ertyu wrote: ↑Thu Mar 02, 2023 2:12 am
Will you elaborate on what you do and how it's going for you so far? Sounds interesting
Sure, though a lot of what I'm going say here is taken straight from that video I linked. I would recommend checking it out from the ~5:30 mark to about the ~19:00 mark (you can skip the example guided meditation from ~10:30 to ~15:00)
The theory
Basically, somatic meditation is body-based meditation, as opposed to the thought/head-based meditation a lot of us are more familiar with.
So, for example, instead of working with prompts like 'Observe your thoughts and then let them go,' you're working with prompts like 'Observe what's going on on your big toe. Can you feel your heartbeat in your big toe? Imagine you're drawing your breath in through your toe. How does that change the sensation? Now do the same with your second toe..." and so on.
It seems like a small change, but it turns out to result in a totally different experience of meditation. River (the guy giving the presentation I linked) describes it like this: "You spend 20 minutes in your big toe and suddenly you realize you haven't had a thought the entire time. And that was just intoxicating. This was the first meditation program I found that I did for the sake of it. I wasn't forcing myself to sit and do it every day." (<-- this matches my experience)
Presentation guy also says that after doing this practice for a few months, his internal monologue that had been torturing him for his whole life just kind of went away without any intentional effort on his part. I can't vouch for that since I've only been doing this practice for a couple of weeks, but it sure sounds cool.
At a higher level, there's a whole philosophy behind this that has to do with getting in touch with your body / grounding in your physical form / 'listening to to what your body has to tell you.' Ideally, you want to completely disengage the linguistic / structural / compartmentalizing / categorizing / filtering part of your consciousness and simply experience 'raw' reality without any of the intermediary brain processes we normally have running 24/7.
I'm hesitant to talk about this aspect of the practice too much because 1) It gets into some pretty 'woo' territory and this forum is mostly a 'woo' free zone and 2) I don't understand it that well yet. I will say that it keeps reminding me of the body/nervous-system-based approach for PTSD treatment described in The Body Keeps the Score (which is a great book, I should write a post on it). More to come on this topic in the future most likely.
My experience + who I think will like somatic meditation
I suspect that a person will like this modality if they relate to the following quote (paraphrased from linked presentation): "I lived my entire life in my head. Lots of twisting, turning, chewing, pretty much my entire life... and if I didn't give my head something to chew on at all times, it would start chewing on me." Presumably other types of people will also like it, but if you relate to that quote, I'm pretty sure you'll like somatic meditation.
That quote describes almost exactly what it's historically been like to exist inside my consciousness. Especially when I was struggling with severe insomnia, it was like my brain was my torturer and I just couldn't get it to disengage no matter what I did. It would just loop and loop and loop and loop and loop and loop and loop and loop and loop further and further in on itself and I couldn't turn it off.
This type of meditation seems to be the first thing I've found that resembles an actual off button. And that just... feels good. Other meditation practices I've tried didn't have the same effect.
***The important caveat is that it's still early days for me with this stuff. Maybe it's just the honeymoon phase with Shiny New Thing I Think Is Going To Fix All My Problems.
But at the very least, I can honestly say that I enjoy the moment-to-moment experience of somatic meditation more than other types I've tried in the past. As for whether I experience any of the longer-term changes, I will report back in a few months.
Okay, but what does this actually look like in practice?
I bought the book mentioned in that presentation, which is called Somatic Descent (I should have checked if they had it at my library first). The book has a few short chapters on theory at the beginning, and then it dives into the specific steps of the Somatic Descent process, which are basically a bunch of guided meditation practices.
It also comes with a set of audio tracks that are a mix of 1) guided meditations and 2) explanations of what the meditations are meant to achieve mixed with some philosophical background based in Vajrayana Buddhism.
So what this actually looks like for me is:
- Read the part of the book that explains a specific step in the Somatic Descent process
- Listen to the audio preamble for a given guided meditation that explains the theory and goals the upcoming session
- Do the meditation
- Repeat the next day
- Write about your experience on the ERE forums (optional)