Inner work tends to destabilize us on the way to finding deeper stability. In the destabilizing stage, you start to realize your understanding of the life and world you’ve lived in until now is no longer sufficient, no longer serving as a sturdy and generative trellis to support and direct your growth.

As we reach the edges of such a trellis, or find the places where it’s broken, we have to take our example from the plant world: we grow towards the sun, expand outward, and stay open to unexpected new footholds.

In the context of Somatic Resonance this openness is a fairly specific task, though an endlessly varied one.

Most of us spend most of our lives living from the Systematic mind. This builds a healthy but overdeveloped reflex towards focusing on what we already feel is important, and to filter out everything else. This can be a helpful reflex—life is complex enough, imagine if you couldn’t filter anything out—but it’s also a reflex that can keep us trapped in patterns that are no longer working for us. It can blind us to ways that our usual patterns aren’t working, and can stop us from seeing alternate patterns that might.

What’s needed is humility: openness to the possibility (or lets be real, the assurance) that we don’t have it all figured out, that our picture of reality is smaller than reality, that there are surprises waiting around every corner that could transform our lives if we let ourselves see them.

This isn’t a dour, trudging humility, meant to make us feel small and ignorant; it’s an expansive, exploratory humility, an adventurous curiosity that can drive us to expand our boundaries and stay open to whatever we find.

This exploratory humility is especially vital when we start working deeply with the soma. Unexpected material comes up when we allow the soma space to communicate, and if we aren’t careful, our old overdeveloped reflexes could keep on dismissing all this unexpected material. What a waste it is, when that reflex wins out.

This might sound abstract. That’s fair. It can be hard to speak in specifics, since the specifics are so different for every individual. It that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t need openness, we’d just need a new way of focusing. Let’s take a minute to explore some concrete possibilities, tangible ways this filtering-reflex and this exploratory humility might manifest. Don’t take any of them too seriously or literally—what’s important is the attitude of exploratory humility.

• Me first: after about a year of somatic meditation practice, I was getting some Cranio-Sacral Therapy done by a bodyworker I knew. During the session I was overcome by incredibly intense shoulder pain. As both the bodyworker and I felt into the shoulder pain, I had the unsettling experience of finding fully-formed memories, images, and narrative implications coming out of the shoulder pain. There were sets of memories concerning the life of a small boy with misshapen limbs, living in a medieval mountain village. He/I lived a very painful life, crawling from place to place in the village, begging for food and firewood.
  • My first reaction was that these felt like past life memories, and I don’t believe in past lives, so I should just ignore them or look for the psychological meaning in them.
  • Then, contemplating the felt sense of the memories, it felt wrong and deadening to interpret them psychologically. The experience presented itself as urgent, physically and emotionally challenging memories, and it seemed best to approach them that way. (One of my core tenets of somatic-imaginal work is that when images come to us, they show us how they’d like to be treated. In this case, they very clearly wanted to be treated as memories.)
  • I won’t get into the all the processing that went on, but by staying humble, open, and exploratory to an experience that I had reflexively wanted to ignore, I undid a lot of emotional knots as well as physical knots in that shoulder.
• Sam finds traditional Christian imagery schmaltzy and kitsch. A couple months after starting somatic work, he has a series of intense dreams, night after night, centered around full-on wings-and-haloes angels. His first impulse is that dreams are meaningless anyways, and these particular dreams are embarrassing to even look at, so he should forget them and move on.
  • Then, remembering a dedication he made to keep open, exploratory awareness of whatever came up, he decides to keep a notebook by his bed. Every morning, he records any dreams he remembers, and spends time journaling through his impressions of it. During his morning meditation, he allows the dream to marinate, gives it space to speak to him more if it has more to say.
• Anneliese recently had a series of strange somatic breakthroughs and is feeling much less tense and constricted. She notices, strangely enough, that she keeps meeting women with very similar names. In the past two weeks, she’s been introduced to a Kayla, two Kayleys, a Kyla, and a Kaylin.
  • Her first instinct: shrug it off, it’s probably just a combination of coincidence and Baader-Meinhof effect.
  • Counter-instinct: exploratory humility. Over the next few days, she journals, meditates, and muses on these different women—ways they’re similar, ways they’re different, odd coincidences in their meetings, roles they play in her life. By opening to the possibility that this knot can be explored rather than dismissed, she unearths deeper layers of unexpected expectations she holds in her emotional life and in her body.

So on, so forth. Again, there’s no need to take any of these as gospel, or as models of how to behave (no need to believe in angels, now or ever)—but that movement from reflexive dismissal to humble exploration is well worth getting familiar with. Allow the dismissing-reflex to become a cue for more openness, more humility, more somatic spontaneity.

A useful exercise for exploring this attitude is Somatic Animism. The spirit of the exercise is to give up your own sense that you are the only agency in your body, in your lived experience. You take an attitude of exploratory humility, step back, and allow other aspects of the soma to communicate themselves, to be prompted into communicating.

SR4 ExploHum.mp4

please see note on videos; this video covers the same material as the text, and I suggest you revisit it later to review the same material in a fresh way

<aside> 🎯 Exploratory Humility encourages openness to unexpected possibilities; this openness lets us break free from patterns that no longer serve us. This involves a shift away from the Systematic mind's reflexive dismissal of anything unfamiliar and towards an attitude of curiosity and exploration. Staying open to these possibilities, even when they are unwelcome to our conscious mind, is a key part of finding somatic resonance.

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