What's somatics, anyway?

What is somatics, you ask?

“Somatics” is a broad term that means different things to different practitioners. There are many “somatics” modalities. In general, somatics asks us to remember that we are a body, that our body is intricately linked to who we are and what we’re capable of, and that we can work through the body to make desired changes to the Self.

Somatics is a pathway and a methodology for transformation. When we embody the changes we make, these changes can show up in all our ways of being and relating and perceiving.

Somatics asks us to increase our ability to feel ourselves, to feel into other humans, and to feel the world outside ourselves more deeply.

Somatics makes us more aware of what we’ve embodied over time and maybe why—it gives us a deeper understanding of how we live in and through our bodies. It helps to show us that what we’ve embodied over time—the shape that we are (psychically, emotionally, historically and how this shaping lives in us)—may or may not serve who we are now or what our vision is for our future.

Somatics teaches us that we can shed old ways of thinking and being and open to the aliveness that is waiting to move through us. Somatics brings us to a stronger alignment first with what is and then towards what wants to come into form.

To me, somatics is a natural partner to bring alongside creativity—if we can’t feel ourselves, how can we feel-into other lives or the world we inhabit—indeed how can we settle enough to set words onto the page?

Somatics helps us as writers deepen our commitments to ourselves as well as our writer-selves. By getting out of our own way, we become a clearer vessel for language to move through us.