(The thinking mind cannot contain who we actually are)
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.
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.
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.
Quite to the contrary, for this lineage, the only way to reach complete realization is in and through our completely embodied human existence.
(Somatic meditation: entering through the body’s own knowing)
Somatic Meditation develops a meditative consciousness that is accessed through the spontaneous feelings, sensations, visceral intuitions, and felt senses of the body itself.
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.
So step one in Somatic Meditation is to come to and into the body and attend; and then step two is to open our consciousness into the interior wakefulness that is going on under the surface.
When the meditator does not address his or her disembodiment in a fundamental and decisive way, particularly on the spiritual level, any kind of meditation carried out is more than likely to lead eventually to the complete cul-de-sac of disconnection and disassociation—a dead end from which, because of sophisticated techniques and defensive rationalizations that can be built up in the practice itself, escape is extremely difficult.
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.
(Disembodied spirituality as spiritual materialism in disguise)
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.”
techniques to separate what we feel are the “higher” part of ourselves—our more pure, clear, and clean parts—from everything that is lower—all the mundane, ordinary, pained, nagging, struggling parts. This approach leads, as mentioned, to a state of spiritual dissociation.
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.
Quite the opposite, we are now fully and thoroughly liberated into a complete acceptance and openness to everything we are, to see for ourselves that everything we go through is an engagement with the heart of reality itself.
knowing. This is a kind of knowing that does not rely upon and is, in fact, completely independent of conceptual thinking.
(The Soma as infinite, boundless, and the realm of enlightenment)
For example, we find in the body an objective witness to our life that has no investment whatsoever in our skewed ego-versions of things. In addition, our Soma not only knows the truth of how it is with us, others, and the world, but it appreciates and, in a strange way, delights in everything.
other words, when we have direct experiential contact with our body, we actually discover that our Soma has no definitive boundaries at all. We think it has boundaries simply because that idea is based on our conditioning; but in fact, it turns out, when we actually take a look, it is our thoughts alone that unnecessarily limit and freeze our experience of our body into such a small compass.
This “infinity of the body” is not a theory; it is an experiential datum, and when you realize this state of affairs about your body, as did the neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, it completely changes your experience and understanding of being human as it did hers.
For somatic spirituality, the Soma is the realm of enlightenment, of ultimate realization.
We meet a realm that, far from being “empty,” is filled and charged with the grandeur of our own unmediated, naked experience of life in all its variety, its own fullness and mystery. We discover that our own life, from the beginning, has been the free and joyful expression of the universe itself.
though, that this nirvana is not anything far off or unattainable, but rather it is fully and completely revealed and available, right here and right now, in this very body of ours.
mystery. We discover that our own life, from the beginning, has been the free and joyful expression of the universe itself.
The six offered here will provide you with the foundational practices of the entire somatic journey of this lineage, of which all the other protocols are further elaborations and refinements. With these six in hand, you will be able to develop a strong somatic presence and tap into the endless spiritual journey that is waiting for you in your body.
Finally, the somatic protocols have been nourished by the increasingly rich and creative modern Western traditions of somatic exploration and healing—for me this includes principally Hakomi but also other similar somatic therapies such as Feldenkrais, Rolfing, Alexander work, Continuum Movement, Integrative Manual Therapy, Focusing, and other forms of body-based awareness training that I have studied over the years.
The naked, nonconceptual experience of our own actual life is ours and ours alone, and when we realize that, we are freed from all the prisons of past templates, conventional thinking, and religious dogmatism. We are set free to fly.
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. (In addition, you can explore these and the other somatic protocols in other free and for-purchase guided meditations on the Dharma Ocean website (www.dharmaocean.org), through online Dharma Ocean courses, and through in-person programs at Dharma Ocean’s Blazing Mountain retreat center in Crestone, Colorado, and elsewhere in Dharma Ocean programs in North America and beyond.)
The human voice holds within it the entire experiential reality of the speaker. That is to say, when we speak to another person, though we generally do not realize it, we are transmitting the totality of our experience. And though the hearer may not be conscious of it, his or her body is taking in the totality of the speaker’s experience. Sometimes, however, we are conscious of it: have you ever had an experience in which someone has been describing an incident, an encounter, a situation, and, with only a few words out of the speaker’s mouth, you have seen within yourself, you have experienced directly, what is being talked about?
In listening to and following the audio guided meditations, then, you are entering the world of transmission. You will be receiving, partly consciously and partly unconsciously, the experience, the actual territory, of each practice.
The six somatic protocols that I am about to teach you are generally to be practiced in a sequential way because, in a progressive and unfolding manner, they address different areas of our disembodiment. Ten Points (practice 1), for example, addresses our general lack of awareness of our overall body. The practice works with the body as a whole, sometimes strictly through attention, sometimes also including breath.
Through the somatic protocols and the neurological development they lead to, new information is going to arrive to our consciousness; we are extending our awareness further and further into the previously uncharted, unconscious darkness of our
unconscious. Far more than that, through developing new neurons and new neurological pathways, we are developing new capabilities to receive and process and hence to know and to experience, throughout our entire somatic system. These capabilities did not exist before anywhere in our state of being; they really are new. In this, we are truly enhancing our experience of being human. We are developing and maturing our ability to feel and to know our life, developing and maturing our capacity to know, in an unmediated and nonconceptual way—in our Soma—the illimitable universe that we live in, of which we currently may have rather little direct or personal knowledge.
The more we practice, the more sensitized we become and the more we notice.
(Neurotic tension as somatic expression of ego’s grip)
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. Neurobiology tells us that that this kind of pathological tension extends all the way down to the cellular level and is a contributing factor to ill health and disease.
