Hello and welcome.
The following is a guided meditation by Renée Sills,
A somatic movement educator,
Energy worker and astrologer.
This meditation is intended to help support your embodied meditation practice.
If in the recording you are prompted to do something that doesn't feel good for your body,
Please adapt and modify to make it work for you.
Please also note that the content of these meditations sometimes explores deep and subtle states and memories,
And sometimes guided visualizations.
You are encouraged to work with discernment as you practice with them.
If any of the guidance Renée offers feels too activating or uncomfortable,
Please listen to your body's knowing and pause the recording until a later time if you wish to return to it.
These guided meditations range anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes and do not require any supplementary equipment to participate.
We hope you enjoy.
Hello and thanks so much for listening.
This is Renée and this is a somatic meditation.
Somatic meditation is a style of meditation that works through the body.
As we practice together,
I'll use guided imagery,
Visualization and suggestions for palpation,
That means touch,
Or felt sense awareness of your physical body as well as your inner body.
And as we explore the physical awareness or the somatic intelligence,
We can come across all kinds of information,
And this information includes awareness of our emotional,
Mental and psychic capacities,
As well as clarity that we might develop around issues that we're working with in our lives.
And finally,
These somatic tools are really useful.
They can be applied anytime and anywhere in your life.
Meditation in general is a really great way to train your body,
Mind,
Heart for the world that we live in,
Which is so demanding and so distracting so much of the time.
So in today's meditation,
We're going to be working with the idea of clearing confusion and connecting to wisdom.
And I know for me,
This feels like a really necessary practice to do regularly.
So as I'm offering it to you,
Please hear that I'm offering from my own questions and my own experience.
And as you listen to it,
Feel free to adapt it,
Feel free to modify it,
To add your own words,
To add your own movements,
Etc.
Also feel free to share it and share it in any way that's joyful for you,
But please share it freely.
All right,
So as we begin this meditation,
The most important thing is that you're comfortable and you're welcome to do these meditations in any position.
You don't need to be sitting up on a cushion.
You can lie down and sometimes I,
If I'm not recording,
Am moving around as I do these meditations,
Kind of moving freely and expressing through my body and sometimes expressing through my voice.
So please take creative liberty in how you want to practice.
You might also practice this meditation in your car,
In transit or somewhere out in the world and that's a great place to practice it as well.
So we'll begin by softening the face and the eyes and just taking some deep centering breaths.
So you can inhale through your nose if it's comfortable and let your belly soften and expand.
And then exhale and sigh out your mouth.
And as you exhale,
Release any expression in your face,
Release any tension in your eyes.
And we'll take a number of breaths like this.
And so in these beginning breaths,
Attune yourself to the sensation of your breath.
Notice the feeling of your inhale as it passes through your nose and into your skull and sinuses down into your throat and into your lungs.
And as you exhale,
Enjoy the sensation of the exhale.
And when you sigh and you can make your sighs nice and loud if possible,
It's a signal to your body to relax.
In the exhaling breath,
You can allow your attention and any forward moving or outward moving energy to kind of melt.
And this feeling then is letting the eyes and the face soften,
Letting the ears open and inviting your sensory perception,
Your sight,
Your hearing,
Whatever you're smelling or tasting or sensing with your skin.
Invite all of that information to kind of move away from anything that it's observing outside of you and get really present with the feeling of the observation in your body.
So if your eyes are open,
You might feel how light and image are just delivered to your eyes,
But try not to harden your eyes looking out and seeking to see.
As you hear my voice and as you hear any other sounds,
Let your ear canals open and let sound flow in kind of undifferentiated.
Any sensation that passes in your skin,
You might notice how your mind very quickly moves to the sensation.
There might be an impulse to do something.
See if you can notice the sensation for a minute before you respond.
Definitely you're welcome to respond to make yourself comfortable,
To scratch an itch or anything like that.
But it's an interesting practice to develop a pause before we respond.
And sometimes the reactive responses are really distracting in themselves.
So feel the sensations that arise on your skin,
Notice what they are and then decide what to do about them.
We'll take one or two more breaths like this,
Just inhaling through your nose,
Letting your belly fill and soften and expand.
And as you exhale,
Feeling all the breath pour out.
And at the end of these couple of exhales,
Just like firm your belly and push the last little bit of air out and then let the breath come in.
So that little push of air moves the stale air out of your lungs,
But it also does something to your nervous system and your circulation.
And I notice how just after that,
I get this swell of openness up through my skull.
Right.
So let's now bring attention to the brain and let's begin if it's comfortable enough for you by touching our skulls.
And so you can use your hands and just bring your hands to your head and feel the shape of your head.
