---
title: "Spiritual Rationality (minimal edition), part 5 of 8"
canonical: "https://spiritual-rationality.org"
pages: 2
---

*Part 5 of 8, minimal (headings, emphasis and prose only) edition — “Somatic Phenomenology” through “Misc. Features of Spiritual Practices”. Previous: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-min-4.txt. Next: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-min-6.txt. Whole edition in one file: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-min.txt. Index: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms.txt*

# 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.

I'll use the word *somatic*, or *somatics*, to refer to this kind of phenomenology, agnostic of its relationship with eg. physiological mechanisms.

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" is 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
- Emotions identifiable as spatially localized clusters of sensation, with specific felt flavors or tones, as well as sometimes common movement patterns.
- Knots, dislocations, or regions of contraction in the energy body, sometimes very subtle
- These are often called "blockages." (see below)
- There are also common reports of blockages dissolving, unraveling, or exploding due to "healing" practices, most often into intense negative emotion. (see more later)
- 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 such systems in the West, they're known as *chakras.* Cf. also meridian systems, some of the "subtle body" systems, etc.
- Claims of psycho-somatic effects causing gross (medically identifiable) illness, in rare reports including up to cancer (!!) (see below)
- Acute states of intense pleasure, bliss, or profound peace, reported as more intense than sex or drugs, arising at least initially from ordinary body sensations
- 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 sensation, and very specific locations (see below)
- "Profound and subtle wrongness"
- Persistent sub-personalities with emotions and attitudes substantially *separate* from that of a person's experienced personality, usually localized to specific parts of the body
- (Often called "parts," but also "critters")

I try to stick to a narrowly *phenomenological* frame in the presentation here, but many of these reports are couched in terms of this or that metaphysics, which I also try to depict accurately. To be clear, I don't necessarily hold a "sensation only" view of somatics, nor am I married to materialism, but I've gone a bit out of my way to describe the phenomenology here in a way which isn't in conflict with materialist-reductionism.

## Meaning and resonance

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 a 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 analyze 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."

Describing this explicitly both feels embarassingly simple, like pointing out that feet each have five toes, or that the sky is blue; it's also apparently necessary, often such basic features of phenomenology seem to be news to many people! (I'm also a bit embarrassed to say that a lot of this would have been news to me before I had engaged seriously with "spiritual practice.")

We have some familiar expressions in English to describe these phenomena, eg.:
- "heartwarming"
- "gutwrenching"
- "hair-raising"
- (Yes, this one refers to a gross physiological response, but also a somatic one.)
- "sickening," just generally
- "cold blooded," also "hothead," maybe peripherally "red blooded"
- perhaps "struck a chord" (of an ideology etc.)

Note that some people take this kind of language to be poetic or purely metaphorical, whereas for others it's obviously referring to completely humdrum somatic phenomenology. Again I'm confused how to talk about any of this, partially just because it seems embarrassingly *simple*, but also is surprising or contentious to some people!

Some more concrete reports, again mostly gestural and not comprehensive:

- Distinct patterns of somatic activation correlating with, or often constituting, specific emotions
- Eg. fear, affection, sexual arousal, fatigue, etc. having distinct patterns of somatic phenomenology, as well as there being quite a lot of variation within each of those.
- Reports from random lay people of these phenomena tend to be coarse, low resolution, and use stereotyped emotion words. Reports of the finest/most skilled introspection, by my sense, tend to be extremely rich, detailed, and particular. Note the point here isn't about the *words* used to describe these phenomena, indeed, usually advanced practitioners don't really care to try to describe any of this stuff in words.
- Variously, somatic phenomena seeming to "contain" emotions or psychological content, or that content seeming to "reside" in parts of the body.
- Energies seeming to have been "trapped" or "locked" in some part of the body, and then being suddenly released or suddenly becoming accessible to attention
- One common group of reports here describe clusters of sensation seeming to "know" things which are apparently news to the person experiencing them. Often these reports include these clusters being able to "speak" into the person's inner monologue, or arouse internal visual imagery, and "explain" or "communicate" aspects of the person's psychological landscape which were previously not introspectively available.
- A person's apprehension of eg. a social situation, and the affordances of their role, being reflected somatically.
- Often reported to be surprisingly high fidelity, so often the feelings are reported to vary and track a lot of detail in the person's perception of a situation.
- Note this is distinct from eg. their body language per se, though it seems to have some feedback loop with body language.
- Their internal experience and external expression seeming to flow back and forth, so eg. felt spaciousness vs. claustrophobia seeming to be reflected in visible behavior
- (Unfortunately this is a *different* phenomenon which some hippies also call energy.)

