“Definitions are often necessarily vague and imprecise, as is somatics, but in common parlance we are able to use them to communicate and understand each other.”
-Martha Meyers
“Somatics” is a difficult word to define because the very nature of understanding it depends on subjective experience. Every individual approaches somatics with different experiences that shape his or her point of view. The result is a mulititude of voices, each with a unique variety of seeds to plant in the field, but how to identify and cull together common themes into one concise definition? Maybe we can’t…or we shouldn’t? Maybe the definition of “Somatics” is constantly evolving so all that is needed is a statement that is open enough to allow for change and a variety of understandings.
St. Olaf College Summer 2012: Julia Moser-Hardy ’14
Somatics is an embodied approach to an intentionally experiential lifestyle.
St. Olaf College Summer 2011: Aleks Weaver ’12, Betsy Gaasedelen ’13, Kathleen Pender ’13
Definition: Somatics is an embodied philosophical approach to life, dance, education, and anything else. Rooted in first-person experience, it emphasizes attuning to one’s own inner self, sensing, feeling, and perceiving the world from the inside out. From a holistic perspective that recognizes the connections in all things, somatics integrates body, spirit, emotions, and intellect.
Why is it Valuable?: Listening to the wisdom of the body expands awareness and consciousness of self, others, and environment, giving an individual the internal authority for choice and agency. Somatics cultivates the flexibility for growth and change inherent in adapting to life’s ebb and flow as well as the imagination, curiosity, and creativity necessary for our 21st-century culture.
Generative Somatics
“Somatics is a holistic change theory that understands both personal and collective transformation from a radically different paradigm. Somatics understands both the individual and collective as a combination of biological, evolutionary, emotional and psychological aspects, shaped by social and historical norms and adaptive to a wide array of both resilient and oppressive forces.”
Global Somatics
Definition: Somatics is the science of studying the physical body through personal experience.
Understanding the Root Word: Soma refers to the experienced body instead of the body as an object other than self. A complete understanding of the physical body requires both the subjective somatic experience and the objective clinical information provided by western anatomy/physiology. The consciousness of the experienced body includes the consciousness of emotions, mind, soul and spirit. A person participates in the body from the inside out by learning its native language of vibration, breath, sensation, movement, touch and sound. Over the last hundred years, numerous somatic modalities have emerged, each bringing a unique and necessary aspect to the field. Process, every cell, system, person, and community is honored as a world unto itself that manifests and participates in the interconnected web of life.
Somatics Journal
1. The art and science of the inter-relational process between awareness, biological function and environment, all three factors being understood as a synergistic whole:the field of somatics.
2. The study of the soma, soma being the biological body of functions by which and through which awareness and environment are mediated. It is also understood that all such somas have, to some degree, the capacity for awareness (sensorium) of the environment and intentional action (motorium) in the environment.
3. In common usage somatics relates to somas of the human species, whose sensoria and motoria are relatively free from the determination of genetically fixed behavior patterns, thus allowing learning to determine the inter-relational process between awareness, biological function and environment.
Thomas Hanna
“…the field of study dealing with somatic phenomena, i.e., the human being as experienced by himself (or herself) from the inside.”