. Rather, we are opening and extending our somatic awareness downward, into the earth. This practice is going to challenge the way we habitually think of our awareness or consciousness as generally quite small, contained in our skull or, at most, circumscribed by the envelope of our skin. As the somatic practices quickly make clear, that limitation is an artificial construct. In fact, our awareness has no inbuilt or inherent limitation whatsoever.

We are going to begin this practice with the same lying-down posture we used for Ten Points: on our back, knees up, feet flat on the floor, rug, or cushion, hands crossed over the lower belly. In Ten Points, we went through a process of connecting with each part of our body beginning with the feet, feeling the physical sensations in each place, noticing the tension, and releasing the tension down into the earth. In the Earth Descent, we are going to begin where Ten Points left off; we will start by feeling our body, but this time as a whole, sensing first the overall sensations of our body as a totality, then feeling all at once all the body’s myriad tensions—the dammed-up life force or energy—and releasing this down into the earth. In Earth Descent, though, we are going to follow the flow of this tension/energy down into the earth. More precisely, we are going to use the downward flow of energy as a vehicle to extend our somatic awareness and open downward, deeper and deeper into the earth.

THE PRACTICE

Let’s use the cycle of the in-breath and out-breath as an aid. On the in-breath, just be in your body and feel it as a whole. Now sense whatever tension is presenting itself. On the out-breath, release the tension down into the earth. Do this a few times until you feel comfortable with the cycle, “in-breath feel the tension, out-breath release downward.” Next, feel the tension on the in-breath, and on the out-breath release and extend your awareness beneath you about two feet. Do this a few times; on the next out-breath, extend your awareness down three feet. Then, on the next out breath, extend downward four feet, and open downward another foot with each successive breath until you are extending downward to ten feet.

On your next out-breath, extend downward to ten feet but, on the in-breath, leave the outer margin of your somatic awareness down at ten feet. On the next out-breath extend another ten feet downward so you are open to twenty feet beneath you. Then, on the in-breath again leaving your awareness at twenty feet, extend down another ten feet and keep extending downward another ten feet, then increase to twenty feet, then to fifty feet on each out-breath. Then you can extend downward at increments of a hundred, five hundred, a thousand feet. Explore your own inner feel of how to move downward, in what increments and at what speed. At some point, you may wish to leave the breath aside and simply focus on descending.

As you extend downward, you are likely to meet resistance within yourself. You may start to think the earth is solid; you may feel obstacles of all sorts, thoughts, doubts, even see images of walls and barriers. As each of these comes into view, remember that you are meeting your own assumptions and preconceptions. These are just self-created barriers; in the earth’s space, there are no impediments whatsoever. Just let them go and keep opening your somatic awareness downward, ever deeper into the earth. Notice fear, notice hesitation, notice the way in which we artificially limit our awareness going down. There is part of us that wants to hang on for dear life to a restricted sense of ourselves. Letting go of the hesitation and the fear, just keep extending downward.

To continue, at a certain point, you can let go of the idea of increments entirely and just imagine that your awareness is extending and opening downward in a steady way, like a snowflake falling through the air or, more quickly, like a stone dropped into a bottomless well. As you descend, have the feeling of your somatic awareness not only going down but also going out to the sides; so the overall feel is that your awareness is becoming more and more vast beneath you. Keep the feeling that it is your own body, your somatic being, that is opening deeper and deeper discovering new dimensions of itself. Let the leading edge of your somatic awareness extend downward faster and faster. And now open all the way down; see if you can just let go completely into the fathomless depth. Let the bottom fall out. Just extend and then, abruptly, open to infinity under you. So now a sense that the depth is infinite—it has no end—and opening to that endless depth…This can become a tangible, direct, personal—and visceral, bodily—experience. It’s now an utter, unconditional opening on our part. Feel the infinite depth of your body’s own space. Notice that there is no break between our awareness of our body and the awareness of the earth—it’s one continuous experience of primordial being.

As you extend and open downward, also notice the quality of the space of the earth beneath. Does it feel warm? Welcoming? Nurturing? Safe? As you descend, do you feel as if you were coming home? Is there an increasingly primordial feel to this much vaster and deeper scope of your body? Does the space feel healing? These kinds of questions are deliberately leading, used in the Tibetan tradition to direct our attention to things we might not otherwise notice. Now returning to your circumscribed body on the surface of the earth, bounded by the envelope of your skin, see if you can allow the energy of the earth into any place in your body or your psyche that feels compromised, shut off, or in need of healing. In fact, you have the ability to direct the energy of the earth to those places.

Practice Three: Yin Breathing

In Yin Breathing, we are going to take a closer look at the experience of space within our body. The term “yin” is Taoist, referring to feminine space, feminine reality, in contrast to “yang,” the masculine principle or reality. We are not talking primarily here about concepts of human gender but instead about basic, experiential principles of polarity that exist throughout our entire experience: night and day, health and sickness, light and dark, life and death, male and female—throughout all the realms of animal and plant life and so on. Within the human body, the place of yin is in the lower belly, approximately a couple of inches below the navel and in about the middle of the body. This place is extremely important in Chan and Zen meditation, where it is called the hara, and in Tibetan tantra, where is it known as the secret center. In Taoist meditation, this place in the lower belly is known as the lower dan t’ien.

By breathing into the lower dan t’ien, in a purely somatic way, we will be able to contact the most complete and primordial space of our human body, the transmitter from beyond time and space of the life force—our life force—that continually arises from that space. If you want to know, right now, who you most fundamentally are and where you came from, here it is, available for you to experience directly.

THE PRACTICE

Take the customary lying-down position, on your back, knees up, perhaps tied with something, feet flat on the floor, hands crossed over the lower belly, left hand under the right. Make whatever micro-adjustments you need to so that you are completely relaxed in this position. Here, in particular, loose clothing is important so that your lower belly feels easy, free, and open. The practice instructions are simple compared to the previous two practices. As you are lying there, try to feel the place of the lower dan t’ien, or hara, the place of yin. In the beginning, you probably won’t have any direct experience of it; you will need to begin by imagining where it might be and then trying to feel. Next, begin breathing into the lower dan t’ien or into the place you think or sense it might be. Again, use your imagination: visualize this space and imagine that you are breathing right into the center of it. We are not bringing our breath in through our nostrils or down through our airways or even trying to breathe in from the outside at all. We are simply imagining the center of the space and attempting to breathe directly into that place. Use your physical breath as an aid. On the in-breath, just visualize you are breathing right into that point. As you are doing this, try to get the feeling of opening up the space in the lower belly: opening, opening, opening. A good place to begin is to imagine that your lower belly is like a balloon: on the in-breath, you imagine the balloon is inflating; on the out-breath, imagine it is somewhat deflating. On the in-breath, you feel yourself breathing right into that place; on the out-breath, you just imagine the balloon deflating—you don’t worry about where the breath goes. Use this visualization for a while until it feels easy and continuous. It may take many tries before you feel you are catching on. Try to keep your attention on the space and within it at its very center, breathing into it and continually opening it up. As you continue, try to be more and more focused right in the center and more present to it. When the balloon visualization begins to feel doable—it doesn’t have to be perfect!—then shift your attention to the point in the middle of the balloon that you are breathing into. Try to be really there, just breathing into that point and, as you do this, relax and let go of the balloon imagery.