### Resonance

*Resonance* is usually used to refer to somatic phenomena which arise seemingly directly in response to some perception or input. Most often these are relatively distinct sensations, though not necessarily spatially localized. Some common features of reports which use this language:

- Emotional responses to music
- Felt psychological-archetypal "alignment" with a fictional character or political narrative
- Felt (especially strongly felt) introspective truthiness
- Used to describe the experience of "receiving" energy or emotions from another person
- Distinct sensations in response to eg. individual piano notes struck, or a buzzing fly
- "Hitting" or "reaching" some localized cluster, which may not have been available as a distinct sensation previously, arousing distinct emotions or more unusual sensations

(Note it became fashionable to say "that resonates with me" as a slightly California way of expressing "I agree with that" or "that seems right", which mostly 🤮 lol. In any case this is usually narrowly not descriptive of a referent in the sense above.)

Resonance, frustratingly, is used to refer to wide enough different phenomena, under different ontologies, that it's not even always clear what phenomenology a person is trying to describe when they use the term. See also below re surprising/unusual metaphysics used in descriptions of energy.

### Attunement

*Attunement* most often is used to describe either a state or experience of fine sensitivity to another person's experience or state. Centrally this is described as being deeply connected or especially "in sync," though sometimes two people might be highly attuned while in conflict. Often the word is used comparatively, eg. to describe states of more or less attunement. Attunement generally involves rich *receptivity* to another person's emotional/psychological state.

Attunement, both on the "giving" and "receiving" sides, is often described as coming with fairly distinct phenomenology, eg. changes in perception described maybe variously as "bright," "vivid," and "grounded."

## Embodiment

*Embodiment* usually refers to the domain in general, and relative qualities, of integration between the physical body, somatic phenomena, and attention/consciousness. Unfortunately again, frameworks which make reference to this concept are often inconsistent in their ontology and the causal theories under which they understand these phenomena; the frameworks themselves also of course vary, so 'embodiment' is one of the least definite terms in this section.

While the term is used varyingly, most often when someone says "this person is more or less embodied" that means "they have more or less introspective access to somatic phenomenology."

A few major clusters of reports here:
- Feedback loops between posture, psychological state, and some kinds of resonance
- Eg. specifically open/closed/proud/etc. postures being *elicited* by some corresponding emotions, and of those emotions being aroused or amplified by adopting those postures
- Postures like the above (though in various and conflicting ways) freeing access to somatic phenomena
- Particular meanings associated with particular postures, eg. penitential postures, bowing, boastfulness, aggression
- (It's unclear how much this is culturally patterned, it seems likely that some of these are arbitrary cultural symbols, but eg. both aggressive and high status body language seem probably substantially native to our species.)
- Practices using the body, and especially using the body in coordinated, full-bodied, and high-skill ways, contributing to more robust access to somatic phenomenology
- Also regulation, sensitivity, and sometimes broad "wisdom" etc.
- Salient examples here (at least in my circles) would be Tai chi, "Yoga", and various martial arts traditions.
- Note there seems to be some "coming apart at the tails" here, so eg. MMA fighters are highly embodied in some ways but also seemingly dissociated in others, and broadly speaking not very integrated.
- Models of body practices vis-a-vis embodiment highlight variously: coordination and proprioception, fluency in the full range of motion, and access to and comfort in extreme portions of the ranges of motion.
- Some reports also highlight body practices being "grounding," which usually means something like "bringing one into calm, alert clarity."
- Experiences of somatic integration/body practices/somatic phenomena being central to "healing" broadly construed
- See immediately below re dissociation and re releases, also see later re healing and somatic openings.
- This is *often* reported as being about sensational intensity, cf. Thummo, Wim Hof method, Ashtanga Yoga, sussokan, sauna/cold plunge etc.
- Again there are common reports of body practices leading to somatic openings, leading to positive changes in perception/attention/mood etc.

There's a large group of claims that extremes of skill and development in embodiment lead to wisdom, spiritual achievement, or spiritual insight. Reports of highly developed embodiment often include fluent, rich, whole body somatic awareness, which some people claim to have passively at all times. Similarly there are common claims that especially *primitive* (perhaps, low-abstraction?) cultures are much more spiritually robust, which is tied to the claimed robustness of their embodiment.

#### Locus of attention/self

There are a variety of reports of surprising changes in the locus of attention, or (separately, but overlapping) where "the self" is experienced spatially. On the far end, and familiar in popular culture, would be out-of-body experiences.

My impression is that most people in western culture experience "themselves" as existing behind the eyes, somewhere near the middle of the skull, and attention as *pointing outward* from that location. Reports of changes of the locus of self describe experiencing that "they were" coming from, or located in, their chest, or belly, or IIRC sometimes their whole body at once.

