The term somatic means “of the body” and refers to focusing on the internal experience of your body as a means to connecting with the emotional content of that experience. It’s a muddy space and as the term gains more mainstream attention, it might help to clarify this.
It helps to distinguish what I call the Universal Body vs your Personal Body.
We all inhabit a body that is designed to balance on two small platforms call feet. It has a big task of balancing a heavy bowling ball called a head on a stack of small bones called a spine. This body is below the surface of your personal narrative. It’s a body we all share as humans - it’s what I call the Universal Body.
Your personal experience of the Universal Body is colored by all the experiences in your life and all your interpretations. The meaning you associate with a collection of body signals is very personal to you and you don’t know it any differently.
The Universal Body is best navigated by the lower brain because it has evolved over millions of years to do this well. We interfere in this efficient operation through our personal perception of what we fear, what we desire, and how we organize ourselves in response.
The purpose of anything labeled ‘somatic’ is to help you drop down into what is happening in the Universal Body, below the Personal Body. It’s not a simple process because we experience the Universal and Personal Bodies at the same time. The act of pulling apart what is Universal from what is Personal requires a quality of attention that often means slowing down because our conscious perception is a million times slower than the innate organizing systems in our lower brain.
Distinguishing your Universal Body from your Personal Body provides a clarity that helps you do this skillfully and reliably. In my book, When Things Stick: Untangling Your Body From Old Patterns, I present a system that starts with focusing on the fundamental challenges you face in your Universal Body - how to stand on your own two feet and how to move forward. After you refine these skills, you can use them to move past the patterns that are embedded in the stories that drive your Personal Body.
Learning to be present through your body
When you say “I need to learn how to be present”, what does that mean? That you mentally feel scattered or fragmented? That you get distracted from overthinking about a memory, problem, situation? That you have a hard time staying still or focusing?
These are all descriptions of the same thing. And they all have the same elegant solution - learn to use your body.
Let me explain. The distractions from the present moment are not bad in and of themselves. You need to plan for the future, to remember your history, and to discover solutions to problems. However, when you do so out of distraction, compulsion, or avoidance, you are doing without using one of your greatest assets - your feeling capacity.
Feeling is the main gift of having a body. It’s the feedback system that allows us to be the observers of our experience. Being able to observe your felt experience is how we are able to choose how we experience life.
Without conscious choice, we feel frustrated or stuck, so we move away from the feeling. And we “do” without feeling. And we feel fragmented, distracted, stuck, compulsive, restless.
When I teach people how to be still in their bodies, they get better at it as they learn how to move in a way that is organic and whole.
Ironically, learning to move with feeling is one of the best pathways to stillness. Moving while feeling is the definition of somatic movement.
Over the past 20 years I have sought the most direct, effective, and lasting ways to make global changes in a body. When I started teaching classes online, I discovered that doing so through a digital medium - one that had no dimension - naturally demanded that people listen differently. When you learn embodiment online, you experiment more, you listen differently, you are naturally more self-reliant. In fact, you uncover your strength, your ease, and your resilience.
Are you ready to access more of yourself? Read an excerpt from my book to learn more.