Tuning into the innate wisdom of your body to heal
Somatics is about seeing ourselves as an integrated whole.
We are not just mind-body-spirit, not just our psychology and biology. We are also our emotional and life experiences, our thoughts and perceptions. Your Soma is ALL of this, it’s how you are being as a human in this world.
Somatics sees the body as a place of change, learning and transformation.
Yet we often experience living mostly in our minds and not in our body at all.
With Somatics, we start to practice an awareness of body sensation, slowness and feeling what is there beneath our thoughts and perceptions. As we reconnect to the intelligence of the body, powerful things happen.
With this awareness comes greater choice.
You can understand what you are actually practicing and where you are truly at. Aha! I see what I’m doing, I feel what my body is trying to do and how it’s all the happening together here beneath the surface.
From this place of awareness, you can learn to shift and change towards what you want with more ease, confidence and connection to yourself.
With Somatics, you learn to hold this awareness as you practice or embody how you want to feel. How does a confident body move? How would a pain-free shoulder hold itself? What does my body want to express and how do I shift to that? This is embodiment.
Ask yourself: What’s next for me and my body?
And now slow down for a moment and really tune in.
Deep breath.
Ask again.
How would your body answer that question?
What is happening for me now? What shape does my soma take with these choices and tendencies in my life now. How does this feel? Living “at a distance from our bodies” while functional for survival often on many levels, keeps us from engaging deeply in our life and often from truly living to the depth of joy, pain, compassion and connection that we might long for.
To become somatically aware, we are given great insight into how our life truly feels right now and we can see things with greater clarity, maybe compassion and from there begin to envision where we want to go… what future we can envision that can bring us more expression of our truest self.
When we are at a distance from our bodies, we become confused about how to live our lives. To change how we are means changing how we act, it requires a different way of organizing how we feel, act, sense and perceive. To embody new actions, we move into the realm of practices that reshape and transform how we actually are, not just the idea or desire of who we are.
– Richard Strozzi Heckler “The Art of Somatic Coaching”
