I stumbled into imaginal practice, and it transformed my life. I tried to share it with other people and pretty quickly noticed a pattern—some people had a much harder time with it than others. For some people, they could dip into the imaginal quite easily, and meaningful mythopoetic material would unfold at the slightest coaxing. For others, every step was a struggle.

The distinguishing factor that emerged should have been obvious to me earlier: somatic training.

My own journey into mythopoetic states came as a natural side-effect and unfolding of my somatic meditation practice, but despite that fact, it took me a long time to recognize that somatic resonance is necessary for imaginal grounding. We have to be grounded in the body if we want to bring soulfulness into the world.

That's the reason I set aside time to focus on communicating Somatic Resonance, on gathering the materials and practices and frameworks that helped me, and put them in one place for others. It's important to me—and it feels important for the world—that more and more people develop a sturdy imaginal practice, a rich awareness of the mythopoetic aspects of experience.

Two quotes give context to my urgency around this:

Myth is the metaphor that organizes libido into configurations. -James Hillman

Myths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. They shape its meaning. -Mary Midgley

Putting these ideas together, we find my central concern: the imaginative patterns we participate in, both as individuals and as cultures, are the organizing forces that direct lives.

• If you live a myth where you're powerless before the force of powers outside yourself, your life will be stunted and forced into smaller and smaller loops. Learned helplessness colonizes the soul.
• If you live a myth where the quality of your life is decided by how much you're willing to surrender your values, dissociate from your experience, and give yourself over to power games—your energy will move away from your own life and be directed into feeding more power games, more myths to trap others.
• If your culture lives a myth where the only available template of A Meaningful Life is one where you give away your time and energy for a pittance to systems that make the world worse—the world will get worse, and you'll see no option to stop contributing to that.

I could go on. There's a thousand of these, ranging from the most minute, intimate moments (the myth of 'his face twitched, is he mad at me?') to the most large-scale and collective (the myth of 'history is shaped by vast impersonal forces').

I want to see a world where folks have the awareness and agency to recognize, interrupt, and replace bad myths on every level, from the individual to the collective to the global. But in order to create that world, we can't simply jump right ahead to myth and the imaginal. We have to build a strong base, we have to ground ourselves in direct experience of a clarified and integrated body-heart-mind-soul.

That begins with Somatic Resonance.

To clarify, these are my motives, my trajectory I'm tracing. Somatic Resonance is a trailhead where a dozen trails go off in all directions, and I have no illusions all of you will walk the one I'm mapping out.

https://twitter.com/the_wilderless/status/1582776995351793665?s=61&t=sywRt5ymoXETcQXmRb5kHA

Somatic Resonance is a good for its own sake,

• for undoing dissociation and moving into presence
• for deepening a meditation practice that feels too much in the mind