I’ll give three different levels of granularity for this meditation instruction, starting with the simplest and most direct, ending with the most granular and instructive. Hopefully, triangulating between these will help you orient yourselves towards the key experience.

Start with the top level, and check in with the nested levels after practicing a couple times, to see if they help explain anything you found difficult or confusing. —Feelings of difficulty or confusion in the beginning are well worth it, they make the solutions stick better over time.

If anything still feels difficult or distant after going through all the instructions, don’t fret: the rest of the course is, in some ways, a very long trouble-shooting guide.

Get in a comfortable position.

Breathe in and out through the entire body at once

Allow the body to feel itself, to amplify its own experience, without the head-self acting as a middle-man

Allow your felt body, the full “phenomenological field,” to explore itself—sensations, impressions, images, movements, tensions—until it finds a natural ending point

Return to yourself, integrate the experience, go about your day

Next Steps:

If there are many areas of the body that feel distant, numb, or difficult to access, it can be helpful to try Whole Body Breathing. This type of breathing acts almost like CPR, helping to “wake up” the soma in places where it doesn’t feel accessible. Combining this with a Whole-Soma Good Morning can also be a big help.

Somatic Resonance