Somatic Meditation - Two-Part Series by Reginald A. Ray

What is Somatic Meditation?

Somatic Meditation takes our body as the fundamental arena of meditation practice. Rather than trying to develop meditation through our left-brain, thinking mind in a “top-down” process, as is the case with most contemporary approaches, Somatic Meditation involves a bottom-up process, wherein we connect with the inherent, self-existing wakefulness that is already present within the body itself. In contrast to conventional approaches that emphasize entry through the intentional thinking of the conscious mind and following conceptual instruction templates, Somatic Meditation develops a meditative consciousness that is accessed through the feelings, sensations, somatic intuition, and felt sense of the body itself. We are simply trying to tune into the basic awareness of the body. Put in Buddhist terms, the human body, as such, is already and always abiding in the meditative state, the domain of awakening, and we are just trying to gain entry into that.

This bottom-up somatic approach to the meditative process throws into bold relief the way in which conventional, top-down approaches are too often little more than mental projections—in Trungpa Rinpoche’s language, mental gymnastics. In the direct, non-conceptual approach of Somatic Meditation, the practitioner is able to meet his or her own experience in a direct, naked, and totally accessible way. Importantly, it is only this kind of unmediated experience that brings about lasting transformation. In Somatic Meditation, then, we realize that the ultimate meditative state is not found outside, above, or in some other place; it is discovered as the most essential and profound reality of this very human body of ours, just waiting for us to awaken to it.