The Truth is in the Body
Somatic Intelligence is imbedded in our inherent physical nature. Our essence qualities are experienced in the body. Therefore, it is necessary to understand its (our body’s) nature, its workings, and the life force that fuels it.
We exist in a dualistic reality with a powerful, highly intelligent organism called “the human body.” It knows itself and it communicates its knowing all the time. It is a conduit for and inseparable from the unconditioned reality. Awakening to the messages being sent to us from the body is first, what somatic awareness means, and second, what somatic awakening is about.
Conscious somatic participation is a necessary step toward full integration of all parts of ourselves, as this is what leads to the potential for transformation, in our lives as we know it. It allows access to the subconscious and unconscious aspects of our lives, which is deeply stored in the cells. To turn our attention inward into the body is the way to a deeper knowing of “the whole self.”
Developing these capacities is the expansion of our psycho-emotional-physical ability to recognize, allow, and return to the free-flowing life force, without resisting the inner arising of the categories of perception: mental, emotional, and physical/instinctual. This is inevitably the key to attaining spiritual states of being, including emergence, manifestation, and stabilization.
How do we increase our capacity for received spiritual experience? How do we increase our ability to stay present in the moment and grounded in our beings with a compassionate heart and a receptive, clear mind? The Enneagram suggests a three-centered approach — intellectual, emotional, and physical — for integration of the conditioned and unconditioned aspects of our humanity.
This is dependent on developing the capacity of our inner observer and the ability to relax the mind and its continual thought-pattern movements, the ability to track and recognize our feelings, and, in developing the “felt sense” awareness that is governing the automatic survival patterns.
At the root, these patterns are driven by the need to survive in the body, separate from others, which takes precedence above and beyond our emotional need for connection and our intellectual orientation that seeks meaning and gathers information by acquiring knowledge. Therefore, the higher aspects of our brain are deeply informed by somatically based survival strategies.
Working with somatic awareness practices and the Enneagram system in tandem provides a valuable set of skillful means for personal transformation. The combination of the two provides a bridge for the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual realities.These practices and understandings greatly assist us to relax the identification with our personality type structure, and hence, assists us to relax our various resistances to pain and discomfort, while at the same time, developing our own connection to the somatic intelligence available to us. This provides a powerful opportunity to open ourselves to an undefended stance that is not running the automatic, highly conditioned, adaptive strategies of our Enneagram personality type. And, as a result, this gives us access to newfound levels — deeper understandings — of reality as it actually is, with greater receptivity to innate spiritual states.