And a skull massage is always pretty nice.
So you can run your fingers through your hair if you have hair and kind of squeeze it or massage your scalp and feel the way that the skin of your scalp moves over your cranial bones.
You can massage around your face and feel the muscles of your face as well.
And let your hands travel all the way back and down around the posterior,
The backside lip of your skull.
It's called the occiput,
Kind of the base of your skull and into the soft notch at the back of your neck.
And just feel the shape of your skull.
And as you're feeling the shape of your skull,
Let's begin to imagine the shape of the brain.
And you've probably seen a picture of a brain somewhere and the way that it's shaped mirrors or I guess we could say is contained by the shape of your skull.
So the front part of your brain rests above your eyes and behind your forehead bones.
And then the middle part of your brain is between your ears and kind of above your neck.
And then the back of your brain fills the back of your skull and it travels down towards your brain stem.
And the brain stem is kind of just about where this place is at the back of your neck where you might feel a soft notch.
And that's where your brain gets connected to your spinal cord.
And your brain and your spinal cord make up what's called the central nervous system.
And this is basically the command center of your body.
It's where information comes in,
Moves into your brain and where your brain then sorts that information,
Decides what to do with it and sends impulses out into the rest of your body.
And impulses come in through your spinal cord.
They move up to the brain.
The brain does something with those impulses and then the brain sends an impulse back into the spinal cord and out into what are called the peripheral nerves,
The peripheral nervous system.
So now if it's all right,
Take your hands and start to touch your skin and it doesn't matter where.
You can touch your own hands,
Your arms,
Your chest,
Wherever.
When I'm working with my nervous system and working with a sense of somatic knowing,
Sometimes what I like to do is slap my skin.
And so if this sounds fun or interesting to you,
You might just slap yourself a little bit.
So slap around your arms or your chest or down your legs and your slaps can be gentle or hard.
But as you're slapping your skin,
You're waking the nervous system up.
And of course,
You don't want to inflict pain upon yourself unless you do want to,
If that feels good.
But the slapping just wakes up the skin.
And so if you're doing this or you can also scratch your skin or just kind of vigorously rub your skin or really lightly trace your fingertips on your skin and any of that will wake up the nerves in your skin.
So you might do that for another second or two and then pause and just notice what the sensation in your skin is.
And remember that you have this amazing system in your body and in your being called your nervous system.
And the central nervous system,
As I described your spine and excuse me,
Your spinal cord in your brain,
Work together with what's called your peripheral nervous system.
And these are nerves that branch out into your skin and your muscles.
And your central nervous system also works with what's called your enteric nervous system or your autonomic nervous system.
And so now if you bring your hands to your belly and your chest and then just breathe,
You can feel into or imagine your organs.
So all your organs of the vital forces,
Your lungs,
Your heart,
All your digestive organs,
Your kidneys,
The organs that help you absorb and metabolize and eliminate.
Of course,
The largest organ of all is your skin.
So these,
The organs of your body,
You know,
They are really what's keeping you alive.
And we have different kinds of awareness,
Different capacities for awareness in our skin and in our muscles and in our organs.
But in all of these places,
We're sensing and we're receiving information and that information is traveling into the spine and up into the brain.
And then the brain is processing that information and then we're going to do something with it.
So as you sense into your organs,
And I want to encourage you to keep your hands on your belly or over your chest and just breathe deeply and let the movement of your breath expand into your belly and out into your sides.
The organs have a special kind of sensory capacity.
So they don't have the same kind of nerves in them that allow us to feel specifics like we do in our skin.
So with your skin,
You can sense hot or cold or sharp or dull or tickly or scratchy or whatever the different sensations are.
The organs have a more general perceptive sensation when it comes to pressure.
So if an organ gets very full,
Like if you eat a lot of food and your stomach is really full,
Then you'll feel that you'll feel the pressure.
Or if you have gas and gas is moving through your intestines,
You'll feel that pressure.
But otherwise,
One of the ways that the organs are incredibly intelligent is with intuition.
And our bodies and their vital functions are very sensitive to energy.
And each of the organs has its own what I'll call energetic power and the kinds of information that it will process.
But this is where we get the phrase like you feel it in your gut,
You know,
Like deep belly intuition.
And the autonomic nervous system or the enteric system is a place where our intuition resides.
So now let's do a little contrast and comparison.
Go ahead and open your eyes if they've been closed and just look around and pay attention to how your brain responds to your sight.
So you're probably looking around and as you see different things,
Whether or not you're consciously naming them in your head,
And hearing the sound of those names,
You can identify what you're seeing and make sense out of it.
So I'm looking at a chair.
