Too much meditation instruction stays in the head. It focuses on thoughts, on the mind, on the nostrils, on the head, on the open sky of awareness your thoughts drift through… keeping awareness in the mind even as it tries to point beyond the mind.

For me, that kind of instruction just got me more trapped in my head. Meditation didn’t become a nurturing and fruitful part of my life until I started meditating with the body, leaving the mind aside entirely.

Even if mind-centered meditations do work well for you, I’ve had many people approach me to say that bringing the body more fully into meditation deepened their experience considerably. I can’t recommend it highly enough for meditators or aspiring meditators.

As you ground into your body, you’ll notice the energy start to drain from some things you’d thought were important before. Bit by bit, in ever starker relief, it becomes clear that some of the values you’ve been living by were never really yours — they belonged to your culture, your teachers, the time you were born into, but not to you.

After awhile, as these old values clear away, you find a much richer connection with what’s left — with the values that are native to you. The ones that provide the fuel that drives your life at the deepest levels.

When it comes to inner healing, our biggest obstacles are constriction and impatience. We want everything to happen now, and we stay clenched around the wounds that need space to heal, that need space to become something new.

Somatic resonance makes patience a natural state, and creates a lot of spaciousness around your experience. Somatic resonance on its own isn’t a healing practice, but it is a force multiplier for natural healing processes.

You might have a looping voice in your head that criticizes everything you do, everything you are. This voice gains power when you’re stuck in your head. The fastest and most effective way to drain that voice of its power is to get used to dropping awareness into your body.

For me, it took a couple months for the inner critic to go from a constant companion to an occasional, optional whisper. For others, I’ve seen it take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months.

When we say things like “your body knows the answer,” what we really mean is that if you check in with your body, you’ll notice some things are obvious.

For some people, this doesn’t go much further than “I’m hungry” or “my jaw is tense,” but with somatic practice, many more things start to feel direct and obvious. The shifts here can range from “I’m better at reading my friends moods now” to “I finally know what I really want out of my career.”

Everyone has a backlog of un-felt feelings, un-experienced experiences, un-lived life.

It’s not just important that somatic resonance helps you work through that backlog (though that’s true too), it’s important that somatic resonance gives you the presence to stop adding to the backlog, letting you feel and experience life as it comes, as it takes place around you and within you.

Somatic resonance isn’t a lofty, advanced goal — it’s a starting point.

Whether the journey ahead of you is deepening into relationships, learning to navigate and cultivate your narratives, lead others, become a live player in your life and your culture — whatever it is, the best foundation is the grounded, sturdy simplicity of somatic resonance.