Derived from the ancient Greek soma; Thomas Hanna, re-defined it as the body experienced from within. He coined the term “somatics” in 1976 as “…the field of study dealing with somatic phenomena, i.e., the human being as experienced by himself (or herself) from the inside.”
These days it’s a generative term, now applied to a wide range of practices that acknowledge the body as a place of deep intelligence and learning.
Inspired by the wisdom of the body, practices like Reichian Bioenergetics (psychology field), BodyMind Centering (Dance and Movement Lineage), the ancient wisdoms of the Yogic Sciences and the modern developments in Neuroscience long isolated from each other, often in competition and conflict, have begun to acknowledge and respect the community of work that has grown from different edges to a common centre. Somatics seems to bridge the differences, concentrating the central motivation and creating a worldwide community who as Don Hanlon Johnson says “can now see how each can augment and make more effective the practice of the others…(while) remaining typically grounded in their own unique contexts of skill and service”
In the last century, the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl envisioned a somatology, a science that would bring together empirical studies of the body (3rd-person science) with direct experiential studies (1st- & 2nd-person science). His groundbreaking work with Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed methods for the systematic investigation of the roots of knowing and value in direct bodily experience.
“Human beings, including you and me are ongoing interaction. We don’t exist separately from our environment and then start interacting with it. We are interaction between body and environment, so we (like all living things) are both body and environment. And for humans, the environment includes other people, language and culture.” (Parker, 2007, p.40)
Consider your occupation, your family and relationships, your heritage and culture, the environment in which you live, your posture, the language that you speak, the sports and activities you engage in, your values, the clothes you wear, even the food you eat. All these seemingly separate parts of your lifeworld and your biology, and your psychology are feeding and being fed data via a perpetual sensory feedback loop 24/7. The sum of which, moment to moment, is who you experience yourself to be.
Acknowledging the role of the body in human life, assists the direct experiencing of how we think, how we feel and how we move and noticing that they are the same thing.
Somatic practices build your ability to contact the adaptive organismic process, “the interactional living process” (Gendlin) so that you can explore the internal processes, enabling you to determine where you are able to move and where you are unable to move both inside and outside of your physical self.
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Within day-to-day activities, I provide Self-Embodiment Training for people interested in somatic and yogic techniques. My long-term project of providing multimedia access to bodymind information through my website www.sacarmi.com is to raise more awareness of the efficient and powerful internal technology that somatic practice can have in a rapidly changing modern world.
With bodymind blessings,
Sally Carmichael x