In Yin Breathing, we are roaming on the boundary between consciousness (the ego domain) and the unconscious (the deep Soma). Don’t expect your awareness within the yin space necessarily to look the same or have the same qualities as the awareness of the ego consciousness that you are accustomed to. You may find your mind dark or murky, or shifting, or swimmy. Sometimes the awareness is amazingly soft, subtle, and tender. Or it may feel quite fluid and watery. Or sometimes crystal clear. Sometimes, again, it may feel stunningly empty. You may sometimes find yourself drifting toward sleep, with various images and dreamlike experiences moving in and out. You may wonder whether you are actually being aware at all. You may even drift into sleep for a while. None of this is a problem; it is actually part of the evolving practice. The most important thing is to try to register whatever happens, no matter what state of mind you may be in. Constantly have the curiosity to ask yourself, What is going on here? What am I sensing or feeling? What is this, right now? Treat it as an adventure into an unknown land, for that it exactly what it is. You will learn things in the practice, but since the kind of learning is generally so unfamiliar, it may take time to realize what is going on. And, in the beginning, you may not remember very much.

Give yourself plenty of time to explore the practice and become familiar with it in the lying-down position. Beyond your formal sessions of practice, you can do this anytime you are lying down; it is especially interesting to do at night, when you are going to sleep or when you wake up in the middle of the night. It is truly a miraculous gate into the primordial, and sometimes when we are hovering near sleep, it can open up in unique ways.

Practice Four: Coming into the Central Channel

The central channel is another one of these places where the primal space can be met and experienced. As with the yin space, the central channel has a special importance in the traditions mentioned and others, especially Tibetan tantra, Chan and Zen, Hindu yoga, and Taoist meditation. In terms of its structure, the central channel lies along our spinal column, but just inside our body. (See figures on this page.) It is usually visualized as a kind of tube, extending from the perineum all the way up to the top of the head. The precise visualization varies, depending on how it is being used. Though in some cases it is seen as going over the top of the head and down to the nostrils in front, in our case it stops at the top of the head. The diameter of the central channel varies, again depending on the specific tradition and the uses to which it is being put. For our purposes, you can visualize it as about half an inch in diameter up to an inch. As you do the practice, see what feels right to you.

THE PRACTICE

The Central Channel practice is one of the few body work protocols that we need to learn sitting up. In fact, nearly all the use we will make of it will be in the sitting-up position. It can, occasionally be done lying down, but that is much more difficult and will only be possible once we are thoroughly familiar with the sitting-up version. We also need to learn and mostly practice Central Channel in meditation posture with no back support. This is because only in this way will the inner space of the central channel be fully accessible and unimpeded. And when we practice meditation, we are going to need the central channel to be the energetic and spatial core of our meditation posture.

Let’s begin our Central Channel practice with sitting-up Yin Breathing. If you are not sufficiently familiar with that practice to do it from memory, consult the instructions. Otherwise, just begin to breathe into your lower belly. Take some time, open up the space, and feel your breath entering and dissolving into the lower dan t’ien. Now we are going to use the breath to gradually open the yin space into the central channel, extending upward increment by increment, until the entire central channel is inflated, so to speak, with the space of the lower dan t’ien.

The entry point of the central channel—where we are going to be drawing the breath into it—is about three or four inches below the navel and at the back of the body, right in front of the sacrum. This will feel like the back part of the lower dan t’ien. Begin by breathing into this place. Keep breathing and paying attention to your experience of bringing the breath into this place. Continuing to breathe, see if any one spot in particular stands out as feeling like a gate or a hole. This gate or hole is one of the particularly vulnerable places in our conceptualized body, our solidified version of our body, that I have been talking about.

Breathe into this place, or visualize that you are breathing into this place. Imagine that, as you do so, you are opening the space of the lower dan t’ien into that hole. Now visualize that, breath by breath, you are very slowly, incrementally, opening and extending the space of the lower dan t’ien up the central channel. With each breath, bring the breath up higher, perhaps a half inch or so; try to be very present and fully attentive as you do. Make sure you remain grounded in the space of the lower dan t’ien so that you are not losing your anchor there; but at the same time you are opening the breath—the space, the awareness, for they are ultimately all the same—up and up and up. Keep opening the breath up through this tube of the central channel. Imagine that you are extending a kind of corridor or column of space up, as if it were in the tube shape. Continue to stay connected with the lower dan t’ien, and keep extending the breath up: up the back of the lower belly, past the navel, the solar plexus, behind the base of the throat, behind the vocal cords, up behind the palate, up inside the head but toward the back, to the occiput (the little bump on the back of your head), up to top of the head. Come to the top, but no further; we do not want to exit the body through the top of the head. Now have the feeling of laying your awareness along the entire extent of the central channel, from the space in the lower dan t’ien up to the top of the head. We might think that to be aware of space in the body, we have to pay attention to one particular location, but such is not the case. Once we get used to the idea, we can lay our awareness along this entire corridor of space and feel the whole thing, all at once. Work at this and don’t be discouraged if this kind of less-pinpointed awareness takes time to develop. We are developing a capacity here that looks forward.

Practice Five: Whole Body Breathing and Rooting

In Whole Body Breathing, by breathing in through all of the pores of our body and into its innermost regions, all at once, we are going to be further developing a global feeling of the body from the inside. As we shall presently see, inseparable from the breath is the feeling of the energy of the life force and of awareness. So when you are breathing in through your pores, you have a feeling of bringing not only breath but also energy, light, and awareness into your body. You have a sense of filling up with this breath/energy/light/awareness, as if you were pouring water into your body and completely filling up the envelope of your skin, including every nook and cranny. In this practice, there is no focusing or privileging of any one part of the body over another; every aspect is felt equally as a part of the whole, both surface and depth, down to the cells.

Whole Body Breathing develops a level of intense, interior, global somatic presence that we have not yet experienced. As we shall see, it will be extremely useful in any subsequent stages of the embodying processes in meditation, compassion work, or Tibetan Vajrayana practice. Beyond this, Whole Body Breathing is uniquely valuable for its ability to bring us into our entire body in this very direct and immediate way, even when we may be feeling quite disconnected and disembodied. This practice can also be used to support healing in injury or illness, since it is a way to augment oxygenation, nourishment, energy, and enhanced neurological function and growth to various affected areas of the body to promote and speed healing.

THE PRACTICE

Begin with an abbreviated Ten Points practice. First feel the physical sensations of your body; you might begin with your feet and then slowly sweep your attention upward, including more and more of your body, to your head. Now feel the sensations of your body as a whole. Spend some time here, opening to the full sensory experience of your body: physical, energetic, emotional. Just be with it and take it in. Notice what comes forward from this holistic field toward your consciousness. Next, breathing in through all your pores, be present in your body, as a whole and all at once, and attend to wherever you feel tension. Be within your body as a vast and open field, and be roaming around, noticing places that stand out with tension of any sort. You may notice one part, now another, then larger areas, perhaps even your body as a whole. Just as in the last stage of Ten Points practice, wherever there is tension in your body, try breathing into it, and invite release; try to let it melt and dissolve down, as in Earth Descent practice; let go and let the downward flow connect you energetically with the earth.

