Somatics

These days I call myself a somatic movement researcher, educator and artist. For a long time I resisted using "somatic" to describe what I do because it sounds complicated. I preferred to call myself a "mover"; but it proved to be too vague. When I began to search for something more specific, I realised that all of what I do falls into the broad category of somatics.

"Soma" is simply a Greek word for the living body. Somatics was a term first introduced by Tomas Hanna when he founded The Somatics Magazine - Journal Of The Bodily Arts And Sciences in 1976. The word Somatics is used to designate the approach to a way of working with the body where the body is experienced from within rather than objectified from without. The implication is that when the body is experienced from within then the body and mind are not separated but experienced as a whole.

The field of somatics is vast and spans many areas of study: health, education, performing arts, psychology and philosophy to name but a few. Individual disciplines that can be described as somatic in approach, for example, include the Alexander Technique, Rosen Therapy, Rolfing, Feldenkrais Method, Body-Mind Centering, the work of Elsa Gindler, Mabel Todd, Ideokinesis, Authentic Movement, Classical Osteopathy, Eutony, Reichian Therapy as well as many non-western disciplines such as Chi Gung, Aikido, some forms of yoga and meditation etc. What unites these individual disciplines share is a holistic, first-person view of the body and mind.

We in the west have a tendency to experience "mind" as something located in our heads. To redress this imbalance, many of these disciplines offer ways to experience "mind" as a property of the whole self. I believe that we can all benefit from deepening our own somatic experience; when we think with our whole selves we have more information with which to make decisions and to act.

• Move to Learn
• Interests
• Somatics
• Post-Modern Dance
• Background
• Movement forms that I teach and teachers who taught them to me
• Movement forms and teachers that influence my work