On the one hand, it’s helpful to lay out some of the ideas and experiences this Somatic Resonance course is responding to (and in some cases, reacting against).

On the other hand, I don’t want us to spend too much time and energy focusing on “problems.” So let’s do the quick view-from-10,000-feet version.

First, there’s the “wrong user manual” issues:

• Different cultures in different times and places have different experiences of the body.
  • eg- We can find examples in the historical and anthropological literature of cultures who’s “self” is experienced not in the head (like us) but in the chest or in the belly.
• The roots of many modern meditation instructions are woven in with (or taken directly from) times, places, and cultures with very different assumptions about the experience of the body. When these instructions meet our modern ears, the differences are not always obvious, so these instructions leave out key elements that would have been too obvious to mention in their time-place of origin.
• If the above feels too abstract, maybe just imagine how someone who grew up doing manual labor in medieval Japan might relate to their body—especially factoring in the cultural emphasis on the lower-belly hara center. Now ask yourself, if you and he were given the same basic instructions about mindfulness of the body, do you think you’d take them the same way? Would they lead both of you to the same inner state?

Then there are the “engineer-brain” issues:

• meditation culture in the modern west has been pretty thoroughly run by Systematic types. The STEMfolk. —There’s nothing wrong with that per se, accept that this focus tends both attract and produce practitioners who want to use the Systematic mode to escape the Systematic mind. Which can work for some people, but I’m extremely skeptical if it works half as well as the confidence of that approach would suggest.
  • I’ve met a LOT of meditators who seem disembodied and compulsively cerebral, most of them having come from these Systematic types of practice.
  • I’m sure we’ve all seen some of the studies about how meditation can make many people more narcissistic, not less. This is very closely related to the Systematic disembodiment that so many popular styles of meditation are prone to cultivating. When the left-hemisphere, systematic, arrogant side of us is in charge of the meditation practice, meditation too easily becomes another tool of the ego.

and then there are the “McMindfulness” issues:

• Much instruction has been cut off from its spiritual roots, watered down to be turned into a stress reliever or a productivity booster.
• Even instructions and traditions that do stay true to the spiritual roots have no choice but to be affected by these larger cultural trends toward the understanding of meditation as something between a pick-me-up and a universal panacea; it subtly shifts the way they talk about it, the questions they have to field about it, the parts they emphasize and de-empasize, etc.

There are other minor issues, but those are the big ones. None of them is all-consuming or a reason to run away from all meditation—but put together, they go a long way towards explaining why so many people who try meditating end up getting disenchanted with or actively harmed by the process.

Part of my goal here is to provide instruction that’s more directly pointed at the modern experience of the body, and to nudge meditation away from the domain of the Systematic mode, drawing it closer to the Spontaneous mode.