What are somatic practices?
The Greek word “soma” refers to “the living body in its wholeness.”
Somatic practices help you to reconnect with your body by listening to your thoughts-feelings-sensations, and their constant movement within. They create containers for thinking of the body as a source of knowledge, body as research, for making sense of the world in new ways: listening to what’s wanting to emerge? What's wanting to die? A curiosity for the unknown.
Through somatic practices, we build a relationship with ourselves that we can trust and rest in, a practice of visiting ourselves; a feeling of being at home in our body, of releasing back to life. Examples of somatic practices include Body-Mind-Centering, Continuum Movement , yoga, Alexander technique, Feldenkreis, etc.
As our current, alienating western culture conditions us to depart from our direct, felt, embodied experience, we need to be intentional about cultivating embodied practices, building intimacy with our own inner life, remembering that every cell is awake, alive and aware. It is the process of becoming more aware of our behaviors, reactions, communication patterns and how they feel in our bodies. Somatic practices are the ancient knowledge of humanity.
This transformational process happens by:
listening and connecting through therapeutic touch and movement
observing and understanding what we find through mindful discourse
discovering new options for movement/posture/everyday habits
working together so you can claim your direct, felt, embodied experience confidently.