All of this, the whole course, everything I have to say about Somatic Resonance—it all comes down to a single difficult-to-describe internal move or shift in experience. Once you’ve found that shift and found ways to make it reflexive, enduring, and relatively unobstructed, unexpected new worlds open up.

• You can listen to and speak with the body much more reliably
• Old, stuck patterns start to untangle
• Things like yoga and meditation open up to both depth and swiftness they didn’t have before
• The conscious ego softens, becomes more workable
• The inner monologue quiets down, loses its compulsive inertia
• And (most importantly to me but perhaps not to everyone) emotional and imaginal material begin to pour through, providing the grist for deeper and deeper soul-work.

All of this is available, but of course not guaranteed. What you get out of Somatic Resonance will depend not only on what aspects you choose to cultivate, but also which aspects choose to cultivate you.

Enough with the sales pitch, what is this “internal move” or “shift in experience” we’re looking for?

In short, it’s a shift into a mode where the soma experiences itself, and we hold ourselves open to receiving that experience.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? It certainly can be. Some people step in and find entry with only the slightest prompting. Others need to try a dozen different exercises and framings before something clicks.

In both cases, the first step is just that: a first step. As they continue exploring and finding openness in the soma, there are maybe a dozen common bottlenecks people tend to run into. (Don’t worry, I’ve never met anyone who ran into all dozen—any given individual might hit anywhere from 4 to 8.)

These are what we’re dealing with in this course: entries and bottlenecks. Ways into Somatic Resonance, ways you might get stuck, and ways you could get unstuck.

In these first pages, this mini-course-before-the-course, we’re going to look at 3 of the most effective entry points I’ve found:

• Un-filtering the body
• Moving towards the Spontaneous Style, and
• Humbly opening to whatever experience arrives

Along the way we’ll touch on some related bottlenecks, and if I do my job right, you should have everything you need to know by the end of these 5 pages. The rest of the course—the guides through dozens more pages and recordings and practices—consists entirely of more entryways, more troubleshooting, more angles on and aspects of this path, and more framings that can help open you up further and further to the experience of Somatic Resonance.

SR1. Most Central.mp4