*The following is clipped from the Somatic Silence workshop, targeted at taming the inner monologue. It offers a targeted look at some of our ideas within a particular application, which will hopefully offer you some perspective on applying it to applications of your own choosing.

The full workshop is available with your purchase of this course, check your purchase page for the whole thing.*

There are two different "styles of attending" that each of us uses—one of which (according to Iain McGilchrist) correlates to the right hemisphere of the brain, the other to the left. I riff on McGilchrist’s framework not because of its scientific backing, which I have no real thoughts on, but because of the obvious experiential validity of these two styles he describes.

One of these clusters is associated with the inner monologue; the other with the soma.

While we describe these clusters, keep in mind that it’s best to not focus on the inner monologue's cluster, but to focus directly on moving towards the soma's cluster.

McGilchrist refers to these two clusters as simply the Right Hemisphere and the Left Hemisphere. He also uses the terms Master and Emissary, respectively.

For my purposes, I'm going to use the terms "Spontaneous" and "Systematic."The Systematic style of attending to experience is associated with things like:

• Precision
• Focus
• Certainty (even when wrong)
• Sees itself as living "in" a body
• Sees the body as an assemblage of parts (and relates to body parts as objects in space, much like any other objects)
• Obsessiveness
• Either/Or thinking
• Atomistic style

The Spontaneous style of attending to experience is associated with things like:

• Open awareness
• Uncertainty/humility
• Sees itself "as" a body