The following is still quite rough. At this point, I'm just trying to get ideas down on the page. Editing will come later. For now, here's a great quote motivating my focus on the notion of "skill:"
For every event that occurs, there will follow another event whose existence was caused by the first, and this second event will be pleasant or unpleasant according as its cause was skillful or unskillful. —"The" law of karma
If you don't want to read anything so dense as the paragraphs that follow, you can just read this and you'll be doing OK:
I am a graduate student in a psychology department, and I'm relatively committed to a materialist worldview. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I doubt I will be (in this I share a certain sensibility with the Dalai Llama, but from the other side of the fence). I'm a Feldenkrais® Teacher (and I really hate writing ®'s, but that's a whole different discussion). I have done all kinds of esoteric forms of meditation, and experienced things like chakras and auras and so on. I don't think any of that stuff means you're crazy, and I also don't think any of it is necessary for living life in the best possible way (In fact, I find those sorts of things relatively distracting from things that I think actually matter). I am saddened by the antagonism between the phenomenological validity of such experiences and what most people think is a scientific view. For more on all this, read this article.
Sadly, a large portion of primary scientific research is unavailable to "regular people." A single article can cost you more than a paperback novel. If you do want to read primary research, ideally get a friend who is at a major institute. Happily, lots of stuff is becoming free. For example, you can find many articles available for download now on pubmed. And often, authors will post articles for download free on their lab or personal website (which is technically illegal a lot of the time).
Even if you can't read the article, you can usually read abstracts online. This way, you can get a sense of what a paper is about before bugging someone else to see if you can get a copy to read.
I have started a "Somatics" group on Zotero. There, I'm trying to keep track of articles that I think are relevant to people interested in, you guessed it, somatics. I'll try to write reviews here for the most salient ones. Please join if you are so inclined. If things get out of hand, I'll take a more rigorous role in moderating, but I don't see that happening soon.
My position in brief: If you had some experience that seems to disagree with modern science, that doesn't mean you are wrong, or that science is wrong. Rather, that "seems to disagree with science" bit is probably wrong.
On the other hand, things that are passed down from authority (even "scientists") often turn out to be absolute bollocks. If someone can't explain something to you in a way that makes sense, there's a good chance that they don't quite know what they're talking about. Richard Feynman once said that no one really understood quantum physics, because if they did, they'd be able to teach it to college freshman - and no-one really could.
Of course, that's just what I say.