I've also seen hippies claim that there's major cultural variation here, with people in many "traditional" cultures in general experiencing the self closer to the core of the body. Usually in the same breath is some objection that westerners are dissociated, "in their heads," etc.—note that "in one's head" is not centrally used as a description of the locus of self/attention, and is often also metaphorical. (See some more below.)

This is also where people use language like "staying in the body"; most often this means something like "persisting in attending to the experience of the gross physical body and energetic phenomena." Again the claim here is usually that attention is one of the main inputs to energetic metabolism and movement (see below), and that habitual disinterest in or aversion to somatics is something like pathological.

##### "Heart-centered," etc.

Relatedly here one encounters language of "heart-centered" practices, this is used to mean variously: literally attentionally centered around sensations in the center of the chest; associated with emotions of compassion, tenderness, love, also sometimes grief, regardless of their spatial locus; *behaviors* associated with care and intimacy, agnostic of somatics; and sometimes ideologies which brand themselves in terms of the above.

Cf. also "speaking from the heart," usually this refers to some feedback loop between attention, resonance, and various energetic centers (see below), with thought and expression.

#### "Bodymind" and "the system"

Peripherally here: many writers in this space are averse to the connotations of "mind" in modern western culture, in particular as distinctly *disembodied* (see section below), and so prefer using terms like "body-mind" (or *bodymind*, and some similar terms), which evoke some cohesive causal network of valence, affect, perception, etc.

Similarly also "the system" or "my system" are used to mean something like "the mind, body, and whatever else that doesn't quite catch ontologically, coextensive and interacting." Part of the implicit distinction here is that often decisions and perceptions are experienced as happening outside of the "self," or completely outside of awareness, perhaps, uh, "subconcious," etc.

## Dissociation

*Dissociation* broadly refers to states and long-running configurations distinguished by the absence of somatic phenomenology, or of somatic phenomena being introspectively unavailable. Dissociation is often used almost as an antonym of embodiment, though in some uses eg. "dissociated" is meaningfully distinct from "disembodied." Like the rest of these concepts, 'dissociation' is used to refer to a variety of different actual phenomenological patterns, and under different causal theories.

I would distinguish here between quite a few clusters of experiences reported, each overlapping:
- "*Active* dissociation"
- Poor introspective access to somatic phenomena in general
- Poor skill with emotional language for describing one's emotions ("alexithymia")
- Low resolution introspection, or not finding sensations distinct
- Low salience of somatic phenomena attentionally
- Depersonalization/derealization
- Using entertainment to distract oneself (eg. I sometimes hear "I'll just watch youtube to dissociate")

*Active* dissociation (my ad-hoc term, sorry) is most often what *I* mean when I say "dissociation" generically. Usually most reports and models which use the term 'dissociation' are implicitly drawing on an intuition about active dissociation, even if they're focusing on other clusters.

Parts of the body from which a person is dissociated are often described phenomenologically as "blank," "invisible," or "plain," but also "grey" or "fuzzy." Sometimes dissociation is more attentionally or somatically active, eg. some region or object seeming "squirreley" in attention or being very difficult to focus on, a person becoming exhausted when attending to something, or abruptly finding themselves thinking about something unrelated or occupied with eg. sexual fantasy, food, etc.

My sense is that dissociation tends to be chronic and continuous, but is also commonly reported as acute, eg. in response to a specific trigger, and acute dissociation can be either spatially/sensorally localized, or "global," as in, very little feeling is available anywhere. Often active dissociation is not quite categorical, so at a given location *some* sensations are available, or sensation in general is muted, rather than that all somatic phenomena are absent there.

These sorts of reports obviously most often come from practitioners who also report having "broken through" or "unraveled" dissociation elsewhere, such that the phenomenal character of dissociation is salient to them. Sometimes there's reported subtle qualities to the relevant qualia that smell like one is dissociated, rather than a flawless blankness. The boundary where the blankness starts is also often salient, once one knows what to look for.

There are countless reports of practitioners *becoming* sensitive to somatic phenomena where previously their body was blank besides coarse sensations of touch, hunger, or pain. Reports of, uh, "de-dissociation" or "re-embodiment" often include big releases (see more later), and in particular often access to sensations with strong associated meaning, both negative, eg. anger at particular people, fear associated with specific memories or images (sometimes, distinct images but fantastical, or certainly not a real memory, etc.), and positive, eg. care and affection, sexual arousal, etc. Sometimes these reports describe gaining access suddenly to proprioception and interoception which was previously dysfunctional or absent for a person.

