Footnotes

*1 An audio track of this meditative exercise can be downloaded at audio.innertraditions.com/casppr.

*2 Somatophobia refers to the fear of—and anger directed toward—the soma, the feeling presence of the body. The term soma has different—but perhaps related—meanings in both the Greek and Hindu languages. When referring to the body, soma comes directly from the Greek language. But in the Vedas, the ancient texts of the Aryan people who migrated down into India around 1500 BCE, soma refers to a mind-altering substance that can reveal glimpses of the god realm. In the 1960s and ’70s a number of psychedelic researchers, assuming that soma must be some kind of mushroom or plant, combed the Himalayas in hopes of finding it, but came away empty-handed. An intriguing possibility exists in that both Greek and Hindu derive from a common, much earlier Indo-European language. Might soma—for the Greeks as well as for the writers of the Vedas—actually be referring to the same thing? Might the mind-altering soma of the Vedas actually be the awakened feeling presence of the body? Somatics is now the accepted term for the wide range of body-oriented psychotherapies and techniques that have developed in the West since the late nineteenth century, all of which share the common goal of awakening and healing the body as a path to greater personal realization.

*3 An audio track of this meditative exercise can be downloaded at audio.innertraditions.com/casppr.

*4 An audio track of this meditative exercise can be downloaded at audio.innertraditions.com/casppr.

*5 An audio track of this meditative exercise can be downloaded at audio.innertraditions.com/casppr.

*6 An audio track of this meditative exercise can be downloaded at audio.innertraditions.com/casppr.

*7 An audio introduction to this meditative exercise can be downloaded at audio.innertraditions.com/casppr, where I recommend that your partner reads it to you and then you read it to your partner.

*8 However, there are suggestions that Shams’s family may have belonged to the Assassins, a Sufi group of spiritual seekers whose name is derived from hashish, which they would use as a sacrament for their spiritual practices.

*9 An audio introduction to this meditative exercise can be downloaded at audio.innertraditions.com/casppr, where I recommend that your partner reads it to you and then you read it to your partner.

*10 An audio track of this meditative exercise can be downloaded at audio.innertraditions.com/casppr.

*11 An audio track of this meditative exercise can be downloaded at audio.innertraditions.com/casppr.