What is Somatic Practice?

Somatics comes from the Greek word soma. It means the living body experienced from within. It is not the objectified body as seen or studied from the outside, for example medically, but the exploration of our felt, sensed and moving body from the inside.

Somatics is a field of movement and therapeutic practice focused on internal physical perception, mind-body integration, and the patterns through which we organise ourselves physically. Rather than being primarily concerned with how the body looks from the outside, it works through our internal experience of sensation, movement, tension, effort and ease.

Somatics is an umbrella term and can include many different modalities. The term itself only emerged in the last century to describe a number of Western systems.* At the same time, many Eastern contemplative traditions, including Buddhism, have long included movement-based and body-first methods.**

How is Somatic Practice different and similar to meditation practice?

Meditation practice typically works with stillness. Sometimes it also uses simple, repetitive movements such as walking meditation. By reducing the complexity of what we are doing, meditation creates conditions in which we can observe experience more clearly. In this way, meditation can work directly with the mind — how it perceives, reacts, clenches, identifies and constructs.

Somatic practice brings in another dimension: motor activity and movement. Its primary way of working is through the body, often using subtle, deliberate and slow movements to examine how attention, perception, sensation and movement interact. Rather than studying the mind primarily through stillness, somatic practice studies the mind through movement.

As Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen says:

“The mind is like the wind and the body like the sand; if you want to know how the wind is blowing, you can look at the sand.”

In this sense, I see somatic and meditation practice as quite similar. Both work with attention and direct experiential research, but they can have somewhat different intentions depending on the method.

Meditation practices often aim towards contemplative or spiritual outcomes such as calm, insight and awakening, while modern somatic practices often begin with therapeutic or physical concerns. But this distinction is not so clear-cut. In many Eastern movement and contemplative traditions, physical, emotional and spiritual development are part of the same path. In Qigong, for example, practice can begin with the physical body and gradually include increasingly subtle dimensions of experience.

My own curiosity is in bringing somatic work more explicitly into the path of awakening: using somatic methods alongside meditation practice in the cultivation of deeper calm, insight and awakening.

What makes Somatic Practice different from exercise, sports or functional movement?

Somatic practice aims to work with some of the underlying and ubiquitous ways in which the mind-body organises itself: posture, muscular tone, coordination, effort and motor readiness.

Exercise tends to work more directly with the physical structures and capacities of the body — strengthening muscles, increasing mobility, developing endurance or improving cardiovascular fitness. Somatic practice is more interested in how the nervous system organises what the body already has. Of course, changing this organisation can also create changes in the tissues themselves.

Sports are generally more concerned with the external consequences of movement: how to move the ball better in order to score, how to run further or faster, or how to move more efficiently through water or over land. Somatic practice is primarily concerned with the experience and quality of movement itself — qualities such as effortlessness, ease, responsiveness and awakeness. It therefore directs much more attention towards internal sensory experience rather than external form or outcome.

Somatic practice also tends to work with general mechanisms that underlie many different movements, rather than training only for a particular context. Its inquiry naturally extends into everyday movement: how we stand, walk, breathe, reach, rest, respond and relate.

Our body is always with us wherever we go. In this sense, somatic practice is not simply about learning better movement. It can gradually shift us towards a more somatic and embodied way of being and moving through the world.

Somatic practice also tends to include the psychological dimensions of the body. How we move is connected to who we are. Movement can therefore become a laboratory in which we understand ourselves more deeply.

What are some key principles of somatic practice?

Movement as Research. We bring curiosity and an exploratory attitude to movement, moving for the sake of sensing and learning rather than simply achieving a predetermined result. Rather than beginning with fixed conclusions, practice becomes an ongoing inquiry.

Listening to the Body. Attention is directed towards bodily sensations, feelings and an awareness centred in the body rather than primarily in conceptual thought. This means that we often follow rather than impose. Consciousness becomes increasingly embodied.

Direct Experience. The immediate experience of the body is central to the practice. Sensations, feelings, images and insights are allowed to arise from embodied experience rather than being approached primarily through abstract thinking.

Moving towards Wholeness. Somatic work tends to include the body as a whole and its relationship with the environment, rather than exploring parts entirely in isolation. Over time, the work moves towards greater integration — between different parts of the body, sensation and movement, ourselves and our environment.

An Approach to Working with Somatic Practice

The following is a three-stage process I use for deepening awareness and insight through somatic practice. These are also the three stages we work with in the Somatic Insight Training.

1. Somatic Attention

The first stage is about developing a more refined capacity to feel the body from within.

Here we work with the Micro-Motor Body Scan, using very small and deliberate movements to access deeper layers of bodily sensation. Attention begins to include subtle movement, tension, pressure, vibration and other qualities that may normally remain outside conscious awareness. A deeper understanding of anatomy and bodily structure can also help guide our sensing and feeling.

Rather than imposing stillness from the outside, movement itself becomes the doorway into deeper bodily attention. Small movements can help us access areas that feel frozen, vague or absent and gradually reveal layers of sensation — from gross muscular tension towards increasingly subtle qualities of bodily aliveness.

As our sensitivity develops, the distinction between movement and sensation can also become less clear. We begin not only to move the body, but to feel how sensation itself moves and changes. This can open the practice towards what different traditions describe as the subtle or energetic body.

2. Somatic Organisation

The second stage broadens from local sensation towards the organisation of the body as a whole and the relationship between that whole and its environment.

Rather than moving individual parts in isolation, we begin exploring how movements travel through the entire body. We can allow movement to become more organic and intuitive, noticing how the body finds coordination when it is given enough attention and freedom.

Here we can also begin working more explicitly with Qi or the energetic body, as we develop a feeling for how energy moves through and organises the body.

A broader embodied consciousness can begin to emerge. Instead of experiencing ourselves as a mind directing a collection of body parts, we begin to sense the body as an interconnected, responsive whole — continuously organising itself in relationship with gravity, space and the world around us.

3. Somatic Expression

After developing deeper bodily attention and a more integrated awareness of the body as a whole, we can begin exploring its expressive dimension.

Here the question changes. Rather than asking, How should I move?, we become interested in what movement wants to emerge when we are not organising it entirely through conscious intention.

Expression can begin to arise from the body itself rather than being directed primarily by the conceptual mind or our familiar sense of self. This might involve practices such as Authentic Movement, or working with imagery and particular bodily qualities and observing what movements, emotions or associations arise in response.

At this stage, the practice begins to include more and more of ourselves. Sensation, movement, emotion, imagery, memory, relationship and meaning can all enter the field.

Somatic practice becomes a way of experiencing these layers more clearly, knowing ourselves more deeply, and meeting others and the world in a more embodied and intuitive way.

*Western somatic systems include the Feldenkrais Method, Alexander Technique, Authentic Movement, Body-Mind Centering and Contact Improvisation.

**Eastern practices that can be approached through a somatic lens include Hatha Yoga, Qigong, Buddhist walking meditation, Taiji, Sufi movement practices, Noguchi Seitai and Tibetan subtle-body movement practices.