Somatic Meditation Changed My Life
After years of chronic stress, my body did what every body does--it spoke up in a desperate plea to get my attention. It started off as a whisper, but I just couldn’t (or wouldn’t) hear it. Aches and pains appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and I tried to quiet them with hot baths and glasses of wine. I continued my stress diet, completely unaware that I was addicted to the fight-or-flight hormones, and my body began to protest more loudly. There were days when my feet would swell up and make it difficult to walk, and I became increasingly exhausted. I started scaling back my social life, then my family life, and then found myself unable to do even the smallest things. Taking a bath or brushing my hair became almost impossible. I fell asleep in my clothes well before sunset. Still, I persisted in my habit of stress, and my body finally had no choice but to scream to get my attention. One day I found myself lying on the floor and unable to get up. My body was inflamed from head to toe, seared with pain, and refused to move. I finally had to stop and listen. This was my wake up call, my invitation into the soma--the innate wisdom of the body.
I was given a laundry list of scary diagnoses: Rheumatoid arthritis, Lupus, Mixed Connective Tissue Disorder, Chronic Fatigue, Fibromyalgia, and Osteoporosis. I was further informed there was no cure for most of them and my best bet was to take a bunch of pills that would alleviate symptoms but mostly continue to insult the body. I had kids to raise and needed to get off the floor, so I took the pills to prop me up long enough to figure a way out of the mess I had made. I began to notice how stress and worry crippled me almost immediately, and how these “flares” took days, weeks, and sometimes months to recover from. I also began noticing how being in the present moment, and feeling elevated emotions like love, joy and gratitude affected me so powerfully that pain and fatigue disappeared. Slowly, I began to sense the body as a teacher rather than a traitor, and felt I was close to the answers I was seeking.
Tsundoku is a Japanese term for buying books and letting them pile up unread. I looked around my room at the shelves and stacks of neglected books that I had amassed over the years, knowing that if I could find the energy to start reading, I would find the way to turn my life around. And then it happened. I found what I most needed, first from Reggie Ray’s Touching Enlightenment. According to ancient Theravada texts, there is no other way to touch enlightenment except in and through our body. Far from being the dumb animal I had previously regarded it to be, I learned to know my body as my most trusted and beloved guru. I had encountered this information decades before in my travels to India and Nepal, and collected books on esoteric spirituality and somatic practices, but I wasn’t ready then. At last, I was ripened; I was ready to receive.
It has been fifteen years since I received my wake up call, lying frozen in pain on the floor. It feels like that happened in another life. In a way, it did. I feel very much reborn to a new life. Learning and practicing the gifts of somatic meditation have given me an entirely new way of being in my mind, body and soul, and I am deeply honored to share these gifts with those who also wish to receive them.
