The concept of Somatics comes from the ancient Greek word “soma”, meaning the living body. A paraphrased definition would be “of or related to the body”. This is distinct from the anatomical body which was known as “corpus”.  This delineation indicates a specific sensing phenomenon: awareness of the felt body as experienced from within. Somatics therefor are a subjective and active awareness of and attunement to the experiences of embodiment that allow for change. While optimizing expressions of muscles, joints, fascia etc are aspects of embodied wellbeing, somatic engagement is the receptive relationship to the stimuli and its affects upon the anatomical body, while bodywork is the manual delivery of protocols that engage aspects of the felt sense such as guarding, autonomic activation, emotional salience, movement habits, breath, and ideodynamic response. Somatic work seeks to transform limiting experience through nervous system engagement and psychodynamic awareness to accomplish physiological regulation, of which calming pain and resolving tension patterns felt in the muscles and soft tissue is an aspect. 

As a term, “Somatics” has been popularized by the mental health industry yet it is not clinical mental health work. The term has long been utilized when describing the therapeutic benefits of dance, yoga, and other expressive movement disciplines, but it is not necessarily a movement based practice either. The term has it’s roots in the sensorial experience, which is the domain of bodywork. When understood in that context, it indicates an experiential healing process where the intelligence of the body takes precedence over that of the intellectual mind. Somatic practices utilize the physical body as a means of accessing the sensory body.  The boundaries of the sensory body transcend the conditioned limitations of the physical body through the integration of therapeutic stimuli and the result is often an improvement of the ecological function of the whole. The "whole" is you and the "improvement of function" is your sense of well-being and quality/capacity of your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.

    “Somatic” indicates an understanding by the practitioner that the body is a complex sense making system and is more than the sum of its parts. We cannot separate mind from living tissue any more than we can separate living tissue responses from emotion, thought or movement. With this thinking, what we call a body is not an object of fixed matter as much as it is an ecology of movement and information. Somatics are systems that seek to restore us to our ideal expression by leading us to encounter some essential aspect of inner dynamism that is embodied yet blocked by kinesthetic distraction. To understand what this means, we must understand that muscular tensions are non-voluntary yet self imposed compensatory responses to inner and outer stimuli. These responses are the programs running in our nervous systems that are produced via body memory recall, emotional impressions, sensory triggers, and/or repetitive movements and postures. Disfunction begins to emerge when we are in holding patterns for too long without expressing movement, sensation, and feeling outside of our fortified routines. The innate ability to explore, challenge, and expand our sensorial boundaries becomes impeded. We lose the restorative aspect of full volitional motion within our anatomically appropriate range. Our way of dealing with life’s stressors begins as a solution to something difficult needing to be met in the present moment but over time that present moment becomes the past and the solution becomes a pattern at odds with our optimal state. We might not be consciously choosing these patterns, yet we find ourselves on a sort of “auto-pilot” whether or not we are aware it is so. We are engaging in protective behaviors long after the need to do so has passed, or in some cases because the ability to experience ourselves differently feels inaccessible to us. This has us limited to whatever cycle of experience is most developed. This means we are defaulting almost solely to what is most familiar with the ways we move (or don’t move), the ways we think, the ways we feel, and the ways we react (rather than intentionally respond). In short, we are conditioned to our sense of safety being in opposition to our sense of well being. The body tends towards compensating for such conditioning with physical tension and structural imbalances. This results in stress patterns that limit full function and can eventually lead to symptomatic pathology thus creating a negative feed back loop that seeks to validate itself.

    These patterns develop as a means for safety, survival, or support when an experience or environment we have been exposed to is interpreted as a threat by our nervous system. Often in such situations we learn to suppress body values such as instinctual need, pleasure, recuperation, and rest. Instead what is promoted are identity values of urgency, sacrifice, judgement, limitation, fear, and compartmentalized repression. These are often accompanied by the embodying of archetypal characterizations such as that of a victim/martyr, an aggressor/initiator, or a hero/aggrandizer. All these things, with their accompanying pain, belief, and story converge to become the language of the body. This language can be understood through posture, gesture, breathing, motility, expression, temperature, and sensation.

These muscular tensions and their associated systemic patterns are understood to be indicators of defense. The goal of somatic awareness is to work with the body in ways that invite the natural process of releasing these defensive holding patterns. We begin to suffer when these aspects of our experience become too static or too repetitive. Many people go through life unaware or un-acknowledging of the energetic deficit to which they have become accustomed. Their habitual way of being in the world impedes access their optimal states of energy, flow, and well being due to the survival mode that has been conditioned as their nervous system’s baseline response to stimuli. In such states we forget to embrace the respiratory quality of our existence, which is to allow for both the compressive and the expansive experiences. Instead we become stuck in a compression and often fear or avoid an expansion as time goes on. Somatics take all this into account, reminding us of our vastness while also cultivating opportunities to explore and restore our relationship to wholeness. At Soulfire Somatics, a unique hands on protocol is administered, and within that offering is a safe and sacred space for allowing yourself to feel and express whatever may come up for you in response. Engaging the sensorial being is a powerful aspect of self care when offered with the understandings outlined in this writing. The term “somatic” was chosen to indicate that whoever you are and whatever your unique expression is, whatever you are navigating in your life, it is a natural and powerful autonomic response. Through awareness of our own response to stimuli, we can begin to transform how we feel, move, and experience our own embodied reality.