The above sentence is the core. It’s all you really need, and everything else can bloom and grow from there over time.
Everything else I say is to share some methods, tricks, and frameworks that have helped me towards that end. This page and its partnered practice instruction is dedicated to the most raw and unrefined version of that. If this practice feels a little distant or like you’re only skimming the surface of it right now, don’t worry, that’s perfectly natural. It deepens over time, and we’ll look at a lot of different ways to help deepen it moving forward. But I want to, from the start, present the simplest and most direct version. You can return to it over and over again, and notice it becoming more natural over time.
Back in school, my friend taught me a trick for when I wasn't able to decide what I wanted—maybe you've used it too. The trick was to put two options on the table, then flip a coin on them. —The trick isn't to trust the coin, but to notice: once the coin comes up heads or tails, you immediately know which one you'd been hoping for. Your body gives you a "hell yeah, heads!" reaction, or a "dang, I was hoping for tails" reaction.1
That trick is a way of forcing one particular shade of somatic resonance—it's a way of turning up the volume on what your soma is telling you, making it harder to ignore.
The body holds a lot of wisdom. Wisdom about who you are, what you’re here for, which of your desires are actually yours, and which ones were smuggled into you by advertisers and bullies and sugar rushes.
But we spend most of our time in the head, attending to experience in a very particular way, which focuses only on what we already know and how we already hold ourselves. There’s very little room for humility or connection when we’re trapped in the head, and these are exactly what we need in order to accept—even to notice!—the wisdom of the soma.
So our first, second, and third steps are to spend time with the body, over and over again, as a friend and ally. Keeping an open mind, open awareness, openness to whatever unexpected things might come to us when we open ourselves to this other way of attending to experience.