Models of active dissociation generally present that a person, or "the mind," (or whatever) is "trying" to prevent the arising of some phenomena in consciousness, because they are "believed" by part of the mind to be intolerable, or unsafe, *or* even that the meaning or information associated with those phenomena would be dangerous if allowed to propagate across the rest of the mind. Indeed, many reports of re-embodiment involve a person suddenly finding a certain relationship unmanageable, or unmanageable without having to reveal a lot of information, newly stand up for themselves, renegotiate roles, etc. etc.

Dissociation has some relationship with "repression," which as a concept usually assumes a particular psychological model of a *kind* of dissociation. I'm not a huge fan of the concept, I think it's too culturally laden, and I don't endorse the model it comes with. See more later for my perspective on these and related patterns.

Anecdotally, active dissociation correlates moderately with dampened affect, body language, and expression, and both weaker and sparser access to positive emotion.

(See below re claims from individuals who report having no salient somatic phenomena.)

Separately, some people have variously weak or low resolution introspective access to these phenomena, find somatic phenomena indistinct or *low-salience* in their experience, *or* have difficulty communicating about their internal experience, especially putting words to specific emotions. Again, poor introspection is sometimes called "dissociation," and often an important feature of reports of personal journeys with healing etc.

Active dissociation *and* poor introspection are strongly correlated with trauma (see trauma smells), and in particular *confabulatory* introspection is a very indicative trauma smell. Anecdotally, though, it seems like some people have something like low salience to somatics, and poor introspection, but without most of the usual consequences of active dissociation, so I think these are meaningfully distinct.

I'll add here that my impression is that eg. small children often have poor somatic introspection, in the sense that they can't necessarily *name* what emotion they're feeling, and that the sensations themselves might not be salient, but they are still loudly emotive, move their bodies readily and joyfully, etc. (And indeed, most authors who talk about dissociation *never* describe children in general as dissociated, etc.)

Perhaps relatedly, there are some claims that dissociation (usually more in the sense of "low salience" or "poor introspection," but sometimes active dissociation) is caused by "intellectual" cultures/personalities/practices (sometimes described as being too much "in their heads"), and sometimes the entire cluster of both personality and culture, of "intellectual, abstract-oriented, low salience to somatics" is called "dissociated." I think this is pretty technically sloppy, and this sort of claim is usually overstated, but the correlation does seem weakly true in my anecdotes.

Variation in somatic sensitivity sometimes looks, in my current sense, either distinctly like a distinct trauma smell (whether over- or under-sensitive), like natural *"genetic"* variation, or like some sort of "natural variation of development, symbology, and psychology." However, in many specific cases, whether a broad culture or an individual, I'm confused quite what I'm looking at—and while there are a lot of models that are confident about a specific way dissociation works and looks in general, I haven't seen any that didn't seem overreified or simplistic.

Lastly, psychiatry sometimes uses the term 'dissociation' broadly for what's now more often called "depersonalization" and "derealization"—clusters of symptoms where a patient experiences themselves, or the world around them as "fake," "unreal," or "fictional." Depersonalization/derealization is an interesting phenomenon itself, and often *does* correlate with dissociation in any of the other senses, but is quite distinct.

## Energy

*Energy* is most often used to refer to three main clusters of phenomena, only loosely related:

1. Qi (and related)
2. Emotions, as well as subtle somatic phenomena otherwise
- as distinct sensations
- the underlying generators of those sensations, in such models
- behavioral affordances and biases when sensations are present
3. Perceived qualities (often, "vibes") from a person, group, or space, which *have a substance* and reside or are present in those people etc.

I often equivocate between all three senses under this term, though for me personally qi is the *central* referent of "energy," and the other two feel maybe like Western corruptions of the concept.

There are a variety of reports in which the phenomenology of the energy body (moreso in sense 1 than 2, and seldom sense 3) is experienced as defying 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 practitioners being able to purposefully extend 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
- Being able to "directly perceive" the contents of another person's energy body, at extreme levels of detail
- Relatedly, 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, IIRC some systems having up to four

*Qi* (pronounced like "chee") refers to a cluster of phenomena, to repeat, described as flowing, tingly, buoyant/heavy, or "magnetic." Qi, in the traditions that teach it, is often but not always explained to be something to the effect of a *substance*, which flows through the body, between people, and sometimes even plants or the earth.

Qi is often explained to both be able to impart some kind of force, in the sense that it can lift, pull down, or push limbs, objects, or people. Some practices eg. of cultivation and sensitization to qi involve moving the limbs *only* by manipulating energy, or sustaining postures for long periods; reports here describe that the posture seems to be sustained "by energy alone," specifically with claims that such a posture would not be possible to maintain "by use of the muscles."

