Somatic Practice

There is a particular experience underneath much of the work I do.

I feel a pull before I understand why.

Sometimes it happens with a word. I will be speaking and suddenly stop because something about the word I have used does not feel right. I don’t necessarily have a better word yet. I only know that the one I have chosen does not quite touch the thing I am trying to describe.

Sometimes an image catches me.

Sometimes one sentence in a conversation suddenly feels heavier than everything around it.

Sometimes two ideas that should have nothing to do with each other arrive beside one another, and following the association reveals something I could not have reached by thinking in a straight line.

I have learned not to treat these moments as answers.

I treat them as places to enter.

The body does not always give me the answer.
Sometimes it gives me the question.

And much of my practice has developed around creating conditions in which I can hear that question more clearly.

Why I Journal

This is why journaling works differently for me than simply sitting down and trying to think something through.

When I think deliberately, I can easily remain inside what I already know.

I ask a question. I retrieve the information I already have. I construct an answer.

Writing can interrupt that.

If I keep my hand moving long enough — following the sentence instead of deciding where it should go — associations begin appearing that I did not consciously plan.

I experience this as connecting with something larger inside myself than the part of me currently constructing the explanation.

I don’t need to decide exactly what that larger intelligence is in order to work with it.

It may involve memory, embodied knowledge, unconscious association, imagination, pattern recognition, symbolic thinking, intuition, or forms of knowing for which I do not yet have adequate language.

What matters to me is the movement:

I begin with what I know, follow what pulls,
and sometimes arrive somewhere I could not have
deliberately reasoned my way toward from the starting point.

Why Conversation Works

Open conversation can do the same thing.

This is one reason my work with another person is conversational rather than diagnostic.

I am listening to what they are saying.

But I am also listening for what catches.

A repeated word. A contradiction. An image. A sudden change in rhythm. Something they say almost accidentally. Something my own mind unexpectedly associates with what they have said. A question that arrives before I know exactly why I am asking it.

My associative thinking can look strange from the outside because it does not always travel in a straight line.

But I am not trying to get somewhere as quickly as possible.

I am following relationships.

Sometimes that movement brings forward something the other person immediately recognizes.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

Their recognition matters.

Because an intuition I have about another person is not knowledge I possess about them.

It is something I can bring back into relationship:

Does this touch anything for you?

They remain the authority on their own experience.

That keeps intuition relational rather than invasive.

Why Symbols Help

This is also why I work with Tarot, mythology, astrology, story, image, and symbol.

Not because I think a card should tell someone what is going to happen.

The value of a symbol is almost the opposite.

It introduces something we did not consciously choose.

A card appears.

Now there is an image between us.

We can ask:

The card does not have to contain the answer.

It changes the conditions of the question.

That is why symbolic tools can sometimes reveal something.

They disturb the familiar route.

They give associative intelligence something new to move through.

Why I Work With Energy

Reiki enters my practice from another direction.

Sometimes the obstacle is not that someone needs another explanation.

They have explained it enough. They understand the pattern. They can tell you exactly where it came from.

And still something in the body is holding.

This is where I become interested in what I call energy.

I use that word carefully.

I am not using energy as a scientific measurement or claiming that every felt experience proves the existence of a particular invisible mechanism.

I use it because it is the closest ordinary word I have for experiences of movement, charge, contraction, expansion, resistance, attraction, warmth, heaviness, openness, rhythm, and release that can occur before they become conceptual.

Sometimes Reiki gives us a way to work without immediately asking the mind to explain.

Attention changes. The body settles. Something that felt defended softens. An emotion arrives. An image appears.

A person suddenly has language for something that had previously existed only as sensation.

I often describe that as clearing a block.

But even here I want the verb more than the noun.

Rather than assuming there is literally an object called a block somewhere inside the person, I am interested in what was blocked:

And what becomes possible when movement returns?

The Same Practice in Different Forms

The longer I do this work, the more these practices seem related.

They are not interchangeable.

And I do not think they all work through the same mechanism.

But they share a quality that matters deeply to me:

They create an opening in what I already know.
That opening is where I work.

Intuition Is Not Certainty

I think this is why I resist treating intuition as prediction.

Prediction wants to close the question: This is what is happening.

My experience of intuition is much more often:

There is something here.

That is enough.

Then I can investigate.

I can follow the association. I can trace the symbol. I can check the history. I can ask the person. I can notice what happens next.

I can discover that my first interpretation was wrong.

Intuition remains alive precisely because
reality is allowed to correct it.

The Felt Field

Maybe this is what I mean when I talk about a field.

Not necessarily an invisible substance surrounding us.

A field is the larger context of relationship in which more is happening than any one part can contain.

Something happens between and within all of that.

Sometimes I can feel its pull before I understand its structure.

So I follow it.

Not because every pull is true.

Because sometimes attention arrives before explanation.

And if I can remain with it long enough without forcing it into certainty, something I could not previously perceive may become available.

That is the work.