Now begin to breathe in more intently through all the pores of your body. At first, imagine that you are breathing in just the air. On your in-breath, feel you are inhaling into your body through all your pores at once; the pores do breathe, so this is not pure imagination. In fact, if you attend closely, on your in-breath, you may be able to feel the air coming in through the pores; it will generally be a slightly cool, fresh feeling. Imagine your body filling up with the refreshing air and its life-giving oxygen. See if you can sense your body responding positively, brightening, with uplift, to the inflow of the delicious, oxygen-laden air. Do this for a few minutes, until the experience becomes real and you actually feel it in your body. Next, imagine that inseparable from the breath you are breathing in is the energy of life, the life force itself, and imagine that as you breathe in, your body is filling with this energy so that your body comes further to life. Again, do this for a few minutes until you experience it somatically. Next, imagine you are breathing in awareness itself, which is the essence of the breath and the life force. And finally, image you are breathing in light. Now imagine that your body is filling up with awareness and light.

As you continue breathing in like this, try to come into your body with greater and greater intent, attention, focus, and presence. You are coming into your body more fully, more intensely, more brightly, more exuberantly, exclusively to the point where you are letting your awareness of anything else, anything outside, drop away. You are completely within your body now, your body is one of awareness and light, and there isn’t anything else.

Anytime you do this practice, even if you want to do it during the day to take a nap, whether you would say or think you are tired or not, there are going to be interior areas that feel enormously fatigued. At first, you may be completely unaware of these places. Our body and various locales with in it—which will differ for each of us—are at all times carrying an enormous physical and psychological load, though generally we are completely unconscious of the resulting fatigue and sinking, heavy tiredness that is there, in our body. Even in chronic sleeplessness, we are often unaware of this deepest level of fatigue. But now let’s use it. Now we are going to look for it.

Breathing in through all the pores of your body, search out these areas of fatigue. When you find them—for me it is often behind the shoulder blades, but it can be anywhere—open to them and breathe into them. Try to let go of your resistance to these feelings of terrible fatigue and relax into them, surrendering into them fully. You are searching and looking: where does my body feel crushing fatigue? Let the feeling of fatigue—the more overwhelming the better—bleed back into your conscious mind. This kind of somatic fatigue is not necessarily pleasant. You may find places that feel so weighted and so burdened, so incredibly heavy in an awful way, that you feel you could die. That place in your body may feel like you yourself would feel when you haven’t slept for two days. You feel you would like to just drop into the earth and let it all go. It is easy to see why we do not allow that feeling into our conscious reality easily. As you carry on with the practice, you may well find one place after another with this tremendous tiredness. When you do come upon such a place, bring your awareness right to it and try to let yourself slowly melt into it and dissolve into it. This is where the gate to sleep lies, in the heavy, even overwhelming darkness of this somatic fatigue.

Practice Six: Twelvefold Lower-Belly Breathing

At this point, it may be helpful for me to share with you how Twelvefold Lower-Belly Breathing is explained in the Tibetan tradition. Beneath the operations of our thinking mind runs our prana, or life force. This energy runs through channels or pathways known as nadis. The most important of these is the central channel with which you now have some experience. On either side of the central channel, almost abutting it, are two other principal nadis carrying feminine and masculine energy. These connect with weblike nadi structures in our major energy centers known as chakras. All told, there are said to be eighty-four thousand nadis in the body.

The conceptualizing that our ego is constantly manufacturing tends to tangle up our nadis and disconnect them from the central channel. What this means experientially is that our conscious experience gets disconnected from the underlying infinitude of our basic being, our unconditional awareness or “natural state.” So our prana gets trapped in endless loops, can no longer flow into and through the all-purifying central channel, and therefore becomes stale or polluted. The result is that our experience of life is fundamentally scattered, cloudy, obstructed, and confused. Since we have lost access to our nonconceptual experience, we tend to live in our facsimile versions. Having lost touch with the central channel, we have lost contact with our groundless ground, the natural state, our basic nature, and hence with our true Self and our life.

Twelvefold Lower-Belly Breathing does two things, which are two aspects of the same process. First, through a vigorous out-breath, stale or polluted prana is cleared out of our system. Since stale prana underlies all of our dysfunction, whether physical, energetic, emotional, or spiritual, this emptying-out process is highly beneficial. Then, second, the vigorous out-breath also brings our prana into the central channel. As this happens, our peripheral nadis untangle themselves. As we are about to see, the subjective experience of all of this can be powerful and profound. The uses and benefits of this practice are many. All of them have to do with coming strongly back into our true body, our Soma. Most importantly, it is a way of bringing ourselves back, when we find ourselves checked out, wildly conceptual, overrun with emotions, frantic, or sunken in depression—that is, when we are one way or another lost in our heady and energetically confused versions of reality.

THE PRACTICE

In the lying-down position, just feel the earth under you; then put your awareness completely into your body. Feel that you are extending your consciousness into your body so that you are identified with it. Feel your lower belly and be in there for a few moments. Now pick a spot roughly midway between the perineum and the navel in the lower belly. We are going to begin by breathing into that spot. Visualize that you’re breathing in—just do that for a minute or so. As you did with Yin Breathing, bring the breath in, not from the nose through the trachea and down that way, but just directly and immediately into the lower belly on the in-breath, right into that spot. This is all preliminary to the actual Twelvefold Lower-Belly Breathing. Throughout this practice, keep in mind that you are going to be keeping your attention continually within the lower belly; don’t let your focus wander afield from that place.

Now, relaxing your awareness into that spot, take a relatively slow, gentle, medium to full in-breath into the lower belly; no forcing, just what feels comfortable. Next, keeping your attention there, you’re going to exhale and attempt to empty out all of the breath, all of the stale prana in the lower belly. This is going to be quite a strong exhale. Do the exhalation slowly; no huffing and puffing, no abrupt forcing. Check with your body to see how much vigor it wants you to apply. How much is enough? How much is too much?

What we are looking for here is the sensation of tightening down the lower belly to absolute zero on the out-breath. Imagine you are completely closing it down to nothing. So in-breath is a medium to full in-breath into the lower belly. And then out-breath: empty, empty, empty, empty, and tightening the lower belly down to nothing, emptying out every last cubic millimeter of breath. So now please do one set of twelve breaths. Make sure to take your time; there is no rush; let your body tell you how quickly or slowly to go. After you have completed this set, just rest quietly and put your awareness once again into your body. Notice the difference. See if there is a kind of still or even vastly peaceful feeling. See if you experience a kind of silvery, energetic flow through the interior space of the body. It’s like a lively electricity flowing through the empty, open, body-space, through the entire body: the limbs, torso, head. If you are feeling that, try to be completely with that sensation right now, just be totally with it. Put your awareness into it. This energy harmonizes and heals our entire somatic state of being, so the more you can identify with it, the better. And this also relaxes the body further. If you have any tight spots, just run that energy through—just bring that silvery electricity through the tight spots and see if you can let go a bit more. Relax.

Now we are going to do a second set of Twelvefold Breathing lying down and I am going to offer you some additional instructions to enhance the practice. At this point, you may find that your lower belly is a bit warm, so we’ll be able to go a little further. On the in-breath you can roll the top of your hips forward and puff out your lower belly just a little, and that will lift the lower back off the floor or at least unweight it, very slightly. And on the out-breath, roll the lower back into the floor and pull the pubic bone up and back toward the spine. So you will be developing a slight rolling motion: in-breath, belly puffs out slightly and lower back rolls off the floor; out-breath, belly is pulled back and in and the lower back rolls to the floor. You will need to practice this a little in order to see what I am talking about.

When you are finished with your second set of Twelvefold Lower-Belly Breathing, you can just lie quietly and feel what is going on, with the energy flowing in your body throughout the pathways; see if doesn’t feel almost like liquid light. Luxuriate in the so-very-tangible, physical quality of the experience.. Notice how steady that energy is. It is independent of everything else in your experience that might be going on right now. You might be having different emotions or feelings as you begin, but notice how this energy is underneath that. You may feel exhausted, but—again—this energy is bright, alive, and completely free of that fatigue. It is running well beneath any relative experience you may be having “higher up.”