In these systems, the free and healthy flow of energy within the body is regarded as vital for health, and often the cultivation of energy is regarded to confer social and spiritual power. In some systems, qi is associated with a specific subtle *anatomy* of "energy channels" or "meridians."

(Note that the reading 'qi' comes from Mandarin in particular, and my description here somewhat conflates a variety of models in different East Asian spiritual traditions. I know much less about eg. *prana* in South Asian yogic traditions, my impression is that the phenomenology matches substantially but incompletely, and the metaphysics is somewhat different.)

Energy in the sense of *subtle somatics* (referring to sense 2 above, for lack of a better term), refers to some munged combination of what in *my* ontology are narrowly different types, usually implicitly presented under some metaphysics which accounts for their being joined. The ontology of energy in this sense usually combines the sensation per se with its perceived/modeled *substance*, and often with the attentional/motivational/perceptual correlates of both.

Energies are generally regarded to either create a tilt in the mind toward certain behaviors, perceptions, etc., *or* to have such inclinations "themselves." This sort of model usually subsumes what's understood colloquially as a "mood," along with some subtler phenomena. It's usually claimed that the motivational inclinations that correlate with the presence of some energy still occur or have force, if subtly or """unconsciously,""" even when the energy is completely unavailable introspectively.

Usually in these ontologies, the substance is taken as "self-sustaining", either as subsisting in the space of qualia and phenomenology, or as a substance on a parallel stratum to physical substance, broadly comparable to that claimed of qi. (This sort of makes a false distinction between two kinds of ontologies, in practice there's a bunch of variety to the metaphysics under which these phenomena are understood, variously precise, etc.) Eg., in the crudest versions of this, a phenomenon, approximately coterminous with the sensation, is regarded to "cause" effects in the physical body and on other people.

The particular sensations of subtle somatics are largely covered by my description under resonance above. Broadly this category is more open, and often also includes the kind of phenomenology included under qi, as well as others.

Subtle somatics are also reported to change in feeling-tone, to move, bloom, flutter, and decay. In many models, energies are regarded to something like *need to* move in order to properly decay. Often they claim that "healthy" energetic systems (that is, the energy bodies of people who are very "energetically healthy," etc.) are most of the time very fluid, supple, and receptive. See more re blockages immediately below.

*Vibes* is probably the least precise concept here, but still relevant both in the loose popular jargon around energy, and as a feature of human perception and cognition. 'Vibe' is often used by people completely outside of spiritual discourses just to refer to the perceived affect or social posture of a person, piece of media, etc. In the more extensive sense, vibes are understood to be a *substance*, like that of energies in the "subtle somatics" sense of energy, which is sustained and resides in a person (or etc.), and which is perceptible off of them.

Peripherally here: sometimes "frequency" (as in, "on a higher frequency" but also eg. of someone one appreciates or agrees with, "on the same frequency") gets used in some way that rhymes with some senses of energy here. To be honest, I've yet to see a consistent use of this term, for it to even be worth disentangling carefully. Anyway, 'frequency' is often used to describe an attuned connection with another person, or sometimes the spiritual-affective purity of a belief/person/practice, among other varied and metaphysically dubious senses.

### Blockages, releases, and somatization

(From here on, I'll only be discussing senses 1 and 2 above.)

There's a wide range of reports of energy (qi or subtle somatics more generally) becoming "blocked," "stuck," or "knotted"; the site at which this occurs is most often called a "blockage." Blockages are often described as "tight" or "hard," but there also can often be localized dissociation at a blockage, with subtler sensations.

Blockages are quite often claimed to cause overt physical muscle tension, and sometimes more surprising symptoms. There are many reports of chronic tension being released when some energetic blockage is cleared, and specifically of the phenomenology of some tension "unraveling" seeming to clearly align with corresponding releases of gross muscular tension.

Both energies in general, and blockages especially, are regarded often to be visible in a person's body language, resting facial expression, posture, range of motion, etc. Stereotyped reports here might be eg. a habitual slouch being associated introspectively with protection of a knot of fear, such that standing upright might bring up the stuck energy, and that when the energy is resolved the posture automatically resolves itself. (See more on this later.)

In some of these models blockages are regarded as an extreme case of the pervasive pattern of energetic *resistance*. Resistance describes the felt "force" of one energy opposing another, or sometimes of the underlying field or substrate resisting the presence, flow, or movement of some energy. Resistance is often described as "dense" or "solid," and generally uncomfortable, whether subtly or profoundly.