And when I look at the chair,
I have all of the associations that I have for chairs,
Like that's something to sit on.
I don't necessarily see like a fort that I could make or I don't know,
A decorative item.
I see something that's functional.
As I look at a wall and I see the color of the paint,
I name that color,
I have my associations to it.
As I look out the window and I see the trees,
I know what they are.
I have a sense of what they are through my sight.
So as you look and as you see,
Just notice if anything that you're looking at elicits a sensation in your body.
And then you might close your eyes and imagine seeing the face of someone who you deeply love.
And notice if you have any response in your body.
And then feel free to skip this next imagining if you can,
Because I'm going to say it.
So here's a little warning to plug your ears if you don't want to hear it.
You might imagine something really gruesome,
Like something that we've got a lot of gruesome news recently.
So you might imagine something really gruesome and feel in your body.
So this kind of information that comes through sight,
Our bodies respond to it.
We have some kind of reaction or response,
And I'm going to say that this is intuition.
It's a feeling of how we want to respond to it.
And the same goes for sound and the same goes for sensation.
When we feel confused,
There is often a sense of distraction or disagreement or an inner kind of tearing between our immediate response to something and then what we think about it.
And so this is where the mind and the body can part ways and we can confuse ourselves and we can also be confused by the world around us.
And in my experience,
Confusion has a couple of different causes to it.
So there's inner confusion that arises when my mind is telling me something that's very different than my body.
And this is the case when it's like you have a feeling about something,
You don't really want to do it,
Or maybe you do really want to do it,
But then your mind is telling you the opposite.
For whatever reason,
It has its stories,
It has its but at ifs and ands,
It procrastinates,
It tries to convince,
It feels obligated,
Etc.
And then we get into a space of inner turmoil and confusion.
The other time that confusion arises for me is when I receive wrong information from the world around me.
And I rarely receive wrong information from the natural environment.
It is there.
Sometimes I get lost if I'm out in the woods or something.
But confusion usually arises in relationship with other people and the things that people make and do.
And so I'll experience confusion when I get information that doesn't actually align with something that I think is going on or that I feel is going on.
If someone's telling me something and in my body,
I feel something different,
Or if I'm getting information that doesn't resonate with the way that I actually feel,
Then I'll feel confused.
So I'm going to invite you right now to rest for a moment.
And we'll just enter into kind of a space of mindfulness or meditative space.
And all this is is presence.
So feel your body and feel the way that your body is in relationship to the ground.
So anywhere your weight presses down on what you're sitting on or lying or standing on.
And come back to these breaths that invite inhales through your nose if that's comfortable and allow your belly to fill and soften.
And then sigh out.
Probably you have a situation that's confusing right now.
But for the sake of this meditation and for training,
Let's recall a situation that has come and gone already,
Something in the past,
Not too far away,
Maybe more of the recent past where you experienced confusion or what you would call confusion.
And that kind of confusion could be either of the kinds that I was describing before,
Something that arises internally around your own choice or something that's arising externally.
I should say initiated since it's all an internal experience for you.
So imagine that situation,
Bring yourself into that time.
Imagine the people,
Imagine the time of year,
Imagine where you were.
Imagine the arc of the story,
Maybe it spanned length of time.
And then invite the feeling of confusion to enter into your awareness and see if you can recall how that felt and where you felt it in your body.
So for me,
I identify confusion often as a quickening in my thought pattern.
And it's kind of like a dispersed thinking and an ungrounded thinking.
There are lots of thoughts,
But they're also sometimes like a little sluggish or they feel foggy.
And so this is kind of like steam or something.
There's a lot of movement,
But it's not very grounded and it spreads around and it's hard to pinpoint or materialize.
I also notice when I get confused that there's a shutting down of my heart energy and a feeling of disconnection and mistrust that enters into my emotional sphere.
And then I also feel in confusion that there's,
It's almost like nausea.
It's not quite that strong,
But it's unease in my belly.
So those are some of the sensations that I notice in my body.
What do you notice in yours?
Feel into this imagination of your sense of confusion and notice what the sensations are and try and describe them to yourself as literally as possible in terms of physical awareness,
Like my heart starts pounding or I get cold sweats.
Not so much what you're thinking,
But more what's happening in your body.
And we'll take just a minute or so with that.
And if you need a longer amount of time,
Please feel free to pause the recording and also feel free to make notes about all this.
It's useful information.
Now let's explore the relationship between the internal and the external landscapes.
So you're feeling confused.
You have whatever thoughts,
Feelings,
Sensations arising in your being.
And then there's the external.
There are the relationships that are involved.
There are the situations that are occurring.
What is going on between your internal and external awareness in your confusion?