PART THREE: How the Practices Unfold

Intention, Attention, Sensation, and Discipline

Through the six core practices of Somatic Meditation, a very fundamental reorientation occurs in our relationship to our body; in fact, a radical transformation comes about. At the beginning, we may be so absorbed in the self-enclosed circuitry of our left brain that we have little or no cognizance of our Soma at all; or we perceive it dimly through a haze of mental projections, judgments, and interpretations. In this case, we have little or no direct contact with our actual body and are experiencing mainly a set of mental projections that we take to be our body. Through the somatic practices we eventually end up in a very different place. Now we are able to be fully present within our nonconceptual—which means our actual—body and to experience it with absolute simplicity and directness. We—our conscious self—are now in dialogue with that body; we are able to understand its language, respect what it knows, and, most importantly, from a practical standpoint, follow its directives.

In order to illustrate the journey of our “radicalization” in relation to our Soma, I am going to outline six principal phases, levels, or steps that we go through in working with each of the six protocols. In order to provide you with a concrete sense of what the somatic protocols actually are and some understanding of how they unfold through the six phases, I will be using the Ten Points practice as an example. As you read this description, though, keep in mind that each of the other somatic protocols also evolves through these same six steps or phases, although each does so in a somewhat different and characteristic way. Although I am going to talk about six phases as if they were distinct stages, in fact they lead naturally one into the other; thus, in practice, the journey here occurs in one, unbroken, seamless unfolding. I am artificially talking about discrete steps so that you can have some conceptual understanding of what the journey of each protocol is and how it works.

Intention

The first step in developing a new and more direct relationship with our Soma is forming an appropriate and functional intention. At first glance, this may seem like an obvious and easily understandable point, but there is a lot here. Whatever we direct our intention to, we pay attention to; and whatever we pay attention to, neurologically, becomes the direction in which we grow and develop awareness.

So our first step is to set our intention toward our body: “I prioritize my body and my relationship to it.” This needs to be a real intention based on an understanding of why this is essential for us right now. And thus even to form a strong and functional intention, there needs to be a coherent and clear comprehension of the overall path to spiritual embodiment and the critical place of the somatic-practices work within it.

Directed Attention

Initially, most of us do not have a very clear or positive intention toward our body. In fact, to start with, we are so habituated to trying to live in our conceptual mind that we may not even be aware of an issue here at all. The result is an unconscious, negative relationship to our Soma. Let’s say our life revolves around a hectic lifestyle, being “busy” all the time, working, shopping, relating to our domestic life, including many hours spent on the Internet, watching TV, and reading and writing e-mails—all largely left-brain activities—running through our ever expanding “to do” list, “accomplishing things,” entertaining ourselves, seeing friends, and accumulating more and more information.

Here, the unconscious, negative intention toward our body comes out in paying less and less attention to the domain of the Soma and perhaps not even noticing it, as what little awareness we have of it slips further and further away; we are more and more losing touch with the feeling of our physicality, our corporeal beingness, our sense experience, our feelings, the hum of our parasympathetic organism within, the imaginal life that lies behind and beneath our thinking, and the roots of our emotional life in our limbic system. We are drying up inside; we are fast on the road to becoming a desiccated husk of a human; and of course, we are part of a larger, global campaign, with our increasingly shared world culture becoming a desiccated husk of a society and a desiccated husk of a world. In turning toward our left brain with so much attention and avidity, so much energy and ambition, we are turning away, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, from our Soma, our true Self, and our true life—and Life itself. As mentioned, when we don’t pay attention to something, our capacity to experience it diminishes and, then, over time, atrophies. In this case, the neural pathways that link our somatic experience with our left-brain thinking mind begin to become nonfunctional and die off. Then, increasingly, we lose the capacity to feel or sense our body even at a rudimentary level.

Step two in recovering our body is to pay attention to our Soma. Using Ten Points as our example, then, beginning with the toes, we systematically work our way up through the body, breathing in through our pores, attending to each area in detail, to begin the process of resuscitation and reconnection.

When we arrive at the first instruction, “pay attention to your big toe on each foot,” at first, practitioners may not be able to do this because, they often report, they have no feeling not only of their toes, but often of their feet, their legs, or even the lower half of their body. They can’t pay attention because they don’t have anything to pay attention to. “Keep trying,” I tell them. For even directing our attention to the vicinity of where we think the toes should or might be is already transforming our neurological wiring. If we keep at it, pretty soon we begin to be able to locate our toes, not in terms of our mental image of where we think they are, but from the inside, exactly what they feel like, where they actually are, where they live, so to speak.

However, as you become more familiar with Ten Points, as you move upward through your body, you can continue to include and remain consciously connected with the parts you have already “woken up.” So you focus first on your big toes, but then as you move your focus to your second toe, you retain some subliminal somatic awareness of your big toes. As you move your focus to your middle toe, again, you retain some awareness of your big toe and your second toe. Thus when you move to a new area, you do not entirely abandon or leave behind the somatic awareness of what you have already been developing.

So it is that in your practice, as you move up through the body, Ten Points becomes more and more inclusive of the whole sum. In the somatic practices in general then, you first learn them piecemeal and then it will be quite natural for you to work with them in ever more integrated patterns. In this, you are beginning to develop new capacities and dimensions of awareness; now awareness is beginning to become no longer exclusive or even local. As we make this journey, we will see for ourselves that our awareness operates in more and more holistic ways. We thought it was elsewise for no other reason than because we thought it was elsewise.

Noticing and Feeling Sensation

As we pay attention to the various parts of our body in Ten Points, initially we may simply feel that they are numb or even dead. This, in itself, is a welcome development, because these feelings of numbness or deadness are important feelings; we know directly—not through our incessantly thinking and interpreting left brain—what is going on there. Even in the feeling of numbness or deadness, our body is beginning to wake up; our capacity is developing. As we continue the practice, the felt-sense of our body, the feelings and sensations, become more differentiated, subtle, and clear.

And while we can mentally classify each sensation into some logical group—say, “skin” or “blood and lymph flow”—in fact the more we do the practice the more it dawns on us that each moment of experience of the big toe is its own thing; in some real sense it is fresh and unique. Labeling each sensation is irrelevant and actually gets between us and what we are feeling; at a certain point, we no longer feel the need—if I may coin a verb—to “left-brain” what is happening. For, as we say in our lineage, the Soma never repeats itself.

Discipline: Returning When Attention Wanders Away

As we are poised to go further and deeper, particularly when we are practicing on our own, we run into a serious problem. We find that sometimes or most of the time we are having the hardest time keeping our attention on the practice at hand, staying with the part of the body we are working with, and carrying the protocol beyond a certain point. We keep being pulled off by our discursive thinking. Many times, we exit into thinking about some current situation or event in our life. Ironically, so it seems, sometimes we separate from our body as a result of the increased sensitivity and openness developed in practice itself: we are so taken by some new somatic discovery that we cannot resist thinking about it: “Wow! This is amazing.” But the moment we think about it, of course we have lost it and are no longer within the Soma. First, we feel we are really there, within our body; the next moment, without noticing it, we have popped up to our head and are off thinking about something. Our mind feels quite unsteady and unstable; distressingly, we seem to have very little control over it or ability to stay with the practice.