*Releases* are generally acute events where some clot of tension or blockage loosens, and the trapped energy is able to move. The term is also sometimes used more in reference to the sudden movement of energy, agnostic of a specific blockage. Note also, tension is sometimes described as "evaporating" or "burning off" over weeks to years, rather than in a distinct release.

There's two ish clusters to reports of energy releases:

- Soft, flowing, buzzy, or tingly, often with no distinct "feeling tone"
- Broadly speaking the same phenomenology as that of qi, though IIRC there are sometimes differences; some teachers refer to both as just "energy."
- Gushing, coursing, emotionally intense, often chaotic, sometimes very pleasant or very unpleasant
- Some practitioners insist that chaotic and unpleasant releases are due to resistance remaining in the path of some energy.

In the "buzzy" kind of release, there are many reports of the energy body, whether localized or across the whole body, slipping into a mode of spacious, gentle, flowy non-resistance. Sometimes these kinds of releases are described as "dissolving" some energy or sensation. What's maybe more surprising are countless reports of this kind of release happening with intense physical pain dissolving into buzzy energy, or even the perception of one's body, the surrounding space, etc. "breaking up" phenomenologically.

(Sometimes this is reported to occur across multiple sense modalities, so even eg. vision and hearing "breaking up" or "dissolving." I have to admit I'm not personally familiar, and I have trouble imagining.)

Reports of the "dense and valenced" kind of release vary in terms of how much energies are reported to flow smoothly. In some reports from so-called meditation "masters," their baseline energetic phenomenology is so spacious as to be unperturbed by acute fear, pain, etc. arising in the system, such that all energies are able to "effortlessly arise and fall away." This quality is often referred to as energetic *capacity*, under a model where greater "capacity" corresponds to the ability to experience a wider palette of more intense sensations without resistance, contraction, or blockage.

More generally, many models present the dense-and-valenced type as being more or less fluid, smooth, and pleasant according to how much somatic resistance there is elsewhere in the system, *in the way* of the "natural" or "necessary" path of some energy. Again in the most extreme reports, it's claimed that the unpleasant character of most "unpleasant" phenomena is almost entirely a *consequence of resistance*, and that at high levels of some kinds of somatic/spiritual development, sensation per se can be arbitrarily perceived as neutral, invigorating, delicious, etc. Regardless of the limiting case, there are many reports of developing or accessing greater ease and flexibility with sensation, such that some phenomenon which was previously met with a good deal of resistance and discomfort is experienced mostly as flitting or ticklish.

Somewhat *separately*, both kinds of energetic releases are associated with gross muscular movement. This variously appears as faint or very large waves or jolts of tension or contraction, often shivering or shaking, and sometimes thrashing. There's also some relationship between the motor expression of a release, and associated chronic muscular tension, often nearby, though also often recruiting many more networks of muscles or further bodyparts as it moves. Again, in the extremes of skill and energetic capacity, releases are generally meant not to cause gross muscular movement/contraction, or at least for it to be much subtler, and much less frequent.

This quality of "resistance vs spaciousness" (keep in mind that there's more complexity underneath that dichotomy) is in general a salient feature of discussions of somatic phenomenology, and of somatic development.

I've yet to find a satisfying explanation of exactly the nature of the interface between the physical body and blockages, especially why some kinds of blockages cause gross dysfunction and others not. IIRC, I've found some pieces of explanations that eg. muscular contraction and resistance also *constricts* the flow of energy, and that a person's "body-mind" will be "intuitively" or "automatically" trying to manipulate energy, but will usually just take advantage of the coarsest level it can find, in many cases muscular.

#### Somatization

*Somatization* (and some variations) is a term used in psychiatry to refer to patterns of physical symptoms associated with psychiatric disorders, in particular in many cases with physical symptoms understood as being an *expression* of psychological distress.

My impression is that psychiatry hasn't arrived at a consensus model for what's going on with these cases, and still considers the kind of description of "blocked energies" pretty dodgy.

Briefly here, I'll say that the symptomatology of somatization seems to align *often*, but not always, pretty nicely with many reports of physical correlates of energy blockages, and again there are many reports from energy workers, meditation teachers, etc. of having been able to fix these sorts of problems by resolving "underlying" energetic problems. By my sense, blockages severe enough to cause this kind of somatization would usually reflect both fairly extreme trauma, and pretty intense dissociation.

I mention this mostly because I've seen people explicitly confusing somatic phenomena, which are unfamiliar to them, with somatization, which they recognize as happening to them only when things get *really* bad emotionally.

## Humbug!

See also a much longer discussion in the section on metaphysics re phenomenology.

I sometimes encounter people who say something like, "I don't have this sort of phenomenology, therefore indeed it's not universal/innate, therefore your model is wrong somehow."

