Somatic Resonance-1FINAL.mp4

I have a huge amount to say about the somatic aspects of working with the unconscious in general, and with dreams in particular — as you might imagine, given that my main offering is a Somatic Resonance course. That said, and because I have a tendency to sprawl, I’m going to try to keep the somatic aspects of this course pretty focused and direct.

The following are a few propositions about the body and the unconscious that you might find either a) fully obvious, b) potentially possible, or c) deranged. Whatever your feelings about them in general, I should note that holding each of them at least as a provisional belief opens up a huge range of possibilities in working with the unconscious:

• The body is a large part of the personal unconscious.
• Your body is where your intuition comes from — the more time you spend attentively aware of your body, the more wise and incisive your intuition becomes.
• Every state of consciousness you’ve ever passed through has been accompanied by a complex somatic state — by increasing your awareness of these somatic states, you gain more access to those past (and future?) states of consciousness and the implicit knowledge contained in them.
• Any effort that aims at wholeness but doesn’t include deep bodily experience is doomed to failure.
• The unconscious communicates with you through somatic messages, just as it communicates with you through dreams, images, feelings, and desires. Its language includes the body.

There’s no need to take any of these points as gospel truth, or to start beating yourself up for the ways you might fall short of them; but moving forward, it’s helpful if you can make space to provisionally treat them as true, or at least be open to seeing if there’s a helpful kernel of truth in them.

Here are some of the possibilities we open up when we do so:

Intellect & Intuition

Intuitive Soma-Kinetics (ISK)

Navigating Dream-Space

Depthfulness

Navigating Desire

And here are some practices to help us open up into deeper somatic resonance, in ways that help us communicate with the unconscious.

Practice

Somatic Scenery