Now the gritty work begins. When the mind wanders away from the body work, just bring it back. One needs to be patient and steady: every time we find ourself having abandoned the Soma and having drifted away into some discursive fantasy, simply, gently, but without hesitation, rancor, or negotiation, bring it back.

The process of bringing the mind back again and again accomplishes some important things. First, when the mind wanders off, it is looking for some wishful-thinking, fantasized gratification, some imaginary “payoff,” that being within the simple “isness” of the Soma does not provide. This is a neurotic, addictive tendency; by short-circuiting that tendency in mid-course by bringing our attention back to the body, before it gets very far, we are undermining it. Once we stop driving in this neurotic, ultimately self-defeating neurological rut in the open fields of our mind, the grass of fresh, living experience can begin to grow back. Second, by bringing the mind back again and again, we develop the habit of returning to the Soma; we are building a new and different pathway through the spacious field, one much more in keeping with respect for the habitat: namely, our own person, the totality of our living experience, and our journey. And third, over time, we begin to find a kind of corporeal relief and satisfaction, and relaxation, which discursive thinking is quite incapable of providing. This becomes a repeated and repeatable experience, and it tends to help us remain within the integrity of our body and the practice.

Tension and Breathing

Working with Tension

Tension continues to enter our awareness as we carry out Ten Points practice throughout our entire body. In each place, as our ability to sense becomes more refined, the more we notice tension. How might this tension be experienced? In addition to what feels like the natural, unaffected being of each part of our body, we sense some kind of quite unpleasant overlay. Something seems to be leaning on, impinging upon, or restricting our otherwise free, open, and easy sensation of that part; some vague sense of artificial gripping or holding on seems to be happening there. We might have a subtle feeling of wanting to get rid of it so that we can “liberate” that part.

With each part of our body, we are first going to notice the more extensive, tightest, or most obvious tension; then we see that the tightness and restriction lie in other, adjacent areas of that part, too. With the big toe and the other locales of our body we are exploring, eventually we begin to suspect that tension seems to completely pervade the entire locale, though at various levels, like the successive layers of a many-layered cake: there is the gross tension on the surface; then less obvious, subtler levels of tension beneath; then, finally, the subtlest and most refined tension at the deepest layers.

When something occurs that we do not want to see or feel, we have a strong tendency to freeze and exit into thinking. It could be an internal or an external event. Perhaps a memory suddenly pops up of a painful interaction we had yesterday. In the instant of the memory abruptly appearing, we have a feeling of some kind of vague something in our body, in the Soma’s simple and nonjudgmental way of knowing. The initial experience is neutral, but it is some kind of eventfulness, some kind of energy and, as with any new event, we fear it. In a split second, we freeze, we tense up, and exit; we separate, label it, and attribute a definite source to it, to what happened yesterday. We are trying to get our familiar ground back. We begin to think about it, trying to “work it out,” attaching all kinds of judgments, interpretations, and perhaps strategies to it, setting it within the constantly running ego narrative, the map, of who we think we are or are trying to be. In that split second between the naked experience and finding ourselves gone into our left brain, something very important has occurred. We turned away from the raw, somatic reality of the visceral felt sense toward a disconnected, mental—and much less viscerally painful—version of it. A disembodied, abstract version. The map of our conceptualized “me.”

Through the somatic protocols, we begin to be able to track this process in an ever increasingly precise way. We begin to become aware of how we accomplish turning away from the open and unmediated experience of our body; we do that by literally hardening our body so that we no longer feel. Something painful or even just slightly unpleasant happens and two things occur simultaneously—in fact, they are part of one process: we tense our body and we jump into our thinking mind. Hardening our body so that we no longer feel the painful thing is part and parcel of exiting into thinking; exiting into thinking is inseparable from hardening our body even further against the feeling. We tense up, and it is “up”; rightly, we never say “tense down.” But we do say “calm down,” which is exactly accurate to the process of releasing tension and returning to our Soma.

However, this awareness is still too external; we are viewing the tension from the outside, as alien and other. At this point, I will instruct people to try to put their awareness inside their tension. “What would it be like to experience your tension, in this or that place, not just from the outside, but from within itself?” This may seem implausible to them and even impossible at first, but as so often in the body work, the impossible turns out to be eminently doable and, eventually, completely obvious. You have perhaps seen this in the protocols we have just carried out. The practice is to bring your awareness right to your tension—say, at the junction of big toe and foot—and then try to surrender your awareness into the tension there. This may sound like a fairly advanced practice, because, after all, you are being asked to give up the dualistic standpoint of self and other—here your big-toe tension—and dissolve your awareness into the other. But the body is a wonderful—in fact the premier and perhaps only true—access point to moments of a truly nondual and authentically self-aware state of being. The body is quite capable of experiencing itself, without the intervention of dualistic consciousness.

Once we find ourselves inside our tension, if even for just a moment, a few very interesting things happen that foreshadow later, clearer experiences on the path. First, in that moment of “being inside,” we cannot tell if it is still “we” who are aware or whether it is really just the body being aware of itself. There is no conclusion to be drawn here particularly, but it does open up a field of uncertainty about who we are and what the body is that is extremely interesting. Once “inside,” we also no longer see the tension as something other that has happened to us. In fact, we can feel in it a “me,” a subtle ego consciousness, that is hanging on, maintaining the tension, refusing for its—our—own purposes to let go and relax. This discovery represents a hugely important moment: by entering the tension, we have pushed back the boundary of the unconscious and can now see the previously unconscious ego agency maintaining the tension. As long as we did not realize that it was “we” who were tensing and holding on, we were unable to take any responsibility for it; we were unable to own it and gain agency in relation to it. By putting the agency on the “other,” the body, we were in a state of disempowerment. But, in realizing and feeling, quite clearly, that it is indeed “we” who are holding on, we have taken responsibility for our tensing; and we have gained the capacity to begin to release it. Now the instruction can be given, “inhabit the tension, feel it, and begin to release and let go.” Inside the tension, you see exactly how to do this. If you are holding a ball in your hand and you want to drop it, you are aware of your hard gripping and you can just let go. With our somatic awareness of our tension from the inside, it is that simple.

Breathing Practice

In many of the somatic practices, we use the breath as a vehicle for and an enhancement of our attention and our awareness. The breath, as used in the somatic protocols, has three progressively more refined dimensions. First is the outer breath, which is our physical breathing in of the air around us. Second is the inner breath—the prana (India), lung (Tibet), or qi (China)—which is, at a subtler level, the vitalizing energy lying beneath and within the outer breath, of which the outer breath is a more concrete physical expression (we have also called this, in its most elemental form, “the life force”). Third is the secret breath, the quantum emptiness that is the core or essence of the inner breath; this is unconditioned awareness itself which, as already suggested, gives birth to the inner breath.

Within the protocols, there are many ways in which the breath is used. At the simplest level, it provides a vehicle on which our intention and attention can ride. We can visualize ourselves breathing into our big toe, in through all its pores and directly into its interior. This bringing in of the outer breath, then feeling the inner breath or life force within it, and finally experiencing the awareness that the life force carries as its core all greatly enhance and strengthen our Ten Points practice with our big toe: our attention is more focused, simple, and pure, and the experience of the big toe can become subtler, more nuanced, and more profound. In Ten Points practice, in particular, the breath enables a much higher degree of experiential vividness and differentiation as we move from the big toes on through the entire rest of the body. The breath also helps us explore the inner spaces of the body in a way that enhances our practice significantly. Within the body, as we have seen, there are many interior vortices where an experience of radical openness and emptiness can be found; and where, as we shall presently see, we will find our own most fundamental openness, emptiness, and freedom. These include (among many others) the perineum, the sexual center in the lowest regions of the lower belly, the hara or lower dan t’ien, the navel, the solar plexus, the base of the throat, the throat, the back of the palate, the middle of the skull, the top of the skull, and (of particular importance for meditation, as we have already seen) the central channel. By breathing directly into these places or in some cases simply following the natural flow of the breath there, we are able to connect with the basic space and unique energetic aspect available in each; each functions, then, as a “gate” to the primordial state, and the breath enables us to come to the entrance to, and later to step through, each of these gates.