First off, and this is kind of an unfair move discursively: the people who say this seem to have both pretty strong trauma smells, as well as having other correlates of just poor introspection in other ways. So, while this is cursed to say, and indeed I mostly don't say it to those people directly, I largely want to say, "look, this tracks with the rest of my model, sorry"—I would be very surprised if I met someone who didn't have any trauma smells, but reported no somatic phenomenology.

Unfortunately, this is also still a reasonable objection in principle, and I both don't have a smack-down argument for such people, and I have a very small probability on this being in the same sort of natural variation as aphantasia seems to be. So, no more claims here, but just recognizing "yup, that's an objection."

(Again, see the section on metaphysics re phenomenology for discussion of more objections, like "what if these *experiences* are just artificial?")

# Misc. Features of Spiritual Practices

The below isn't even remotely trying to be comprehensive, but this is I think an important angle on some common features both in spiritual traditions and in human experience in general.

### "Practices"?

*Practice*, or especially *practices* evoke discrete activities performed deliberately, with time set aside for them specifically. Obviously I'm including that, but I'm using the word in a broader sense here, that's fairly common among at least Western meditators.

Often practice includes attitudes and qualities of mind that can diffuse into other activities or non-activity or just-hanging-around. Even when pretty distinct, practice can also occur spontaneously, eg. countless reports of falling into meditative states during ordinary activity, or into prayer or devotion.

## Imaginal practice

*Imaginal* practice as a concept I get through Rob Burbea, though he didn't originate it. Firstly, yes, *imaginal*, not *imaginary*, though there's certainly some overlap.

Imaginal practice concerns exploration of and relationship with *images*. Images in this sense are patterns of resonance in relationship with, usually, internal images, as well as internal sensations of touch, movement, sound, etc. Images might be deliberately evoked, or organic or spontaneous.

For example, with respect to sexual and romantic fantasy, a person might experience images in a variety of ways:
- Spontaneous, sometimes intrusive reverie, of a past lover or a current crush
- These can often be phenomenally intense and rich, not narrowly restrictected to *visual* imagery but including rich internal touch sensation, etc. etc.
- Often these are extended and engrossing
- Sex dreams
- *Deliberately* evoked fantasy, in the context of masturbation
- Most often this is consciously "controlled," though often control is nebulous, and sometimes such fantasies are experiences as playing out "on their own."
- Brief flits of internal imagery and feeling
- Extended extemporaneous romantic storytelling in one's mind, eg. often stereotypically done by teenage girls in our culture

Again, these are often quite rich phenomenally, and despite the unfortunate name they usually aren't even *mostly* about visual imagery. Broadly speaking I would say imaginal practices involve an exploration of the resonances that a person's relational/affective attitudes define, most saliently in the absence of "real" (physical, enacted) experiences that would align with them.

Imaginal qualities are often diffused into a broader set of practices, and may not be elicited deliberately in isolation. Eg., in a broad sense storytelling is usually concerned with *images*, certainly rather than purely linguistic, storytelling is about evoking images and their resonances. Even fairly technical discussion can include a kind of imaginal backdrop, eg. I see old discussions of transhumanism, even when they get pretty far in the weeds, as an expression of yearning, excitement, and anxiety, and an *imaginal* negotiation of those feelings.

Imaginal practices from world traditions and independent practitioners are often much weirder. One common cluster of reports is of images "taking on a life of their own," where they have access to wisdom that the person feels they don't possess, or even that they have access to specific knowledge that a person did not have access to themselves. Eg., there are countless reports of people calling upon the memory of a beloved relative, and finding that the image speaks back with creativity and spontaneity which is felt not to be "invented" or "orchestrated." Similarly with many traditional religious practices of communing with spirits or deities, the entities in question are commonly reported as experienced as independent, spontaneous, and real.

Many traditional spiritual systems will construe these experiences metaphysically as real in the sense that those entities are actually independent, have their own experiences, persist outside of your practice, etc. etc. Some modern hippies (as did, as it happens, some 19th century German philosophers) similarly claim that one can tap directly into a cosmic wisdom through these and other practices. I'm pretty confident these are all false, and I'll talk about this again later.

One more cluster I'll mention briefly is known as "deity yoga" (not anything about physical postures, that's afaict mostly a modern innovation within "yoga"). Some of what's known as deity yoga is not so dissimilar from forms of prayer that will be familiar to Westerners. The more interesting forms include eg. Yidam practice in Tibetan Buddhism, and I believe there's some similar stuff in Hindu Tantra and some kinds of modern Western esotericism. In Yidam practice, the practitioner visualizes themselves *as* a deity, usually with an involved collection of symbols, but importantly feeling and seeing as the deity would. The ways of seeing of these deities are supposed to be bizarre or alien (Tibetan Bodhisattvas are quite weird), but advanced Yidam practitioners are meant to take on these ways of seeing in their more ordinary experience. I think this points to what the broader space of imaginal practice can be.

