Integrating Polarities - Somatic Meditation

At the heart of all transformation is the need to resolve conflicting polarities that we hold within our minds & bodies. Many people gain great insight by searching through their lives to find the conditioned beliefs that they hold that no longer serve them. Yet often the reactivity & behavior that arises from those beliefs still doesn't change. 

It can even seem to cause greater suffering to begin to see the ways we sabotage ourselves, yet despite all of our efforts it does not change our lives or our situations. This is where, for me, enlisting the body & the nervous system has helped immensely. By combining our awareness & insights about the conflicting beliefs we hold & pairing it with simple somatic exercises, we can begin to resolve the original imprint that we literally hold in our tissues. And often times these simple processes can have profound & lasting effects.

First it does require us to do some self inquiry as to what it is we are feeling. By dropping our awareness down into the body & asking for the source of the inner conflict we are often drawn to a particular sensation somewhere in our body. Then, when an issue begins to bubble to the surface revealing something that we desire or fear, we are able to investigate what it's opposing belief would be. 

For instance, we may determine that we feel contraction in our chest & upon examination we see that we have to go to an event that we really don't want to attend. Looking a bit deeper we realize that there will be someone there that tends to overpower & bully us & we feel insecure around them. So that is one aspect of the polarity - the aversion to feeling small & insecure.

Then we can examine our lives & find that there are other areas and activities that we are drawn to because we feel adept & confident at them. We many even realize that sometimes we come off as a bit bossy ourselves in this environment. So now we can see the other side of the polarity - that we like feeling big & important.

Click on Arrow below to play Video

So now that we know what the polarities are, we can then utilize this little exercise to resolve & integrate the conflicting duality. By intuitively identifying one aspect of the polarity in one hand & the other side in the other hand, we can begin working somatically to integrate them within our nervous systems & bodies.

In the video it shows bringing the hands together toward the head, but if one felt unresolved tension in the chest, one could instead bring the hands together & place them on the chest to somatically integrate the energy in the place where the body has stored the conflict.

As with all of these meditations & exercises, the most important aspect of them is our ability to use our micro-awareness as a non-judgmental witness to what we are experiencing in our bodies, & in this instance, in our energy fields as well. Over time we begin to see how much of our lives are ruled by this split between what we want (which is usually what we've been conditioned to believe we want) and what we fear or feel aversion toward (which is indeed also learned). And bit by bit we are able to liberate ourselves from this dualistic dance.

                                  ♡ Jeanette