As the Practice Matures

The reason for taking time with each protocol and its stages is to grow and develop the neural pathways in that area. With Ten Points, for example, you find the more you do it the more you are able to do it. You are developing neurological capacity. Though you may be taught the practice, going through all the stages, in the beginning you may only have a faint experience of what, later on, you will find very simple, natural, and straightforward—and very much more profound. While the practices and steps as I am describing them may possibly sound a bit tedious, the actual experience isn’t like that at all. We train in one protocol, then the second, following the instructions, and the process unfolds in a natural and spacious and generally quite fulfilling way. One thing leads to the next as we follow the thread of our experience; we are assimilating the lessons into our way of being and gaining a feeling of groundedness, simplicity, and ease. As we become more familiar with the protocols and how they go, those practices begin to become second nature; we are able to do them directly and intuitively, without having to think about it. And, strangely enough, this feeling of simplicity, groundedness, and ease begins to permeate our larger life, almost without our realizing it.

The first “movement” in the symphony of our journey, then, is training fully in the somatic protocols, learning the structure of each practice and its various aspects, and assimilating it thoroughly. In so doing, we come to see what the practice is for and what it can accomplish for us. Through this, the journey each protocol embodies becomes part of our system, our process, and our life. The second movement of our symphony involves practice, practice, and more practice of each protocol. However, in this movement, rather than focusing on mastering and integrating the practice, we are now exploring what happens within it; we are allowing the “container” of the practice to hold us in a safe and familiar environment, while we explore the ever-new experience and ever-fresh discoveries that arise with in.

Much later in our symphony—perhaps it is even the coda—we are able add a free-form element to our practice. It is not that we stop carrying out the practice as taught or stop exploring what happens when we are securely within its protective container; that continues, of course. But after we have trained for quite some time, our subjective experience might be like this: we feel called to a certain locale in our body (it could literally be anywhere); we sense a restriction in our experience there; based on our past practice, we are now able to feel the restriction as unacceptably uncomfortable; we see directly that we need to meet that restriction, release it downward, opening that space; and we know in a direct, nonconceptual way how to do it. At this point, we don’t have to be consciously selecting one of the protocols or running through the six phases deliberately and self-consciously. Working with our body in this way has simply become our natural and preferred way to relate with our experience. This is quite a change from how it was for us earlier on.

Tension has been our way of keeping unwanted thoughts, feelings, memories, images, sensations, emotions, and the like out of sight, buried in our body, in our unconscious. What happens when we start letting go of this repressive mechanism and soften the boundary between the Soma and our consciousness? Now everything that we have been artificially excluding from our everyday awareness is free to come knocking at the door. What kinds of things come up? When we as practitioners dissolve layers of tension, we typically find that our experience of ourselves opens up quickly and sometimes quite dramatically. Again, what’s happening is that previously unconscious material is now flowing up from the Soma. We may come into contact with inspiration and with creative aspects of ourselves we never have felt quite this strongly or clearly before. We may experience feelings of sensitivity, tenderness, appreciation, or love that are new. Visions, dream images, sudden memories, inner pictures—all begin to arise from the Soma in a new way. And, just now, we are only at the very beginning of the somatic journey.

At the same time, we will run into unconscious aspects, our “shadow” material, that call into question and disconfirm our ego versions of ourselves and others. We may now find ourselves noticing a great deal more about our relationships with family members and close friends, becoming aware of how we have been invested in restricted, self-serving versions of people in our life, whether stubbornly and artificially negative or blindly positive; and realizing that there is much more to those people than we have been willing to see. Having perhaps had the impression that the responsibility for troubled relationships lay mainly with the others, we may now see how much we are contributing to the problems. Or, conversely, having assumed that we are to blame for difficulties, we may now see it is actually the other person who is driving much of the trouble. Our body is already rebalancing the one-sidedness of our conscious standpoint. Having considered ourselves to be kind, considerate, and generous, we may suddenly run into a deep and willful, even arrogant and aggressive, narcissism within. Or having thought of ourselves as being shaky, confused, and without much to offer others, we may discover reservoirs of strength, confidence, and creativity that are quite unfamiliar. Perhaps we have always thought of ourselves as self-sufficient and confident, but we now uncover unsuspected levels of neediness and lack of confidence. If we are of the male gender, particularly of the older generation, we are likely to have been brought up to feel we have to be strong, independent, confident, and able to handle everything; in that case, coming upon deep levels of neediness, weakness, and even helplessness can be very challenging indeed.

What is wanted is that our conscious, ego mind align itself with the person we most deeply are and need to become, with the wholeness of person that our Soma embodies. In the unexpected manifestations of the somatic practices, we are being invited to follow the thread of our own journey; we are being shown the path to our own completeness, our basic uniqueness as a person and our own purpose for being at all. And this path must be shown to us moment by moment by our Soma, because there is no place of residence for it in our left brain, our conscious inventory of past experience that is made up only of abstract maps and facsimile versions. The Soma, our deepest Self, is all about the future fulfillment and completion of our life—and about what needs to happen right now to move us toward it.

How the Soma Protects Us and Supports Our Transformation

As we are releasing tension and relaxing, and as we experience the steady influx of new information about ourselves and our lives, we may feel apprehension. We may feel that we have been ignoring a lot and so fear the arrival of new data that we can’t handle; we might think that we will be inundated, flooded, and overwhelmed. It is true that life and particularly a conscious, spiritually oriented life is always lived somewhat on the edge—on the edge of wondering whether or how we are going to be able to handle what comes up in the work. But my experience teaching the somatic work to thousands of people for the past thirty-five years suggests that fundamentally we can indeed relax and needn’t worry overmuch. We are called to change in very basic ways, that is true. But we can remember that such changes are the heart and essence of the spiritual journey. They are about the fulfillment of our own human life; we are right on track. And it is an amazing and reassuring fact that in this process, the Soma protects, nourishes, and supports the basic changes and transformations we are going through. In particular, there seem to be two factors at work.

The first is the grounding and stabilizing effect of the body work itself. The first two practices taught, Ten Points and Earth Descent, set the tone for all that follow. As we have seen, Ten Points brings us strongly into our body. And Earth Descent helps us to delocalize our awareness; lying down, opening the back of our body, so to speak, and extending our somatic scope down, down into the earth. Remember, the earth we are opening into is not quite the same as the one we have learned in geology. It is what we may call the experiential earth, the interoceptive earth, the reality that comes into view once we drop our concepts, extend our awareness downward, and see what we actually find in our experience. Through this and other earth-related practices, over time we develop a strong, reliable, open, and profound relationship with the earth beneath us: a deep sense of the openness of the earth space, of its wonderful warmth and nourishment, and of ourselves being held and protected within it. My personal suspicion is that this experiential space is the same one we feel as fetuses in our mother’s womb.

