A Few Thoughts on "Somatic Descent"

What Flavor is Your Woo?

[Not sent to mailing list, just posting for linking, but here we are!]

Over at Tom Morgan’s community of Weirdo’s and Free Thinkers, The Leading Edge, there’s been some lively discussion about different kinds of “practices” — ways of connecting with our bodies, minds, spirits, the universe, and all that jazz, from Prayer to MMA.

I have a few big issues with “woo” culture (and let’s be clear, there is very much a ‘woo culture’ out there, often coopted but the Spiritual Industrial Complex preying on seekers and kensho-refugees), which is where almost all discussions of “practices” reside, but one of them is language.

In Buddhist circles, whatever the thing is that you’re trying to describe has a foreign name. An experience isn’t “orgasmic” it’s a “manifestation of Piti.” You’re not getting sleepy, you’re experiencing the hindrance of “Thina” or “Sloth.”

I get WHY — a lot of this stuff is hard to talk about, and English is becoming a stupider language by the day.

“Somatic” is one of those words that seems more of a barrier than an invitation. The Definition is literally “of the body, in contrast to the mind.” It’s used in practice contexts to refer to all sorts of different ways of using your attention to notice and interact with felt sensations and phenomenology (and even metaphysics), but often distinct from the senses of sight, sound, smell and taste.

So what’s a “somatic” practice? From what I can gather, it includes anything that leans on interoception (internal body sensations like “I an hungry and have a tingling in my calf”), proprioception (your body in space, like “I feel my arms hanging by my side”), vestibular sensation (Balance, like “I am falling” or “I am stable and grounded”), and kinesthetic awareness (movement, like “I feel my arm swinging in a big circle”.

Smart-guy River Kenna makes a big deal about how these kinds of practices are “different” (and he says better) than traditional meditation:

We live in a culture that values and enforces focus, a culture that cultivates in each of us a habit for ignoring anything we deem irrelevant, for blinkering ourselves to anything but what’s right in front of us. I really, really feel it unwise to continue this pattern when people come to meditation and contemplative practice. Which is why my foundational practice, Somatic Resonance, is deeply rooted in open spontaneous awareness, rather than leaning even harder into the prevailing narrowed focus of our culture.

I think I get what he’s saying here — that we’re really a head-centered world, and staying more “in your head” is bad. But honestly this rubbed me the wrong way. Now I’m not a teacher like River and not an expert like everyone else, but when I talk to people about meditation the number one thing I hear is “I can’t possibly sit with my own thoughts that long, I’m too distracted and restless” not “I’m just too focussed, I can’t open myself up.”

Perhaps there’s a Left/Right hemisphere component, where highly concentrative practices (like Kasina, or Vipassana) give the left hemisphere something to do, so the right hemisphere can stretch. So for some severely LH locked and neurostrange people (me) the doorway needs focus first?

Regardless though, while my concentrative practices have been enormously valuable, those single-pointed focus sessions are almost always “somatic” anyway (with Kasina, being visual, excepted). The first “objects” of meditation I ever worked with were the fine sensations of breath passing the tip of my nose, and the internal sensation from my lower belly during abdominal breathing … it’s the sensation that takes up awareness, not “thought”, not “head” (The traditional instruction to “count the breath” seems like a hack to develop metacognitive introspective awareness, but never landed much for me, and I’ve rarely said “One, Two, Three” out loud in my head on the cushion.)

Heretical Rewrite

But hey, I wanted to really give this a shot, so for the last week I’ve read and practiced almost exclusively the “somatic descent” meditation from yet-another-problematic-guru, Reggie Ray. Here’s the book. Here’s a full hour long guided meditation.

And here’s my heretical description using non-woo/non-Guru words:

• Chill out and Body Scan. He’s got his version, but fundamentally, I encountered this first in Yoga Nidra, and subsequently in a bunch of western-Buddhist stuff, and your local coffee-shop quick-hit yoga class. His rigid way of doing it seems good (if extremely brief).

• Crank up the visualization engine. In Reggie’s world, it’s “earth grounding” but Phillip Shephard’s “Elevator Shaft” is similar, as is the common Yoga instruction to “sink into the floor” during lying meditation. I suspect the *real* value here is in bringing the imaginal into action. For some people, this seems to be literally impossible. I dig it, although I like the Elevator Shaft approach more.

• Full-body relaxation. Depending on which version your doing, this is essentially a full-body breathing visualization, again quite similar to many Yoga Nidra instructions or some breathwork practices I’ve tried.

• Asking and Intention (or ‘supplication and request’). Somewhat at odds to other practices that include these steps, these steps are about letting go/acknowledging a higher power/ego death and then jumping on The Secret/Jim Carey/Manifesting bandwagon, but in this case, just asking for guidance. Again, seems straight out of a lot of Yoga Nidra instructions I’ve read, obviously foundational to Christian mystic traditions, and to my mind, pretty Westernly articulated. In my experiences with Zen and Western Buddhism, intention-setting is a big deal, but usually done outwardly and sometimes liturgically. “for all beings” etc…. Reggie’s version is American - he uses examples like “having a fight with a partner” or “moving to a new city” with the idea that the “body knows.”

• Energy Visualization Block 1: Breath (called “Yin Breathing and Central Channel” in Reggie’s parlance). Here’s where I get squirmy. Most of the reading and guided sits I’ve done lean into this stage as the way to “access the primodial soma” — which is where this starts to lose me. During the actual meditations, the lines seem blurry between visualization of somatic sensations, and full on “a different intelligent force lives inside you.” Whether true or not, it’s mishmashy.

