FRequently Asked Questions
1. What Is Somatic Meditation and Why Practice It?
Somatic meditation is a way to digest, resolve and update emotions that drive our thoughts, beliefs, and behavior. Emotions are stored in the body and become accessible as feelings to our heart and brain through our nervous system when anything associated with that emotion comes our way. Our emotions are part of our internal navigation system, which is made up of our beliefs, senses, emotions, and thoughts. These interact with and influence each other.
In an ideal situation, our emotions update with our experiences so that we are acting upon the best information when we navigate life. When we have a strong negative experience, we can become overwhelmed by strong emotions and suppress them. Other emotions can get stuck in the past and never evolve or update, even when life changes. That causes our beliefs to become rigid and feel like they are not serving us. Releasing suppressed, stuck, and outdated emotions releases long-standing tensions in the body, improves how we navigate this world, and helps resolve areas where we are emotionally or cognitively stuck in life.
We are constantly forming emotions and feelings in response to our environment, experiences, thoughts, and beliefs. Some proportion of those emotions and feelings will become stuck or suppressed, as described above. As a result, human beings have a significant amount of stuck and suppressed emotions and feelings that drive their subconscious mind. These emotions and feelings live in the body, where they are stored as chemical and electromagnetic signatures. Somatic meditation as an ongoing practice becomes a way to resolve emotions and feelings from the past, and to sort out our feelings and emotions as we face new life experiences. This makes somatic meditation a beneficial lifelong practice.
2. What is the Role of Unconditional Love?
Unconditional love is an electromagnetic vibration that carries a lot of positive information for living beings. We all have the capacity to intentionally generate this vibration in our hearts. It is also an emotion that we experience in certain situations in life. Unconditional love, when properly applied to somatic meditation, makes the practice more effective. Unconditional love enables you to communicate with your emotions in a supportive manner while building a solid relationship with your emotional body. Indeed, unconditional love builds trust and confidence with your emotional body, where your emotions live. By applying unconditional love to your emotions at appropriate times and in an appropriate manner during somatic meditation, you are helping those emotions be heard, resolve themselves, and update effectively. As you build more trust and confidence with your emotional body over time, your somatic meditation becomes more effective overall as well. Moreover, incorporating unconditional love into your meditation practice will help you during the tough moments in your life. It is also likely to improve your relationship with yourself and others over time, as practicing unconditional love in an appropriate manner helps you develop both better discernment skills and a more open-minded perspective on a given situation.
3. What If I Can’t Feel Some of My Emotions?
Emotions get suppressed when we believe that we won’t be able to handle them or when we don’t have the opportunity to process them. This is a very common occurrence for everyone in the modern world for a variety of reasons and we have countless emotions and feelings that get filed away within our emotional body without fully being processed. Highly sensitive persons (HSPs) can engage in emotional suppression at higher rates than other people because they experience life more deeply than others and process higher volumes of emotional information from their external environment. Emotional suppression is a common coping mechanism for dealing with difficult life situations as well as everyday life experiences. I teach you the basic skills to be able to access and digest previously suppressed emotions and the feelings that stem from them. Some difficult emotions will surface fairly quickly; others need more time and opportunity to surface. I provide tips and strategies to identify these opportunities.
4. HOW MANY SESSIONS WILL I NEED WITH YOU?
I need about five sessions to teach you the skills you need to get going on your own properly. I make time for questions during the sessions. I will also provide you tips on how to work with different types of emotions and provide ideas based on what I believe is most relevant to you, given your specific situation. I further provide you with written information that will help you with your meditation practice. It is then up to you to apply these skills to make progress at your own pace. If you would like more support from me or want to learn additional techniques, you can schedule additional sessions at any time.
Utilizing meditation techniques in our foundational sessions together, I will teach you beginner’s level skills to:
Generate and send unconditional love to the emotional body at appropriate times and in an appropriate manner
Tune in to your own emotional bandwidth for the purposes of being present with your emotional body
Get into a state of unconditional presence with somatic sensations — the emotions and feelings that need to be heard
Resolve conditional thought-patterns and other forms of resistance to making progress
Practicing these techniques will send a lot of positive information and feedback to your emotional body, which you will be able to feel on a visceral level. You will notice your physiology recalibrating in positive ways. And you will find that your efforts to access and digest your emotions will become more effective.
5. WHAT IS YOUR TEACHING STYLE?
I am focused on teaching the skills you need to get going on your own. This requires me to think on my feet a great deal, answer questions when asked, and improvise in order to respond to your individual needs and whatever comes up. I anticipate that you will develop a style of your own over time as you build your skillset. However, there are elements that are foundational to the practice that I teach; I prioritize relaying them to you. There are also certain wisdoms that I provide that will save you a great deal of time figuring out on your own. I make myself available to answer your questions along the way during our sessions together.
6. How Long Will It Take Me to Achieve My Goals?
The timing and sequence in which things unfold for each person toward their goals depends in significant part on their starting point and their commitment to build trust and confidence with their emotional body. Each person is unique in their somatic experiences because each person experiences life differently and filters it through their own lens on top of that. One can actively support the process by supporting the emotional body with unconditional love at appropriate times and in an appropriate manner. Please know that there are feelings that need to be felt, acknowledged and supported in a given order that is unique to each individual. Your body knows how things need to unfold and in what order; it will signal this to you during somatic meditation and otherwise.
While everyone has some goal when they practice somatic meditation, it is important to realize that being too attached to a given goal or expectation creates a state of conditionality. This in itself becomes an impediment to making progress, because the emotional body shuts down, becomes distressed, and gets very tense when treated conditionally. I will spend some time with you in our foundational sessions addressing how to approach an emotional state of conditionality so that you can benefit from unconditional love and its trust-building benefits. After our foundational sessions together, I anticipate that you will work at your own pace on your own time. You can always schedule more time with me if you need further help with a specific goal or want to learn additional techniques.