What is somatics?

You’ve likely been swimming in the words ‘somatics’, ‘embodiment’ and ‘transformation’. But what do they mean?

Somatics is a paradigm, a practice, a process.

As paradigm is assumes that our experience of life occurs within the soma, the body. That our lives occur not just outside and around us, but primarily within our felt experience.

As practice, somatics asserts that what we live day-to-day becomes our embodied experience. It assumes that we are living our values, whether ours or another's, in each moment through our thoughts, perceptions, actions, and choices, and that to live our own values and desires is often a process of transforming our soma, our physiology, to allow for a new way of being.

Which brings us to somatics as process. Somatics ultimately teaches us that to change something in our lives, we must transform our embodied experience of it, or how it lives in our somatic shape. Our somatic shape includes our physiology and web of thoughts, emotions and behaviours informed by the land, our culture, our lineage and family, our beliefs, our perceptions, our worldview. It is interwoven with our experience of life.

For example, if I have learned a value of urgency from my culture and family, this ensures a set of thoughts (not enough time), emotions (stress and overwhelm), and choices/ behaviours (rushing, less connection, busyness, saying yes to everything, addicted to work and productivity). The value of urgency (as well as every other possible value) looks and feels a certain way. It is a part of one’s somatic shape. Thus, it is not so simple to shift from an embodied experience of urgency to that of ease, if that is something I long for. I cannot will myself into ease, as my entire soma supports the experience of urgency. Ease would actually feel unfamiliar to my soma, often even feeling like a threat. I might feel contraction when ease arises, and as such I would perpetuate the behaviours, thoughts and emotions of urgency because that is what is familiar to my living self.

And this brings us to embodiment. Somatics teaches that it is our day-to-day thoughts, emotions, behaviours, and choices that encompass our embodied experience. And that so many of us are embodying values and desires that are simply not in alignment with our own. That to turn towards our own means teaching the body to open and become familiar with the new desired experience.

And this is the work of somatic transformation. Discerning what values and desires we are currently embodying, feeling what values and desires that we actually align with, and teaching the soma to shift from one to the other. To open to what you deeply long for so that you may learn to live it.

It is a wild, beautiful dance. A scaffolded journey. A lived within experience, felt rather than cognized.

Somatics as practice teaches us to slowly welcome a new experience, a new value, into the body, through gentle practices such as:

~ Blending

~ Tracking the charge

~ Scanning for safety

~ Resourcing

~ Consent and boundaries

~ Opening

~ Awareness

And that through an amalgamation of these practices, you can begin to live in accordance with YOUR values and desires, as opposed to values and desires that you do not align with but have been taught to you and encouraged by external influence.

I teach all about somatics as paradigm, practice, and process in my Somatic Educator and Therapist Certification and Training Program, Brain Body Being. If you want to learn how to first discover, and then shift your somatic shape, as well as how to discern which practices are most supportive in a given moment, for both yourself and your clients, click the link below to learn more about the curriculum!

Journal prompts to begin exploring your own somatic shape:

1. What values do I hold dear? In what ways do I live these values? In what ways do I not?

2. What values do I embody (live day-to-day)? Are they mine or are they another’s (an individual’s or societal)?

3. What are my values? My desires in this life?

4. How does my body feel when I consider the possibility of living my values? Do these values feel possible? Safe? Or do I contract?

Mallorie Buoy

Mallorie is the founder and lead educator at Homebody School of Somatics. She currently practices as a Registered Master Somatic Movement Educator and Therapist, a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and Clinical Somatic Therapist, as well as a psychedelic-assisted therapist. With over 15 years of studying mysticism, movement, and exploring the rich truth of cosmic law, alongside the science of it all, she now teaches others to become somatic educators and therapists without the stress or overwhelm of a traditional university setting.

Explore our 500-hour ISMETA Approved Somatic Educator and Therapist Training at homebodyhealing.org.