• Energy Visualization Block 2: Two sets of much more focused body-scan work “Soma Zones” starting with the head and working into the spine and torso. These are … fine? In the written work, there’s a *lot* of “othering” the body — the Soma — that feesl odd to me. The recurring assertion is that the Soma is “not us” and is a separate intelligence communicating with “us.” Throughout these two blocks the Soma — the body — is the “actor” and we are the “receiver” — which just feels shockingly dualistic and untrue in my own lived experience even during these, the deepest parts of the meditation. I could get into a big metaphysics discussion, but I’ll just leave it with — as ground-reality metaphors go, this one puts me off. (Happy to discuss the metaphysics 1:1 with anyone, reach out).

• Most sessions end with some integrative/return process.

So first, let me say, I do think these practices are “skillful means” — that is, they’re following well established ways of being/thinking/focusing to engender certain “states” which can lead to various forms of “insight.” If *nothing* else, if this path gets you some calm, gets you in touch with your body, helps you handle stress, whatever, then that’s great! Awesome even! Rock on!

Caveats and Suggestions?

But as an “outsider” to this new-tradition — it wasn’t my entry point — I guess I’d have a few observations about how “somatic” practices have worked for me, as my own weird neurospicy sample-of-1, not to critique the above, but to provide some thoughts for folks whom this lands less-than-perfectly out of the gate.

• Having done a bunch of these “cold” — just sit down and press play, and a bunch of them “warm” — after an initial 25 minute Zazen practice, I have a very hard time imagining people are having a common experience. “Cold” I’ve found them to be … nice? Calming? Chill? “Warm” I’ve had some profound, long periods empty, non-dual rest, generally starting in the “energy visualization” bit and then just sort of not-hearing the rest, and surfacing perhaps an hour later. So, if you already have a practice, try these “warm” — if you don’t have a practice, I might suggest doing something mindful or flow-state prior. Go for a walk. Play an instrument. Whatever your thing is.

• This leads me to a common thing I read/hear with more “advanced” practices. “Oh, I did years of X before I finally found Y. Y is the best.” Everyone from the Buddha to Jed McKenna says this exact same thing. “Oh I did a lot of this first …” as if that “lot of” wasn’t an actual required foundation for their ultimate experience. The guided sessions drop commentary about all sorts of metaphysics and states: nonduality, oneness, interconnection, and so on. I suspect this is a deeply “your mileage may vary” thing.
  
  I do not think any of this would have landed for me nearly as well without having done years of work on developing single-pointed focus through more “traditional” meditation practices and through separate Yoga/Taoist body practices. I’m also curious if anyone who is hardcore on this type of practice experiences any of the common phenomenology from other practices (the ‘flickering’ nature of sensation, cosmic union, no-self, nonduality, orgasmic rapture, equanimity, cessation events, and all the rest of the “state” rides.)

• Visualization-based guided meditations (which I would consider this), are, for me, a double edged sword. I have pretty good visualization skills from a concentrated state. I know other meditators who cannot “see” internally or engage synesthesetically at all. I suspect this is a common reason some folks think “Energy Work” or “The Light Body” are just so much made up bullshit — because they either lack or haven’t trained their ability to visualize in strong concentration. I feel like this is a very big “works for some, not at all for others” area (which I would ascribe to almost all woo.)

Yes, and …

Like I said, I think Somatic Descent is a skillful approach, but I also suspect it’s not just “easy” for everyone. If you’re going down the path, here are a few suggestions for things you might encounter:

• Sleepiness. For all the poo-pooing about traditional seated meditation, sitting upright and erect keeps you alert, and if you are not alert, you aren’t doing anything but relaxing. That’s great, if that’s what you’re after. If you are still sleepy, open your eyes. If that’s too distracting, do what every other distractible open-eyed meditator does: stare at a wall.

• Body-contact. I was immune to my body most of my life. I didn’t fix it by paying more attention, i fixed it by working with my body, a lot: yoga, tai-chi, running, hiking, swimming, stretching. Maybe a Somatic Descent meditation gets it all done for you. I still need an hour of Yoga a day to remember I have limbs and organs.

• Belly-breathing. This is like, woo-101, but I’m still amazed at how hard this was for me, even as someone who CAN breath HARD through my diaphragm to project, it took years to reprogram my body to naturally breath low, all the time, even if I’m not thinking about it. Anytime I felt myself slipping this past week, it was always losing the depth of my breath.
  
  I had an early teacher who really harped on relaxing the lower belly. “Nobody’s ever had kensho while sucking in their belly to look good,” he admonished. This kind of deep, down into the perineum breathing is (for me) *vastly* easier sitting than in lying down.

• Be honest with yourself about audio-guidance. Are you able to stay with the cues, even when the guide stops talking? Or, when the guide takes a 20 second break, does your internal dialog come running back in? I know that the part of me that deals with language has to shut down completely before I can even approach stillness. In Left/Right McGilchrist terms — while both hemisphere’s process language, the left is pretty much the only one who “undertands” in any linquistic sense. For me, words can really, really get in the way.

• Maybe slow down? The full Somatic Descent practice is actually a half dozen different (good) techniques mashed together, each of which could be a year of practice work in their own right. There is no substitute, I don’t believe, for time, and spending 3 minutes on one thing and 6 minutes on another feels absolutely frenetic to me. There are LOTS of variations on Somatic Descent that do less, in more time, and those are worth exploring.

Happy sitting. Or not-sitting, as it were.