“The body isn’t a thing we have but an experience we are.” -Christine Caldwell, PhD
My Arrival with Somatic Work
Before being formally introduced to the world of somatic healing, my intuition drew me to it. I remember a poignant initiation, sitting in a circle with the other members of the performance art dance troupe I had just begun to direct in 2018. A troupe member invoked Sandra Pearlman’s definition of the felt sense: the intuition and internal feeling of a thought at the tip of your tongue.
This concept certainly stayed on my mind in the following months as I taught our beginner dancers how to embrace their sexual confidence, authentic expression, and creative abilities on stage through dance, movement, and character work. In dance performance art, we seek to translate the power of internal feelings into externalized movement. The more students deeply felt what was going on in their bodies, the more they were able to metamorphose those feelings into physical articulation. In the context of exploring sexual shame and erotic taboo, movement becomes a way to transmute pain and trauma into creative expression. This is the felt sense at work, and it was my first taste of the language of guiding embodied healing.
Meaning of “Somatic”
The word soma comes from the ancient Greek language and translates simply to “body.” Yet its meaning runs deeper than muscles and skin. Soma evokes the living, breathing intelligence within us—the sensations, emotions, and subtle messages that speak beneath thought. In somatic therapy, the body isn’t a machine to be fixed, but a wise companion that remembers, communicates, and guides us toward healing and wholeness.
The United States Association of Body Psychotherapy calls the field a distinct branch of therapy with an “explicit theory of mind-body functioning that takes into account the complexity of the intersections of and interactions between the body and the mind, with the common underlying assumption being that a functional unity exists between mind and body” (About Body Psychotherapy and Somatic Psychology?, n.d.). Creating a functional unity between mind and body is the focus of this therapeutic work. Somatic therapy centrally engages the practice of embodiment as a means to access and explore this functional unity of mind and body. This can occur through expressive movement, such as in the dance troupe, or through internal and invisible patterns in the body.
Somatic Therapy and Embodiment
Susan Apoashan describes embodiment as moment to moment sequencing of all aspects of life in and through the body. This encompasses our complete physiology, including movement, perception, cognition, speech, emotions, and neurological processing (Aposhan, 2007), together painting a picture of the somatic approach. The somatosensory cortex processes highly synthesized information about body sensations and gut feelings (seeds of the felt sense), as well as forms the context of our early relationships. Through cultivating deliberate, ritualized, embodied awareness practices and understanding the afferent flow of the vagus nerve, body psychotherapy is a powerful method of remapping trauma.
Somatic Therapy in Practice
The most important skills I have cultivated as a somatic therapist include an ability to be sensitive to nuances in a client’s nonverbal expressions, subtle body movements, present moment awareness, and use of interventions that practice bodily exploration through the felt sense experience. A holistic and culturally aware approach to somatic therapy includes several additional layers: an interpersonal self-awareness around emotional and physical boundaries; an intrapersonal togetherness of expression, receptivity, mirroring, and attunement; a cultural level of defining meanings, goals and ideas around desire, consent, ability, and social forces relating to the body; and institutional or systemic awareness of how bodies are shaped within the wider spaces they inhabit.
Allowing bodily awareness and movement to bring a transmutational power of intuitive feeling culminates in greater physical awareness and evokes a comfortable and accessible experience of sensuality through the practice of erotic bodyfulness (Walker, 2020). Weaving together somatics and sexuality, I support clients in evolving and applying their embodied awareness around sexual intimacy, desires, and sensations by creating increased capacity to identify and be present with sensations of pleasure and wellness. Through somatic therapy, the felt sense has a space to be tasted, touched, seen, heard, and felt, creating a sensual landscape from which healing can emerge.
References
About Body Psychotherapy and Somatic Psychology? (n.d.). USABP. Retrieved January 19, 2024, from https://usabp.org/About-Body-Psychotherapy-and-Somatic-Psychology/
Aposhyan, S. M. (2007). Natural Intelligence: Body-Mind Integration and Human Development. Now Press.
Walker, M. (2020). Whole-Body Sex: Somatic Sex Therapy and the Lost Language of the Erotic Body. Routledge.