I'll also mention here, imaginal practice isn't necessarily positive or pleasant, and many traditional and modern imaginal practices are quite the opposite, eg. literally imagining capital-h-Hell, or reflecting on and empathizing with the suffering of factory farmed animals.

## Prayer

I would regard almost all prayer as different kinds of imaginal practice. In particular most prayer as taught in eg. Western Christianity is a framework for working with a particular set of images in a deliberate way. This kind of prayer usually involves a pattern of usually performative external action alongside internal motions, including eg. internal speech, deliberately arousing specific emotions, or much subtler moves.

The role and attitudes of prayer can often be self-gratifying or transactional. However, many traditions teach prayer as a practice of "meeting" and entering into relationship with an energy (more relevantly, see re resonances) or image, and this is the kind of attitude often reported from the most serious practitioners in these sorts of traditions. Such images are often reported to take on a shape that a person *doesn't* want, whether to make demands of them or to show things they flinch away from.

To be clear, sometimes people can have a kind of masochistic or at least self-punitive attitude towards prayer, and in this sense prayer can be an upside-down kind of self-gratification, where a person will fairly consciously control or puppet the image to tell them what think they should hear.

As with imaginal practice more broadly, most traditions construe these experiences metaphysically as "literally real," or something close enough. Agnostic of the metaphysics, or at least even in *my* metaphysics, there's a distinction that's important to track here, with respect to a. the resolution and detail of the image, b. its richness, and c. its flexibility or dynamism. In particular, I most *trust* (in some sense) reports of prayer which seem spontaneous, alive, sensitive, etc. as opposed to "scripted," stereotyped, etc.—even if I don't believe in the metaphysics in which they're presented. Note that many reports which I "buy" are thin or nebulous when it comes to any *visual* aspect, but which are very rich and dynamic relationally/emotionally/etc.

## Devotion

The term *devotional practice* is used to refer to a broad collection of practices and models across traditions, broadly speaking oriented towards surrender and devotion to a figure, symbol, etc. Devotion is usually a large aspect of prayer, but the two are only partially overlapping.

The central stereotype of devotional practice is the performance of gestures, affect, and utterances associated with fealty, reverence, or submission. These can often combine performance of both the "attraction" (love, admiration, etc.) type of status as well as the "aversion" (fear, anxious submission, etc.) type. Besides straightforward deities, commonly this involves veneration of spirits, ancestors, saints, etc.

There are also subtler objects of devotion: while "original Buddhism" almost certainly contained Buddha-worship as a fundamental feature, some later schools innovated on this pattern to include devotion *to the path* as more fundamental than Buddha-worship. There are reports eg. from Orthodox Christianity and some Hindu schools of a kind of "devotion without an object."

Imaginal practice and prayer as convergent features of religious traditions is mostly unsurprising to me, but it's somewhat confusing the extent to which devotion in particular is a *very common* feature in especially "world religions," though probably not a universal feature of world human spirituality.

## The Sacred

Again there's a broad cluster here, which perhaps doesn't form a natural kind.

*Sacred* as an adjective narrowly describes something as set apart and special in a positive sense. Obviously, more generally, sacredness is connotatively and imaginally rich (see above) within a given culture; in particular in English, 'sacred' is in a semantic field with 'holy' and 'mystical,' and also often brings up connotations of "magic" or "supernatural."

The concept of *the sacred* refers to the domain generally of that which is held sacred. Some contemporary writers use this term as a neutral, generic concept to refer to patterns in human culture, *or* as a sacralized object itself, eg. one sometimes hears lines to the effect of "they are depraved who reject the sacred."

There are a number of cultural patterns of "setting-apart" which I'm more or less inclined to call "sacred" or "a practice of sacredness." Most centrally, in my usage, sacredness distinguishes that which touches upon the highest value, or the nature of value—though I'll note it's unclear to what extent this is a coincidence of modern Western culture or not.

One point which I'll toss in here is that it seems like the usual perception and depiction of the sacred that I find... perhaps across cultures, to the extent I've dug, munges at least 3 aspects which I would want to distinguish, namely: a. the socio-spiritual quality of set-apartness, b. the value of the set-apart object in and of itself, and c. the, uh, "cultural-symbolic extra-spiritual shininess" that they perceive *with* it.

## Hyperstition

*Hyperstition* refers to deliberate attempts to modify one's own beliefs, emotions, and perceptions.

## Magic