Instead of “depthfulness,” I could use words like “groundedness” or “stillness,” but neither one quite captures the somatic quality I’m pointing at.

Imagine sensing inside your body and feeling the usual — organs, heartbeat, movement, gurgling, and the like.

Now imagine sensing a little more subtly, noticing that there’s a very fine field of vibrating shimmers underlying everything else in your body (and not just inside your body, actually, but surrounding it a bit).

Now imagine sensing even more deeply, and noticing that just like you can’t have ripples without water to ripple, you can’t have vibrating shimmers without something to shimmer, some underlying medium for everything to happen in.

That underlying substance is what I call soma, and the experience of soma is an experience of depthfulness. It’s like infinite space that is also infinite ground. It’s like finding the center of gravity that holds every moment of your life together.

It’s a wonderful and inexhaustible area of experience, but more pertinent to this course: starting from this space of depthfulness, and holding it during dream return, allows for a very deep reverberative experience of symbolic content. The dream images echo through you, they resonate with other parts of you like tuning forks.

This might sound poetic, but I mean it in a very literal experiential way.

To give one example: in a dream return that involved an underground cave and a lion made of light, my dream return ended with the lion exploding into a shower of golden sparks, which swirled and churned through my soma for about 40 minutes afterward. During the practice, I simply sat and focused on the golden sparks circulating through my body until the storm died down and they processed.

Afterwards, investigating the experience, it was clear that the way I was experiencing that storm of golden lion-sparks was resonating very strongly with my embodied sense of courage, uprightness, honesty, and self-esteem. These weren’t anything I thought about or specifically put attention on during the practice; but the way my awareness reverberated during the meditation had the effect of activating those areas of my experience, keeping them in my awareness over the next few days.

Some version of this effect is available at any level of practice — but in my experience, it’s only when we can reliably sink into what I’m calling depthfulness that the full potential of this effect is unlocked.

Practices

Try to retrace the levels I described at the top of the article.

1. Awareness of the physical, material body. Your breath, heartbeat, movements, bones, digestive movement, all of it. Spend lots of time familiarizing yourself with this experience.
2. Feel for the subtle shimmer or buzz underneathe and around all those physical experiences. This may appear to you like tv static in the body, or like subtle currents of movement that don’t have an obvious physical basis. Spend lots of time here as well.
3. Feel underneath the shimmer, sensing what is the medium that is shimmering? If you’re able to stabilize awareness of that medium, stay there and let yourself enjoy it as often as possible.

Developing the ability to sense each of these levels might take a few hours of practice. It might take a few months. For a few, it might take a couple years. There’s no wrong pace here, let it unfold for you how it wants to unfold.