What does Somatic mean?

Human beings can be viewed in two ways: from the outside in, or from the inside out.

Looked at from the outside, by a physician or a physiologist, human beings are very different from the beings they appear to be when they view themselves from the inside out.

Read an article written by Janet Thomas on Somatics - click the image above

Viewed from the outside, a human being appears as a body with a certain shape and size. It’s the same as an observed wax dummy or statue that also has a bodily shape and size.

However when a human being looks at him/herself from the inside, he/she is aware of feelings, movements and intentions – a very different, fuller being.

To view a body from the outside is a third-person view: seeing a he, she or it. But when a human sees him or herself from the inside, it’s a first-person view – a privileged view of “me”, which means being aware of “I, myself”.

“Soma” is from a Greek word meaning “living body”. What an individual sees from his/her first-person living, sensing, internalised view is always a soma. To yourself you are a soma; to another, you are a body.

What’s important about Somatics?

Any viewpoint, including that of any physician, physiologist or any health practitioner, that fails to include both the somatic, first-person view as well as the third-person view, is deceptive. Only viewing a body from the outside is to see only a physical puppet or dummy that can be changed by chemical and surgical means. It is a one-sided view, false and incomplete.

What is different about a Somatic approach?

Science is built on a foundation of an objective, third-person view of the human as a body. It is therefore limited in its ability to help human beings, who are simultaneously objects and subjects. i.e. Humans are self-sensing and self-moving subjects whilst being observable and manipulable objects.

The somatic viewpoint is that human beings are self-aware, self-sensing and self-moving and therefore self-responsible somas who can change themselves, as well as bodily beings who are subjected to physical and organic forces. It is a fuller, more rounded viewpoint which presents wider choices and possibilities with regard to health and healing.

What are Somatic exercises?

Somatic exercises are designed to improve flexibility and movement by reprogramming the sensory-motor system, also helping the nervous system to remember what it has forgotten. Many aches and pains are falsely attributed to “growing older” but those who work with Somatics find that training in personal sensory awareness and motor control can create a reversal of some of the major current health problems, such as cardio vascular disease, muscular conditions, stress and a variety of psychological disorders including panic attacks, anxiety and depression.

Somatic exercises can change how we live our lives, how we believe that our minds and bodies interrelate, how powerful we are in controlling our lives and how responsible we should be in taking care of our total being.

The new field of Somatics holds that first-person human experience must be considered of equal scientific and medical importance as outside, third-person observation. The exercises educate the individual and inform their nervous system, providing a way to live under the stressful demands of the world we live in whilst still retaining our mental and physical health