Aaron Hagaman, LMFT
The doors of perception open through your bodily Form
What is Somatics?
Somatics refers to our lived, embodied experience. Mind and body are not separate things but a unified process - our body expresses its mind just as mental states inform our anatomical functioning.
Somatics is about how we make the body more conscious. Being more conscious is how connected and participatory we are with our bodily function. By cultivating the state of our tissues and patterns of movements we open the range of our sensations, feeling and thinking.
Whatever we don't feel or sense we aren't connected to, and what we aren't connected to in ourselves we can't move and influence with intention. Somatics is therefore how we make what is involuntary, reflexive and subconscious in us volitional and participatory.
The Body as a Whole
The field of somatics encompasses many diverse practices, traditions and methodologies. Somatic practices involving breathwork, movement, posture, expression or sensory-awareness each touch on different parts of our holistic functioning. While each have their value, each of these ways of managing ourselves can reinforce patterns that deal with the symptoms, or part, rather than the cause, or whole.
For example, movement practices can become performative and rote with no internal feeling for how we are doing it. Or how somatic approaches that emphasize sensory awareness often neglect how sensation is linked to patterns of movement, managing the signal not the source. Also, focusing too much on nervous system regulation can regulate away emotions and feelings which need to be expressed and formed, not settled.
Reconnecting to the whole is experiencing how the body organizes itself. Changing how we are organized, our form, changes how patterns are supported, addressing the cause and not just managing the effects. This addresses not what we do - the technique - but how we do it. This directly effects us on all dimensions of feeling, movement and awareness.
When we connect feeling to how we function, we can experience how changing the body changes the mind.
Embodied Learning
Since everything we do involves our body, somatics helps with a wide range of experiences, from we are with ourselves or others, to how we cope with stress, to how we imagine and express ourselves creatively. What integrates these dimensions is the process of how we learn.
Some of the principles of somatic learning are:
1. We learn by doing: Action generates feedback to the brain about how the body functions. We have to do it to feel it and know it. This is a learning in action rather than information.
2: Somatics requires voluntary engagement: Learning to voluntarily perform and repeat an action is the basis of somatic learning. Repetition forms lasting changes in structure and function. This is different than information based learning or passive techniques that only have temporary impacts.
3. Somatics is about giving you agency and self-sufficiency: We all need help at times. Somatic learning is helping in a partnership to empower you with the tools for how you can help yourself. This form of help supports personal empowerment over dependency.
4. Agency is the antidote to learned helplessness. Learned helplessness - the source of much of our distress, anxiety and depression - is what happens when we are conditioned to disconnect from ourselves. The more we are able to reconnect to our bodies and sense of agency, the more self-trust we regain.
How does this look in practice?
Putting it into Practice
Somatic therapy is how we begin to connect the emotional and narrative contant about what is happening in our lives with our embodied responses. Therapy addresses the particular and personal way we show up in relation to ourselves and others.
Somatic practice is how to dive deeper into the way we function as bodies - it gets at what is universal in how bodily function impacts and informs the way we move through the world.
Therapy can be generally understood as how we deal with stresses of life and how we can adapt ourselves in how we face those challenges. Practice gets under the hood of how stress impacts our functioning on a physical, emotional and mental levels. This replicates the rhythms of life - how we pulse between stress and release, activation and rest, organizing and disorganizing, the conditioned and unconditioned.