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Somatic Phenomenology

Both hippies and traditional spiritual lineages have some big fetish for "somatics," by many names, and mostly for good reason. Saliently, most of the reports of somatic phenomenology from both sets of sources are (afaik) all-but-unattested in academic psychology, and to a decent extent seemingly absent or at least pretty shallowly understood in Western culture in general.

Briefly, there are a variety of reported phenomenological patterns which are experienced as sensations "in the body." Reports here vary from simple but amorphous feelings often reported in association with positive emotion, to complex, bizarre and incredibly rich.

Some assorted reports, evocative of the breadth of the space:

  • A wide palette of sensations variously described as flowing, tingly, buoyant or heavy, or as though one is feeling a magnetic field
    • This is often called energy, and the space or stratum within which it "occurs" often called the energy body. ('Energy' is also used to refer to a variety of other phenomena, see more below)
  • Nebulously felt happiness or positive feeling otherwise, with no salient location or boundary
  • Knots, dislocations, or regions of contraction in the energy body, sometimes very subtle
    • These are often called "blockages."
    • These are also common reports of blockages dissolving, unraveling, or exploding due to "healing" practices, most often into intense negative emotion
  • Specific reports of localized centers of sensation in the body, with specific semantic associations
    • IIRC there's a few different mostly unrelated traditions of such systems, but in the most common cluster of systems in the west, they're know as "chakras."1
  • Variously, extremely fine sensitivity to specific emotions, both in oneself and others.
  • Specific patterns of somatic resonance, both re very specific qualities and patterns of sensatino, and very specific locations (see below)
  • "Profound and subtle wrongness"
  • [critters]

Among the wackier reports, there are a variety of those in which the energy body seeming to extend beyond the boundary of the physical body, and of the energy bodies of different people (or even eg. trees, the earth, etc.) interacting:

  • The energy body extending beyond the physical body, and purposefully extending it further, perhaps as far as a meter
    • (This while still being felt as "contiguous" with the body, so this is separate from reports of "astral travel.")
  • "Penetrating" into another's energy body
  • People who can "directly perceive" the state contents of another person's energy body, at extreme levels of detail
    • Relately, some claims of people being able to perceive physiological states at extreme resolution, eg. being able to detect the state of the spleen from touching a person's hand
  • Some people having powerful energetic fields with specific flavors or tones
  • Being able to extend or toss around energy "balls" or "missiles" toward another person, which they can perceive and which affect them
  • Several separate strata of somatic phenomena, some systems up to four, IIRC

Meaning, resonance, and embodiment​

Somatic phenomena correlate strongly with other kinds of "states of mind," and their presence, contours, and progression seem to track much better the details of the underlying generators of psychological states than signals like "thoughts," whatever those are, lol.

More broadly, reports from people who talk about somatic phenomenology at all, with a few important exceptions, place it at the center of apparent existential meaning. (To some extent this is some elaboration on my part, often people draw the boundaries differently, or reify certain aspects over others, but still this is very common feature.) Reading or talking to people who leave somatics out of meaning, for me, it can feel like they've stretched and flattened the domain, and they're only able to analyize the silhouette. The exceptions are also telling actually: the main one salient to me would be reports from meditation masters of things like "a peace beyond feeling or perception."

[something about, the semantics being contained in the feeling, not in like, thoughts that you have at the same time]

[we have some imagery associated with somatic phenomena in colloquial language, eg "heartwarming," maybe "coldblooded," "hothead," or "sickening" (as an emotional word, rather than due to physical illness.) ] [the colloquial language is generally of simple and legible experiences that are at familiar to most people.]

Dissociation​

[Dissociation isn't depersonalization, in the terms I'm using re somatic phenomenology​ -- that word has been used to refer to a bunch of things, so shrug shrug, but that's not what I mean]

Energy​

Humbug!​

[some ppl are prolly like "ya, bro, so what?????" and some are like "hmmm this seems fake" -- I've definitely talked to people who think this is mostly fake! which is why I wrote this page in this way]

[it's not sufficient to say that the experience was real, dreams are real etc. see real, but also like, eg. if someone simply reported no emotion, I'm much more likely to think they're either confused or dissociated, rather than "just that their experience is different," depending on how we construe whatever that would mean. ]

[obviously some people will be like "yeah, sure, so what?" or at least about some of it, like they'll be confused that it's mentioned at all]

[a lot of the reports are consistent enough across a bunch of these that I'm like "yeah I'm pretty sure that's real" for some sense of real here that means like "a basic part of human phenomenology, not culturally contingent and not imagined or confabulated ] [but what all actually fits in there, idk lol, there's a bunch of wacky stuff reported!]

[partly here I'm addressing people who are like, yeah idk dude, maybe you're experiencing it but I don't have it, and if you think it's a phenomenological universal, you're clearly mistaken becaurse I don't have it] [fwiw some evidence here bc those people also usually have other trauma smells, and I'm like, yeah looks like dissociation rather than natural variation]

[my own experience accords with a lot of these reports, some of the wackier stuff i'm like "hm yeah I'm not that surprised byt hat" even though I haven't experienced it, and some parts I'm like "bro I have no idea what's going on there, honestly that smells like bullshit"]

Often the metaphysics under which many different kinds of people conceive of somatics are quite confused, agnostic of whether the experience themselves are "real." I'll talk more about this [probably link to later again,b ut like, often the plain colloquial language assumes a metaphysics that's pretty sketchy even from a "scientific," reductionist-materialist view.

Footnotes​

  1. As it happens the systems from which westerners learned about chakras were prescriptive rather than descriptive, and there are a variety of different systems with different numbers of chakras, different associated colors, geometric symbols, etc. ↩