Name that for yourself.
So for me,
One of the things that I notice with most confusion is that there's a real big disconnect between my own desire and intention and momentum.
And then what is actually happening?
What seems to be happening?
And this disconnect is usually the point of confusion.
So like what is going on and why is this going on?
This isn't what I want to be happening.
It's not what I was trying to do.
You know,
Whatever,
There's been a misunderstanding or I don't understand.
So there's this feeling of disruption and incongruency between the internal and the external experiences.
For me,
That's how I would describe it.
How would you describe it for yourself?
Can you bring your sense of awareness and your imagination into the space that is both internal and external and feel yourself in the situation and feel the broader and bigger landscape around you?
So one thing that I want to suggest is that with confusion,
Whether that confusion is initiated by something that's internal or something that's external.
What happens is that our inner bodies get out of balance.
Before I describe what that is,
I want to clarify that by internally initiated confusion,
I mean you have some kind of intention or motivation that when you try and enact it or understand it,
It does not produce the result that you want or expect.
And then there is confusion.
There's like an unknowing of what to do or there's a feeling of frustration or kind of you're like forcing something to happen and nothing is going the right way,
That kind of confusion.
Or there's confusion that's imposed externally if someone or something is being dishonest with you,
If you feel like you're being manipulated or if things are happening and they feel really bizarre and out of your control and hard to understand and you don't quite know what to do with them.
So either way,
What I want to suggest is that there's disruption in the inner body when confusion happens.
And confusion for me usually feels like either my inner body shrinking and moving away and kind of a leaving or abandoning of myself or my inner body becoming very robust and assertive and almost like I'm pushing out of myself and there's a feeling of the need to control something.
So when I say inner body,
What I'm referring to is a couple of things.
I'm referring to the emotional sensations that move through your body and this can be sensed in your organs particularly.
So when I asked you to think of a loved one or to think of something gruesome or to think of I don't know like a joke or something,
It's like we have responses in our inner body and things happen.
Our energy moves up into the chest or it moves totally out of our bodies and somewhere else or we feel really full or we feel like we're pressed into the back of our bodies or something like that.
And so one of the ways that you can begin to clarify for yourself and move away from confusion is by watching the fluctuation of your inner body.
And during times of confusion,
As I said,
I noticed that for me there's usually one or the other an abandoning of myself or this kind of overly assertive hardening and impermeability that arises in my inner body.
But either way,
I'm not present and receptive.
When I abandon myself,
I'm obviously not present and I can't make skillful choices about what I receive.
And when I'm in that overly exerted aggressive state,
I'm not receptive at all.
Really trying to understand,
Having a kind of thick skull feeling a little bit and divorced from my own center,
My own inner balance.
So we'll do another exercise to feel this in our bodies.
And I'm going to suggest that now you kind of come back to this awareness of your skin and touch is really helpful.
So if you just want to kind of lightly pet your own skin and feel your skin body,
Your outer body,
And then you can imagine your inner body and the inner body is everything that is contained within your skin.
And this includes your brain.
And so definitely bring your awareness all the way up into your skull.
And then through all of your organ channels,
So the inner throat,
Your inner chest,
Your inner belly,
Your inner pelvis,
And your inner legs,
All that's contained within the skin of your legs and arms.
And just notice what kind of sensation that facilitates in your being when you just spend two minutes feeling the skin body and then the inner body.
And then see if you can let your awareness be in both at the same time.
And then once again,
Recall the memory of your confusion and notice what your inner body does.
Notice how it moves towards or away some part of your skin body,
Maybe towards the back or towards the front.
Notice qualities of weight and shift or tension and pull.
And then go back and forth a couple of times,
Try and come directly into the present,
Feel your skin and inner body and their balance.
And then imagine the state of your confusion and notice what your skin body and inner body do.
So this is it.
This is the meditation for clearing confusion and moving towards your own knowing,
Moving towards your own wisdom.
Confusion arises when there's disruption in integrity,
When environmental factors and relationship factors do not align with the inner experience.
Or when we ourselves are the cause of our own distortion and disruption.
And this usually happens in the split between mind and body or mind and heart.
Even our minds are telling us something and our bodies and our hearts are telling us something else.
And states of confusion can go on for a long time.
So if anyone's ever,
You know,
Stuck around too long in a relationship,
Like this is a,
I think,
Classic and obvious example of like,
What do I do?
What do I do?
This isn't feeling good,
But I can't leave.
In that kind of situation,
The mind is telling you one thing and the body is telling you something really different.
So how do we get into a space of congruency with ourselves and start to clarify our own knowing,
Come back into our own knowledge?
