What is Somatics?
“Between the stimulus and response, there is a space and in that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. ” …Victor Frankl
Although the Greek word soma originally meant “of the body,” it later evolved to mean the living body in its wholeness. Soma is a living process by which our bodily sensations, movements, perceptions, emotions and thoughts form a whole of experience.
Somatic study is an inquiry into our “lived body” by observing and exploring ourselves through sensing and moving. It is simply and most profoundly, the study of how human embodied experience unfolds.
Somatic awareness includes attending to our external senses — sight, hearing, tasting, smelling and touching — as well as to our proprioception or the sensing of our movements. Proprioception guides our senses in the world and underlies our capacity for orientation. Proprioception develops in the womb and as proprioceptive awareness develops it determines the fetus’s ability to respond and relate within the environment. How infants experience their bodies in motion forms the substratum for the emerging self that is the adult we grow into.