Somatics: Musings on Staying
2025 feels like an inflection moment - a timeline in which we are all bending into new postures shaped by the tensions between power and possibility. It certainly is that moment for me. After 10 years of graduate studies in somatic psychology and women’s spirituality; after 10 years of academic research on embodiment and trauma and systemic forces and ecological awareness; after 10 years of the shapes of learning and the pouring of my attention onto the knowledge I’ve been hungrily consuming, I am asking myself “what now.” Where do I go from here, when the here I’m in feels shaky, suspiciously quiet, smokey, and tender. When I notice, I’m looking to the future with hungry eyes, and in return feeling the pangs of scarcity tricking me into drinking from soiled wells.
For this moment, I keep returning to my body and listening for the wisdom that comes up from the bottom. The whispers of wisdom that speak in sensational tongues of tingling, increased heart rate, dry mouth, and a subtle but undeniable shift in breath. In this blog post, I want to invite you into musings on staying in the present moment through and in your body. I’ll unpack somatics from my perspective, and explore what embodiment has to do with personal, social, ecological, and celestial healing and transformation.
Somatics as Lifeway
Somatics, coming from the Greek root word soma meaning the “living body in wholeness," is an orientation to reality. It is based on the belief and lived experience that there is intelligence in the matter of our being and that through attending the the material substance of our existence as human animals, we are better able to relate to the world around us - both the human and more-than-human kin that co-create reality with us. It is a lifeway that finds essential and foundational information about how to be in the world and how to make meaning of our day-to-day beings and doings in the material truths of physiological life. It does not bypass the body, nor does it add it to purely intellectual ways of conceiving of the world. Instead, it is a way of being with and relating to reality that is emergent from the body. It is a way of findign meaning, knowledge, and understanding in that which bubbles up through the unconscious mind that is the nervous system and the interactions it has with the rest of life. It is a way to take seriously goosebumps, tension in the chest, a yawn, or a clenched fist by inquiring how these physical responses inform and instruct us about the world and how we are (or are not) to be in any given moment.
At least for me, somatics is a way of being that extends from our internal-material world out. It is a gift that we have been given to track, notice, modulate, and transmute the energetics of existing. It is not a solution to a problem. It is a radical worldview shift that does not try to centralize duality but instead insists on complexity and nuance. It does not dismiss that body as unintelligent brute matter but humbly honors the profound wisdom and sacred instructional capacity of living tissue. Instead of attempting to find solutions in hierarchical mind-over-matter, top-down ways, somatics asks for the whole of experience to be centralized, uplifted, and tended. It brings the intelligence of irrationality into the conscious workings of our minds in such a way that we start to make sense to ourselves, because we sense ourselves.
My study of somatics comes from the western tradition of somatic psychology and counseling therapy. This approach is ultimately rooted in the traditions of psychodynamics and explores how body-based interventions can serve in unwinding various “psychopathologies” and support people in finding psychological health and well-being. Thought leaders in the field, such as Pat Ogden, Linda Graham, Rae Johnson, Resmaa Menakem, Bessel van der Kolk, Ron Kurtz, and Peter Levine have all informed how I’ve taken in this education and sought to translate it into not just therapeutic interventions, but take it on as a true lifeway.
When I came away with my MA in 2018, I felt very frustrated that I had just invested an overwhelming amount of money into learning skills for being in a body - skills that I felt and still feel are a human right. Understanding that we have bodies, and that we can actually listen to them and translate the signals into meaningful actions that does not override the intelligence of body, should not be a specialization. Instead, we are taught to override our bodies, suppress the signals, and deny that how we feel in our bodies has anything to do with how we live as bodies. So here we are.
Somatic Lifeway as Revolutionary Action
Systems of dominance (read capitalism, white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, human supremacy, extractivism, and exploitation) absolutely and unequivocally necessitate a severance from the skills of understanding the sensational signals of the body. In order to engage with systemic and relational forms of violence, we must be well-trained to override signals that alert us to trouble, in order to effectively survive within the overculture. This can be as simple as being forced to hold urine in math class because you are required to stay and finish a test, or as complex as celebrating the stress/trauma response of fawning that compells people to bypass their own boundaries in order to prevent relational abandonment.
What’s more, because systems of dominance utilize the logic of trauma to reproduce, our bodies have also become well trained and conditioned to operate more from our stress and trauma responses of fight/flight/freeze/fawn (oft called the "F responses”). These nervous system states are reflexive in response percieved or actual threats to existence. As the body goes into one of the F responses, the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for executive functioning) shuts down, and we become organized around a world that is perpetually threatening. As we respond to the world from these reflexive responses, we perpetuate these patterns. What’s more, because we’re always responding from stress, we start to lose trust in our bodies as they become both overly reactive to stress and begin to display symptoms of that chronic stress (chronic pain, digestive issues, etc. are all linked to stress).
