Yeah I know the somatic stuff works well for some people I know. I haven’t currently gotten much out of it when I’ve tried it. (I resonated with Scott Alexander’ recent “are woo-nonresponders defective?”, where, like, it’s totally a plausible hypothesis that I do have some kind of hangups that prevent me from getting value out of somatic stuff that I’d ideally overcome. But, also maybe people just vary?)
Traditional yoga again has arguing takes about this, with some schools claiming that it should work for everyone if you just ‘do it right’ or ‘just punch harder’ etc, and other schools claiming that such practices are basically...not useless per se, but unlikely to do much dramatic for people who haven’t had certain prerequisite experiences (and for some people this seems to be never).
FWIW I think a lot of “somatic stuff” that’s around is either poor quality or comes with very poor pedagogy. In my model there are also subtle and (even for many teachers) commonly illegible prerequisites. Also filtration processes on students and schools, people writing books, etc.
Yeah I know the somatic stuff works well for some people I know. I haven’t currently gotten much out of it when I’ve tried it. (I resonated with Scott Alexander’ recent “are woo-nonresponders defective?”, where, like, it’s totally a plausible hypothesis that I do have some kind of hangups that prevent me from getting value out of somatic stuff that I’d ideally overcome. But, also maybe people just vary?)
Traditional yoga again has arguing takes about this, with some schools claiming that it should work for everyone if you just ‘do it right’ or ‘just punch harder’ etc, and other schools claiming that such practices are basically...not useless per se, but unlikely to do much dramatic for people who haven’t had certain prerequisite experiences (and for some people this seems to be never).
FWIW I think a lot of “somatic stuff” that’s around is either poor quality or comes with very poor pedagogy. In my model there are also subtle and (even for many teachers) commonly illegible prerequisites. Also filtration processes on students and schools, people writing books, etc.