So why are we so tense? As we shall see later for ourselves, any naked, unfiltered experience is initially felt to be painful and problematic; without thinking, we try to withdraw from it, evade and get away from it. We do so by literally tensing up, and this tension is everywhere. Why is unfiltered experience painful?
When new meditators confess, “I feel so locked up, I don’t even know what my life is” or “I feel like I am missing out on the experience of being alive,” they speak the truth.
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.
In the Pure Awareness practices of Tibetan Buddhism, it is said that enlightenment can only be attained by relaxing completely.
But our ego gets in the way and, in its neurotic form, appropriates that life force to try to maintain itself, derailing that energy, and damming it up. That results in what we may call the “pathological ego.” (Later we’ll talk about the healthy, wholesome ego.)
When you are in the sitting position, sit there for a few minutes and feel this out; be very attentive to what you’re feeling right now. If you’re feeling a little bit heavy or slightly deflated, this is a good sign. Just let it be that way. Explore it. Or you may be feeling more grounded. Initially it almost feels like depression, almost like what we’re trying to run away from. And actually it is what we—or at least our ego—is trying to run away from. And yet, in the heaviness and weighted feeling of our somatic sense right now, our whole life and our whole future is present and brewing. So be with it, explore it and, if you can, take much confidence in it. If you notice an upswing in the volume of your thinking, you can regard the thoughts as tension, because they are. Compulsive thinking is a kind of tension.
I myself have done this practice thousands of times and invariably find it fresh, surprising, and new whenever I do it.
A Variant of Whole Body Breathing: Nighttime Practice
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. This representation may sound rather complicated, but it really is needed to clarify the experience we are going to have within the body. I’ll be talking about all of this more later on.
Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso, one of my principal Mahamudra teachers, once said that in traditional Tibet, this practice was considered the only medicine and the only doctor you needed with you in long, solitary retreats.
course of human evolution the distinct yet functional relationship between the conscious and unconscious, the ego and Soma, was likely the original state of affairs. As new information comes in, we are able to “update our files,” in Jill Bolte Taylor’s metaphor, and delete those files that are out of date. The healthy ego consciousness is thus receptive to—and nourished and reinvigorated by—the continual influx of new data; and it is able to change its point of view, as needed, in an ongoing way. The ego consciousness is then open and malleable; it is fluid and flexible; it is able to let go of ideas, preconceptions, and beliefs that no longer apply and reform conceptual pictures, the maps, that are more apt and appropriate to reality as it is showing itself, right now.
Somatic Meditation brings us face-to-face with what is left when we descend beneath the conceptualizing, pigeonholing, filtering ego mind.
We come upon a realm that is open and endless, that is alive with energy and dynamism, that is uncertain, exciting, and free. And we discover that, ultimately, this is really us underneath all the rampant thinking; it’s fundamentally who we are in all our fullness and mystery.
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.
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.”
showed this not to be the case that the dike of a changeless universe gave way. Now we accept that even the entire universe itself, both the seen and the unseen, is making a journey; all manifest reality is, in fact, an organic whole with birth, maturation, completion, and death. (Brian Swimme writes beautifully about this in his 2011 book, Journey of the Universe.)
My own suspicion is that what we call “spirituality”—as a predisposition and a capacity—is also encoded within our genome, traceable back to the original community of Homo sapiens in northern Africa.
It has often been observed that we humans are unusual (if not unique) in our special capacity to obstruct and even derail the inherent, natural life cycle that is part of our genetic inheritance. Many psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists, beginning in the second half of the last century, have suggested that our sociocultural conditioning often lays down in us highly compromised patterns of thinking about ourselves and our world and leaves us unable to grow.
The mental constructs of our thinking mind are, by their nature, not only incomplete and biased, they are incompetent; when we hang on to them, and keep repeating to ourselves their twisted rationalizations and justifications, they poison not just our families and our societies, but our entire lives and our world. Pernicious and virulent beyond question, our left-brain addictions and obsessions cut us off, sometimes completely, from the direct, nonconceptual experience of our body, from the naked and life-giving realities of our Soma.
(The body contains the totality of the cosmos: the somatic claim)
After all, how could the vastness, the complexity, and the full reality of the external universe possibly be completely present in our body? In other words, how could our Soma and the Totality of the cosmos possibly be just two different scales of exactly the same reality? And yet, astoundingly, within the Asian somatic lineages, this is just what is being said: whatever the Totality of all of Being is, all of that is present and accessible in our human body. And, to emphasize, what is proposed is that we are not talking here about just the general outlines and overall reality of the universe; we are talking about its actual tangible facticity in all of its potential detail, complexity, and functioning.
but depend on where you are standing and what you are doing. Reality is not local; events happening in one part of the universe are simultaneously creating repercussions billions of light years away. Past, present, and future are likely constructs that we put on an observable reality that seems to be far more undifferentiated. And on and on it goes.
the ongoing “journey without goal.”
(Knowing the Soma as knowing Being itself: direct, not conceptual)
To know the Soma as it truly is, is to know the Totality of Being itself. Indra’s net. And to arrive here is to be free.
For this reason, according to Vajrayana, we are able to know the Totality directly only in and through the body, the only place where direct, nonconceptual experience occurs. What we may know of the universe conceptually takes second place. This point of view is beautifully articulated in Taoist spirituality and one finds it implicitly in both Chan and Zen. Mental pictures of the universe must always be indirect, partial, and biased because they are constructed out of abstractions from experience itself. Vajrayana teachings suggest that mental pictures cannot liberate us from the trammels of our suffering; only direct experience can.
From the somatic point of view this would make sense, because the outer world and the inner world are actually the same reality and you can access either through the other. So now I must revise my statement that modern physics knows only conceptually, from the outside; I think in a certain way it opens a kind of experiential window into the reality that transcends outside and inside.