How do we listen to our own intuition in the moments when we need it,
If there's confusion arising externally?
Confusion is something that spreads and one confused person can impact a lot of people around them.
But similarly,
Confusion is something that can be pacified or alleviated relationally as well.
And so the more that you practice presence and inner body balance,
The more that you can help exude and transmit these states to other people around you.
So I'm going to suggest that this is actually it.
This is the meditation to work with your confusion is to notice what happens when the confusion arises.
Notice how your inner body shifts,
How you move away from your own knowing or how your own knowing collects in your body.
And then there is disruption or there is distraction between the parts of you that know and the parts of you that want to assert something else to come into a state of equilibrium and harmony.
You can let your perceptive organs open.
This means that your skin body is soft,
You feel that it's expansive and open,
And that your inner body is soft,
It's not gripped anywhere.
And it's also balanced.
So you're not pushing forward with some idea or pulling back or even out of yourself with something else.
But you're really inhabiting your space and able to listen.
And listening is coming through your somatic awareness or your felt sense.
So I'll finish with just a couple of minutes more guiding this sensory awareness.
And I'll invite you now to bring any areas of current confusion in in just a moment.
But before we do that,
Let's take another couple centering breaths.
So inhale through your nose and exhale out your mouth.
And let your face and your eyes and your ears get soft and feel that all the information that you need will come in when you need it.
And you don't need to go out looking for it or reaching for it.
Feel your skin,
Your container.
Feel your inner body.
Feel the balance between them.
You might imagine or explore in your felt sense where they meet the inner layer of skin,
The fullness of your inner body as it moves out into your skin with your inhales.
And then if you have any areas of current confusion,
You can invite them through your imagination to be present.
Place them in whatever way you're imagining them in front of you.
So the person,
The situation,
Whatever it is,
Place it in front of you.
And then feel what happens in your body.
Just feel what you do with that imagination.
It's like kind of immediate for me at least.
And then hold that imagination in your awareness.
So don't go away from it.
Keep it there.
But let your inner body soften and get full.
And if you've noticed that you leave yourself,
You kind of abandon yourself or your inner body diminishes,
How can you invite yourself to be fully here and fully present?
If you notice that your skin body gets really hard and metallic like armor or dispersed like steam.
Can you feel the intelligent boundary of your skin?
That it has sensory capacity,
But it's also a barrier.
And it holds your inner body and your inner body can reside.
And you continue to be full in your inner body and aware in your skin body as you regard the space of your confusion,
The situation.
And you'll probably feel all of the little micro or maybe very large fluctuations in your body as your body does what it does in the habitual ways that it deals with confusion,
The way that it tugs,
The way that it fights.
And so your work is just to stay present and to align with yourself and to know what you know.
And so you're admitting and dropping into and inhabiting your own knowing.
And the knowing may arise as a need to become more permeable if you have a kind of confusion that is seeking to assert and control the outer world and you're confused because it's not working.
Maybe there's a need for more softness in your skin body,
More quietness in your inner body.
If you have confusion that's arising because the external world is imposing on you,
Then how can you invite yourself to stay present,
To take up space,
To ask or demand what you need and to have the courage if those needs are not met or forthcoming,
To have the courage and the clarity that you can actually find your needs met somewhere else or meet them for yourself.
So this is the end of this meditation and it doesn't have a final kind of like ta-da,
Here's the answer,
No more confusion.
It's an ongoing practice of inner body awareness and congruency.
But I hope that it will be helpful for you as it has been for me in staying present with myself and with the ways that I have all of these subtle body responses and reactions to basically everything that's going on,
Any information that I get,
Any decision I'm trying to make,
Any relationship I'm in,
Etc.
So things are always arising and there's almost constantly some kind of conversation between my immediate impulse and then the needs of the situation or something that I feel intuitively and then something that I'm thinking or something that's being asked of me by someone else and what I actually want to do,
Etc.
And so the confusion that then arises when there's distraction or disruption doesn't actually have to be a horrible chaotic thing if I can stay present in myself and really get into the truth of what the need is and communicate from that place.
Without a sense of confusion,
But a sense of fullness in myself.
As I said,
This state can also be transmitted as easily as confusion can be transmitted between people.
A state of presence and embodiment can also be transmitted and it can help clarify relationships.
If you've enjoyed this meditation or have something that you'd like to add in terms of how you work with your own confusion and gaining clarity,
Please feel free to leave comments or send me an email or note.
And if you've enjoyed this meditation and it's worked for you,
Please share it with your friends and family.
Thank you so much for practicing.
Thank you so much for sharing.
May you rest in your own knowing and may your own knowing be a force for healing and wellness in the world.
Bye for now.
