Your Body Knows What's Obvious (and so so much can be so so obvious)

I took my first piano lesson in first grade,

I took my first piano lesson in first grade; it took me entire painstaking minutes to play 8 lousy measures. For each note, I had to look at the sheet music, remember what key the markings referred to, look down at my fingers, and make sure I pressed the right one — then look back up to the sheet music for the next note. I remember pouting with frustration for the rest of the afternoon.

Of course, within a year or two, I was playing much more complicated pieces without thinking about it at all. A quick glance at the sheet music was all I needed, my fingers knew exactly where to press and for how long. Just a little regular practice was all it took, and suddenly my body knew the answer for a whole set of previously-challenging tasks. Year by year, the frontier of musical tasks to which my body knew the answer expanded over and over again.

You've had similar experiences, if not with music then with something. Basketball, dancing, carpentry, driving, spreadsheets — any skill that takes some clumsy effort at the beginning. You had to think it through, step by step, just to do it clumsily; but now your body carries it out smoothly without a thought.

This is the core of what I call somatic resonance. It's the way that your body simply knows the answer, no thought required. The way that you sometimes realize and act on the answer without registering that you're doing it.

When meditators and spiritual types say "your body knows the answer" or "drop that question into your body," it can sound like gibberish to some people. But it really is this straightforward.

The most basic levels of somatic resonance are so obvious we hardly think of them.

• "Are you hungry?" - You don't need to meditate on a mountain for months to attain the transcendental knowledge of your hunger. You just let yourself notice your stomach for a second, and your hunger is either present or not.

• "Are you comfortable?" - You don't need to dissolve into a beam of cosmic light to awaken to your inner gnosis of comfort; you don’t get a PhD in comfortology. You just let yourself notice your body, and it's immediately clear that your calves are a little tense, and you want to rearrange how you're sitting.

That slight inner motion — dropping awareness into your stomach, letting yourself notice your calves — that's all your "question" has to be. Just a wordless inner motion.

That obvious sensation — a gnawing in your stomach, a tension in your calves — that's all your body's "answer" has to be. Simple, wordless clear knowing.

And wordless clear knowing doesn't end with basic bodily functions — it can go far beyond hunger or thirst or comfort, just like wordless clear knowing of the piano can go far beyond playing chopsticks.

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Kalina

I was living in South Korea in my early 20s, and a girl named Kalina was visiting one of my friends for a few weeks. Over those weeks, I got to know her as one of the most weirdly aware and self-assured people I've ever met, though in a very quiet and humble way. She always seemed to know more than she should.

It was in the little things, mostly.

We were going to a club on a Friday night, the same club we'd gone to the weekend before — and when we got within eyesight of it, Kalina gave a disappointed cluck and said "damn, I don't actually want to go there right now. When you're all done, come meet me at the quiet bar down the street, I really still want to spend time with you tonight." She hugged everyone and walked off. It was such a small moment, but at the time, that ability to simply and matter-of-factly recognize what she was feeling, to set a boundary with friends while also earnestly expressing a desire to spend time with us — it felt like a virtuoso performance of some virtue I had little access to back then.

We were going down an escalator, talking face to face, and she casually reached two hands out in front of us, palms out, one second before an elderly woman teetered backward, in danger of falling, and was gently re-supported upright by Kalina's hands. The startled woman turned her head to nod thanks and then walked off.

We were walking down a busy street, and she casually grabbed my arm and tugged me toward her — right before a runaway bicycle rounded the corner, blasting through the place I'd just been standing.

I asked her how the hell she'd known to pull me aside, and she paused to think about it. "I'm not sure," she laughed, "maybe the bike made a skidding sound when it neared the corner, or maybe I saw someone across the street staring at that spot and looking scared?" She really didn't know. She hadn't thought about it. She simply, wordlessly knew that I should get out of that spot, and she gave my arm a tug without giving it more thought than "he shouldn't be there."

I had a chance to ask, before she left. I don't remember the conversation exactly, but I asked something like "Have you always just been this self-assured and intuitive? What's the deal?"

Kalina answered "Not really, I used to be pretty awkward and miserable. I didn't know who I was or what I wanted, and I was always overthinking every little thing. Then at the end of high school and into college, I got a bit into acting and dancing. I wasn't very good at either one, but the exercises we did to practice blew my mind. Suddenly I was noticing my body, noticing my emotions, playing with them, listening to them, letting them change my voice and change how I moved... and I don't know, something shifted. More and more since then I've just kinda... stopped distrusting myself. And people seem to respond really well to me when I'm responding really well to myself."

What she said didn't fully make sense to me back then. Nowadays, I can see very clearly what she was pointing at. She was one of the first masters of somatic resonance I'd ever met.

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Obvious Latent Insight

Physiological stuff like hunger and comfort are one thing. Specific skills that you can practice and deeply integrate into your intuitions — like piano or driving — are another. But generalized somatic resonance is something else entirely. It generates intuition and self-trust over and over again, often by giving you reason to trust yourself. It expands the frontier of what's directly obvious to you, letting you feel the answers to questions like "How do I talk to my boss about my ethical qualms with this project?" as easily as you feel the answers to "am I thirsty?" or "does my foot hurt?"

Bit by bit, it all takes on the same basic structure: you do the wordless inner motion of "asking a question" in your body, and you find a wordless clear knowing waiting there for you. There's latent insight already growing at the site of the question.

And as far as I can tell, this "generalized" somatic resonance supercharges the skill-specific resonances as well. If you play an instrument, for example, try playing it regularly for a few weeks while letting yourself drop into how the music feels in the deep core of your body, how it changes the space around you, how it sparks memories, emotions, insights — let yourself drop into somatic resonance while practicing your instrument, and notice how your relationship to it changes. Watch what happens to your musical capacity over time.

Or your carpentry capacity, your lifting capacity, your coding or drawing or driving — wherever you focus this sense of somatic resonance, something shifts. New things start to feel obvious, and as one new obvious thing builds on top of another, new possibilities start to open up.

Now we're maybe back to sounding a bit abstract, a bit mystifying — but I promise it isn't. It's only abstract in the way that descriptions of intermediate chess matches sound abstract and mystifying to someone in their first beginner matches. Once you actually get there, so much feels so obvious, you can do most of it with hardly a thought.

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How?

Learning to trust yourself, to expand your latent insight, and to generally develop a trustworthy landscape of obviousness — it doesn't happen overnight, but it's also not a particularly difficult or complex process. Kalina tripped into it by accident with acting and dancing exercises. I tripped into it by accident with somatic meditation practices. I know others have found their way in through singing, swimming, even poetry.

Some of my favorite recommendations for curious beginners to start out on are:

• Somatic Descent

• Somatic Resonance

• Focusing

• Mytho-Somatic Dreamwork

• Movement practices

I like to remind people that somatic resonance isn't some distant and lofty goal: it's a starting point. You can reach a pretty admirable level within a couple years of solid effort — and once you're there, one of the things that becomes obvious is that there's another path calling you; there's something else you need to do, and no one else can tell you what it is. 

Me, for example – somatic resonance and imaginal work led me towards a pretty specific course of study and scholarship that I'm learning to approach in my own way. I've seen others find their own obvious truths that they need to start a particular business, or dedicate themselves to their family, or get back in contact with a community they need to be a part of. It's different for everyone. But it's also obvious to each individual.

And that's really the core of it. Somatic resonance is what's obvious. It's a foundational state where you're in touch with your body, living from your body first and foremost, and letting your body speak and act for itself, taking the obvious steps, one by one.