Over time, we feel less and less isolated as a disconnected, physical entity running around on our barren, human parking lot; more and more we feel in connection, communication, and even communion with an alive, aware, sacred presence beneath us. This is always in need of emphasis: this is not an intellectual belief or conceptual understanding; rather it is something we feel in our body—and can only understand—with the corporeal, visceral intuition of the body. Once our body knows this presence, our whole state of being knows it directly, and this is the critical piece. Then we feel ourselves to be grounded, stabilized, and deeply rooted. When we feel anchored in the earth in this primal way, then somehow the comings and goings of our ever-changing psychological states don’t seem quite so weighty, momentous, or final.

The Soma protects and supports our unfolding spiritual process in a second way. There seems to be at work within us—within our Soma—a natural, I suspect inborn, modulating effect in terms of the volume and also the intensity of what the Soma brings up to us, to our attention. I can’t necessarily explain or even claim to understand the process, but it seems to me that the Soma knows unerringly what the limits of our ego mind are, exactly how much we can handle, what our ego consciousness is capable of integrating at this time. When Levine advises us to “pendulate” in this kind of work, I believe what he is advising is not some kind of external and extraneous technique so much as encouraging us to tune in to and trust an inborn and accessible tendency of modulation already within the body itself. He is asking us to listen to the body and follow its call for modulation or pendulation.

Hence, in order to take advantage of this inbuilt somatic wisdom, we as a conscious, ego self, have an essential role to play. Whenever we are working with our body, or meditating, or working on our self-process in any way for that matter, we always need to be checking in with our body, to tap into its precise feeling and what it has to say. As we are practicing, the body will always be willing to show us: “You can go a little further now,” “This is a little too much, back off a little,” or “That is enough for today. Take a break.” Sometimes the body will communicate “This issue is too much for you to handle alone; you need some additional help.” Of course, the communication rarely comes in words like these; it most often arrives as an intuitive bodily sense. In the beginning, when something like this comes up, we may not know if it is our reliable and trustworthy body that is speaking or whether we are having just a random thought. After a while, though, you will develop the capacity to tell the difference: “This is my body” or “No, this is my ego, my monkey mind, trying to coopt the process.” I want to emphasize this point very strongly: we have to check in with our Soma and not allow our own ambitions and agendas, our fears or wishful thinking, to override what the body unerringly knows.

Paradoxes of the Soma

I have been speaking of the Soma in two somewhat distinct ways: both as our own most fundamental Self and, at the same time, as a true “other,” something we experience as outside any known or familiar frame of reference. I have also expressed this paradox in the two seemingly rather different functions performed by the Soma: first, its purely mirror-like, omniscient quality, its ability to reflect with clarity and accuracy whatever is going on with us or in our experience of the outside (the Self); and second, in terms of its having some kind of intention toward us, as if the Soma were an agent wanting to communicate with us and to intervene in our life (the “other”). In both cases, I am referring to the body that we meet and experience from the inside when, using the various somatic protocols, we enter interoceptively into the interior of this psycho-physical incarnation of ours. How can what we experience as our most authentic Self also be, at the same time, often experienced as something so other?

Trungpa Rinpoche provides some clarification. He calls the direct unmediated experience of our body the “basic ground,” because here is our own most personal, intimate, and direct experience that, subsequently, the ego mind builds on and takes as grist for its conceptualizing mill. The basic ground really is our own person at its deepest level, and we feel it as such. But, paradoxically, our deepest Self isn’t a solid, objectifiable entity; it is rather a process of unfolding, which, in its true aspect, is beyond thought or speech. This is why Rinpoche terms this basic ground “groundless.” Our deepest Self is always fluid, in motion and process, “impermanent” as the Buddha says. There is nothing in it that can provide a stable reference point, anything solid to build on or hide in. Such is our human condition that the one thing our ego is most threatened by and fears is the person that, at the deepest level, we actually are and subliminally know ourselves to be. Hence we have the paradox: the actual ground of our person and our life, our true Self, is experienced as ultimately other and sometimes even terrifying. The Soma we meet in Somatic Meditation is thus certainly very, very different from the relatively fixed and solid idea of the body that, for most of our life, we have been taking as our physical self. Thus in relation to our conscious standpoint, the Soma is both Self and also ultimate “other.” It is absolutely “for us,” but it is also the one part of our reality that does not go along with our attempts to domesticate and reduce experience into the bounded, restricted, judgment-laden enclosure of our conscious, ego mind. In this sense, the Soma is far more “other” than the so-called external world, which generally is mostly a projection of our ego mind; for what we think and know of the world “out there” is a highly selective and limited conceptualized version.

The Soma that we come to know in Somatic Meditation is different from our conventional ideas of our body in another way. When we enter the somatic practices, we are beginning with our notion of our body as contained within the envelope of our skin. As we progress through the protocols, however, we gain intimations that there may be more to it. In fact, as we learn to set aside our assumptions and preconceptions about our body and really look, we begin to sense that the envelope of our skin is an arbitrary boundary. And we begin to experience, within our delimited body but not bounded by it, a much more extensive somatic field. It is still our body—interoceptively it is the same experiential space—but we see there is much more to the experience of “our body” than we previously thought.

When we hear about this vastness of our body—that it has no boundaries and that our Soma in fact includes the cosmic Totality of what is—we might suspect dissociation. But this is not a dissociated state; in fact, it is the opposite. The ego is the dissociated state. To awaken to the cosmic dimensions of our own body is to be, finally, fully, 100 percent present and embodied, because this is the actual situation of our incarnation. The more we attend to our Soma and the more fully we come into it, without judgment or conceptualization, the more we see what our body actually is: it is limitless. We feel grounded, rooted, and physically completely present; we feel fully embodied and absorbed in concrete, present reality in this way; and, when we arrive there, we find our Soma is this limitless, this infinitely inclusive, domain.

What the Body Knows

In the illumination of a mind that is finally free, each moment of our human experience becomes transparent to all the realms of being and all those incarnations that inhabit them; we know the Totality. This teaching is illustrated in the description of “Indra’s Net” found in the classical Mahayana sutra, the Avatamsaka, much loved in East Asian Buddhism. As the account goes, Indra, the creator of the universe according to Indian mythology, has brought about all that exists in the form of a vast net, all-inclusive and coextensive with the universe itself. At each cross-tie in this nearly infinite web there is a jewel. Each jewel represents each moment of our human experience when viewed without conceptual overlay or interference; in other words, what is there for us within the visceral range of the Soma. Each of these jewels is not only itself, this moment in space and time, but simultaneously, as part of its very nature, it also reflects all the other myriad jewels at all the other cross-ties throughout the entire cosmos. Hence, when we behold one jewel, we find reflected in it the Totality of Being. In beholding one jewel, this seemingly local and time-bound event, we find ourselves beholding Totality. This is precisely how and what the Soma knows. William Blake refers to something similar when he talks about finding eternity in a grain of sand: the grain of sand is this present, timeless moment of experience; eternity is the Totality in its most boundless extent.

We don’t know what consciousness or awareness (whether of the whole person or an individual cell), in and of itself, actually is; that is one of the ultimate riddles of contemporary science. But we know it is there and we know that cells have it. So let’s muse. These cells in our body (as indeed in the multi-celled bodies of all members of the animal and vegetable kingdoms) group together through neural links into what we might call “communities of awareness”; they link with each other and share awareness and information with one another; in association with one another, their awareness thus becomes more inclusive and of a higher order, and their functioning becomes more differentiated and complex. Obviously we are not attributing to our cells anything like what we identify as the “conscious awareness” of our usual experience; it is, rather, a very different kind and order of awareness that we have begun to contact in our Soma. These communities of somatic awareness, then, enter into relationship with other similar communities and form a larger, more inclusive, metacommunities and collectivities of awareness, information exchange, and functioning. And so it goes until we have the very extensive awareness and nearly infinitely complex functioning of the human being, comprising both conscious and unconscious, as a whole.

