Somatic Meditation Training

Discovering Your Deepest Life Through Somatic Meditation

What is Somatic Meditation?

Many of us are familiar with meditation as a practice for calming the mind or gaining clarity of thought. However, there is an approach to meditation that shifts the fundamental arena of practice from the mind to the body itself: Somatic Meditation.

This discipline represents a different way of engaging with meditation. Instead of a "top-down" process driven by the thinking mind, Somatic Meditation uses a "bottom-up process”. It involves accessing a meditative consciousness through the spontaneous feelings, sensations, visceral intuitions, and felt senses of the body.

The core idea is to tune into the basic awareness already present within the body, recognising that the human body, as such, is already and always abiding in a meditative state.

Somatic Meditation is described as essentially a meditation practicum, offering a series of exercises and practices designed to lead you into a spiritual journey within your own body. It involves disciplined practice, much like athletic training, to cultivate attentional muscles and develop a more nuanced sense of the body. The practice matures over time, integrating learning through repetition.

What is the Purpose?

Engaging in Somatic Meditation leads to a very fundamental reorientation and radical transformation in your relationship to your body. The practices enable you to be fully present within your actual, nonconceptual body and experience it with simplicity and directness. Through this, you become able to understand the body's language, respect what it knows, and follow its directives.

This approach also helps to heal the dysfunctional split between the left-brain/thinking mind and the Soma that can develop in modern societies. By turning attention to the Soma through somatically grounded meditation, this neurological and cognitive breach begins to heal. The more you attend to the Soma, the more you can tune into its style of awareness and unlock the mind's inborn tendency to heal.

Practicing Somatic Meditation allows you to tap into the deepest and most integral life of your body, aligning with your fundamental human process. Our body provides the path of our practice.

Course modules

  • Defining Somatic Psychology, Embodied Mindfulness, and Somatic Intelligence.

    Understanding the "bottom-up" approach vs. "top-down"

    Understanding the distinction between psychology about the body vs. psychology of the body.

    Introducing somatic intelligence.

    Brief overview of the emergence of somatic psychology.

    Basic Techniques: Overview of using Attention (directing focus to the body) and Breath (bringing awareness through breath).

    The Role of Guidance

  • Setting Intention
    Cultivating Attention
    Exploring Sensation
    Somatic Mindfulness and Awareness

  • Introducing the corpus of fundamental somatic protocols. These are body-based meditation practices that show how to apply attention and surrender.

  • The Nervous System

    The Respiratory System

    The Muscular System

    The Brain

    The connection between the brain and body

  • Deepening with Breath: Understanding breath as a key technique for developing awareness

    The Role of Discipline: Somatic Meditation requires disciplined practice, like athletic training, to cultivate attentional muscles and nuanced sensing

    Phases of Practice: Understanding how the practice unfolds through distinct phases or levels. The journey is unique to each person.

    Maturation: How practice matures over time, integrating learning through repetition

  • Body Wisdom & Safety in Practice

    Ego and Soma: Examining the relationship between the left-brain/thinking mind (ego) and the Soma. Understanding the potential for a dysfunctional split in modern society.

    Healing the Breach

Schedule

Course duration: 6-weeks, 90 minute sessions

Next intake: 11 June - 16 July 2025

Classes held Wednesday evenings 17:30 - 19:00 SAST

Classes are held live online. All recorded sessions are available for catch up

Investment

R3,000.00 / $165

All-inclusive, 100% online Training

Yoga Alliance Accredited

  • course duration: 6-weeks, 90 minute sessions

    Next intake: 11 June - 16 July 2025

    Classes held Wednesday evenings 17:30 - 19:00 SAST

  • Lifetime access to all course work + open access to all future online 10-hour meditation trainings

  • 10-hour YACEP Certificate upon completion of the training