To live a somatic lifeway requires diligent tending to the ways our F responses get activated and bring in practices that move us back out of the stress response so we can be discerning about what we’re experiencing as stress. It is taking the day to day, moment to moment, opportunity to interrupt the stress response pattern necessitated by dominant culture through the body. As we interrupt those over patterns, new ways of being and relating get to emerge from the bottom up, and behavior change becomes more accessible. One way this happens is by estabilshing a felt-sense of safety on the nervous system level. It’s about supporting our bodies in feeling safe enough that our awareness, attention, and higher brain functions are able to stay in the present moment.
This is a highly disruptive pattern, because we actually start to adjust how we live to remain within our nervous system and bodily means. We are able to insist on boundaries because we feel the consequences of dislocating ourselves from our bodies in a very tacit way. We can no longer concede to ways of being that require our severance AND we have the embodied resources to do the difficult work of holding those boundaries.
Resourcing for the Revolution
I will be the first to tell you that somatics will not change the world. Diaphramatic breath or humming or any other tool for nervous system regulation isn’t the thing that changes the world - it is a way to interrupt the patterns enough to create openings that supports individuals in showing up more whole - more complete. And from that place, people can think and feel our way into change. We can re-member ourselves, and I have full faith that when we are within our bodily capacities, we can solve problems, make connections, and ultimately heal.
The body cannot exist anywhere other than right here, right now. I will never be in a body that is elsewhere (or at least I don’t consent to such VR options). The body persists in the ever-present now. To return to the body is then to return the mind from the far-reaches of everything back to now. Back to this moment, the moment that holds essential information about how we might make the most out of the next one. How we might be together as bodies on this planet, at this time.
Somatics is an invitation to use our bodies to resource for the very difficult task of staying in the current moment. Difficult because the current moment (i.e. our bodies) have been filled with so much ache, so much trauma. I get it - it’s certainly enticing to float off into the elsewhere and not have to feel and deal with the pain of the world. And, we are all suffering for that abandonment. Somatic coaching as I practice it is designed to cultivate the attentional muscle needed to track when our bodies are going toward those F responses and interrupt the patterns before it sends us into well-worn scripts that are failing us. It’s about using basic nervous system care tools and skills to generate enough of a pause in our systems so we can return to the current moment and learn to be stay with the emotion, sensation, and possibilities alive in it.
Somatics as a lifeway is ultimately rooted in the here and now - which is the meeting place of what has been and what can be. It is a lifeway that asks us to stay present, stay in the moment, in the room, in the conversation long enough to discern what is possible. The stress responses are a profound intelligence that I humbly bow to. They are what have kept us alive. And, when all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail. We are not meant to only live from our stress responses, as this culture demands. Somatics is a way to put all the other options back on the table. It is a way to invite the Divine intelligence of matter to matter to us again. To help us make meaning by helping us make sense of our experience. It is about remembering true safety is possible, and worthwhile.
Somatic Therapeutic Coaching
I adore bodies. Their intelligence is profound and humbling. Humans, like all animals (and more-than-human kin) are fucking AMAZING. As my teacher Resmaa Menakem has said - there is nothing wrong with us, something has happened and continues to happen to us. We are having very normal responses to extraordinarily abnormal circumstances. And we can interrupt these patterns. We can find novel and ancient options that are not rooted in fear, domination, and trauma.
Somatic therapeutic coaching is an opportunity to practice the skills that allow us to gather evidence of this claim. It is a way to come together and let you-as-body experience safety such that your brain changes, your heart changes, and your mind changes. It is an opportunity to undo the impacts of trauma so that you can show up more authentically in our world - which is inherently healing for everyone else. Allowing the F responses to take their rightful places for acute survival moments allows each person to develop their capacity to be with stress such that the choices they make reduce the production of stress.
Whether in a 1:1 or in a coaching group, somatic therapeutic coaching is about trying things on together. It is about exploring what it takes to stay right here, in-bodied, and attentive. Somatics is not a trendy way to bio-hack our way past the nightmare of our times. It is an ancestral truth and human right to be in your body. It is how humans are designed, and it is no accident. It is the basis of our being - the material ground from which all things emerge. Somatics, to me, is a path to freedom. One that sustains, nourishes, and complexifies.
I know this because my body knows this.