Let me suggest this way of putting it: to speak of somatic awareness is what the individual cells of our body, collectively and in communication, exchange, and communion with one another, know. Of course, our conscious mind is usually aware of only a miniscule fragment of what the body knows—as mentioned, only a few parts out of a million. And this is further reduced the more rigid and pathological our ego standpoint is. In a very real sense, then, each cell is directly or indirectly in touch with every other cell; in a certain sense, like Indra’s net, it knows what every other cell knows, what every grouping of cells knows, and what the organism as a whole knows. Perhaps this is what we are getting at when we talk about the harmonious functioning of the human body as a unified organism; the different parts of ourselves are in touch, in communication and cooperation, even in communion with one another.

This also gives us a new understanding of just how grounded, embodied, and literal is the realization of “things as they are,” the ultimate goal of Buddhist meditation. “Things as they are” refers not to some abstract, generic, perhaps even vacant state; quite to the contrary, it refers to everything that every cell in our body uniquely knows, that “we” as the inclusive, integrated unique community of their life, receive into our—their collective—field of awareness. Things as they are is, then, nothing more or less than the bare facticity, the “first-order knowledge” (the direct perception of the Soma) of what our Soma receives and knows and shares throughout our entire being, without—at first—the additional step of “second-order knowledge” (the post-filtering, post-processing knowledge of our ego consciousness). This integrated, total field of awareness and functioning is what defines the ultimate possibilities of our awareness and experience as humans. And, as mentioned, it reflects and “captures” experientially the Totality of what is. In this, then, lies the universally sought experience of utter spiritual fulfillment.

Making Sense of Ego and Soma

When the left brain and the Soma are not communicating, the ego mind operates in relative isolation from the Soma. Then it is able to develop a logic that is relatively self-enclosed and self-convincing of the idea that things could not possibly be other than what it thinks. As McGilchrist explains, it takes its own concepts as reality itself, even when, as recent experimentation has shown, contrary information is present to the Soma’s perceptual field. Smug “denial” in the face of overwhelming somatic evidence to the contrary seems to be one of the pathological ego’s special skills. Often amid considerable distress, through the gritty, hands-on, somatic protocols, one comes to a direct and sometimes disturbing perception of the pathological ego as it functions in one’s own life and experience. The somatic practices described above serve to expose the left-brain pathology. When this happens, when we begin to observe our left brain functioning from within the larger awareness of the body, the authoritative, dictatorial, self-certainty of our thinking mind begins to seem artificial, forced, and even nauseating. We are no longer able to believe unquestioningly what we think. Thus begins the process of dismantling the isolated ego; in the process, we begin to make more room for the unique reality and far more inclusive and accurate knowingness of the Soma.

At the same time, as we work our way through the protocols and their phases, we begin to notice another option for our ego, our conscious self: we see the possibility of the left-brain, ego mind operating in a nonpathological manner, a not-quite-so-linear way, in increasingly intimate connection with the Soma. The protocols bring this about by establishing links of communication—growing new neurons, neural fibers, neurological connections—between the direct experience of our Soma and the left hemisphere. As this happens, we see that our left-brain, ego mind does not disappear; instead, it begins to feel more wholesome and healthy, more realistic, connected, and grounded. At this point, our ego mind is becoming increasingly transparent to the new information that is constantly arising from the Soma, from the darkness of the unconscious.

Seen from the standpoint of Somatic Meditation, the ego has two primary functions: first, a self-imaging function, and, second, a managerial function. In terms of the self-imaging function, our conscious mind is continually engaged in the process of defining and redefining—and protecting and maintaining—our identity: who we think ourselves to be now in relation to what we think of as our world and who we think ourselves to be over the course of our life (our story). This has the potential to be an entirely healthy and creative human process. The managerial function puts into operation and actualizes in our life the intentions, plans, and agendas arising from our self-imaging function. When the self-imaging function is pathological, it is forming and reforming our conceptual identity in isolation, in ignorance of and often contradiction to our actual experience and in opposition to the facticity of our life and world—as directly and unerringly known by our Soma. When this happens, then the managerial function is in the service of this pathology and serves to prop it up and reinforce it. By contrast, when the self-imaging function is operating in a wholesome way, through its transparency to the Soma and constant updates based on somatic data, then the managerial function acts as a reflection of and in support of our healthy self-imaging.

Changes in Our Ongoing Relationship with Our Body

The more we come into direct contact with our factual—as opposed to conceptualized—body, the more we begin to see how much of our incessant thinking process is actually an impulsive reactivity away from the groundless ground of our actual Soma—where we run away from the openness and intense energy of our direct experience into the safer, more secure and predictable world of thoughts and concepts about how everything is or should be. Thus, through the somatic protocols, we begin to become sensitized to the difference between thinking, on the one hand, and direct experience, on the other—a distinction that will become increasingly important as our practice with the body unfolds. As we work our way through the protocols, we gradually uncover in our body an experience of relaxation, peace, and unencumbered ease. By allowing the body to release its tension and the secrets it holds, relieved of the oppositional behavior of ego, the whole body is finally able to settle, open, and fall into a profound stillness.

As we carry forward with our somatic practice, we begin to include this new, larger awareness as part of our ongoing way of feeling about ourselves and about being at home in our body and in the world. We become sensitive to the livingness of our body. It is dynamic, ever changing, and filled with energy and life. The body becomes a revelation in and of itself, independent and outside of any interpretive framework—religious, psychological, or otherwise. As we practice, we become more and more sensitive to our own wayward tendencies. More than ever, we feel the impact when we turn away from our body though discursive thinking—we become numb, tense, feel that we’ve lost our ground. Because we’ve had the experience of the simplicity and directness of our bodily life, purely conceptual experience doesn’t feel right anymore. In fact, it can feel not only completely unsatisfying, but unbearable. When that occurs, we discover that we can actually best address this situation by coming back to our somatic beingness; we are learning how to heal our self or, rather, how our body, given room, heals us. We begin to experience a state of being that is embodied, visceral, grounded, open, and always in process, and we begin to feel that this is our authentic person and the life we were put on this planet to live.

When we experience something without jumping immediately to conclusions, to categorizing, evaluating, and judging, we begin to discover the realm of pure experience: an approaching storm is portentous, filled with its own impending power that we can sense in our body, that saturates our feeling with its own being, its own meaning, its “isness.” And we are brought into a state of utter stillness and awe before it. We smell it, we taste it, and we receive it into our being. Nothing need, should, or can be done in addition, so overwhelming, so final—and sacred, really—is its stark reality. And so it may be with everything else we encounter in our life. We realize that there’s a certain fundamental raw and naked and rugged reality to things we have never experienced in quite this way, that we never even realized was there. And so we gradually discover in ourselves a larger, vaster range of emotional and perceptual experience than we have ever previously known or even suspected. We begin to sense the limitless terrain of our somatic being—the endless, open spaces we can enter through the body and the seemingly infinite scope of experience that arises from that. Now we have an approach, a method, a context within which we can actually experience the full possibilities of this endless, mysterious physical incarnation of ours.