What is
Somatic Education?

Somatic education is not a technique; it is a way of operating that relies on your awareness, desire, and ability to become more self-determining. "Somatic" refers to your ability to sense the processes going on "within" you. "Education" means increasing your ability to function.

This approach to mind/body integration improves your natural control of your body’s muscular system, reduces stress, and gives you more energy by improving your physiological functioning. In many cases, somatic education can eliminate pain associated with aging, injury, and repetitive use patterns.

There are many approaches to somatic education. The following articles are on this site:

Alexander Technique is an educational process that teaches you how to change the habits you want to change, and how to use your body with more freedom and ease.

Body-Mind Centering® is somatic practice based in experiential anatomy, using movement, voice, breath, perceptions, and touch.

Continuum Movement uses sensation, breath, sound, and movement for both subtle and dynamic explorations.

Eutony is a Western way of experiencing unity of the whole person.

Feldenkrais Method® is an educational system that helps you develop a functional awareness of yourself in the environment.

Hanna Somatic Education® releases chronic pain patterns.

Sensory Awareness is interested in the total functioning person and the development of a person’s responsiveness toward life.

The Trager® Approach helps you learn to move effortlessly and freely, relieving pain and creating deep relaxation.

Highly recommended reading if you want a broad view of the field of somatics and bodywork: Bone, Breath, & Gesture: Practices of Embodiment contains writings by and interviews with pioneers in bodywork and somatics, including Charlotte Selver, F. M. Alexander, Moshe Feldenkrais, Ida Rolf, Thomas Hanna, and twelve others.

Somatic Movement

Movement is an important part of somatic education. Why movement? The Tao Te Ching says it best: "That which is static and unchanging is dead. That which moves and changes is alive." Life is continual movement. Even as we sleep, the movements of our internal organs keep us alive. But how aware are we of our bodies and their movements?

Like James Joyce’s Mr. Duffy, who "lived a short distance from his body," many of us live away from our bodies in this age of technology and stress. Yet technology and stress make living in our bodies even more essential to our health and well-being.

Each stress, each trauma, each abuse takes it toll on our bodies. We abuse our bodies with drugs, alcohol, diet, too little sleep, and too little or too much exercise. We abuse our bodies by ignoring them, disliking them, or trying to force drastic change.

We judge our bodies as seen from the outside, as if we were viewing a statue or wax dummy. But we can also view the body from the inside. The body as seen and experienced from within is the soma, from the Greek meaning "living body."

Viewing the body from inside brings awareness to feelings, movements, and intentions, and is quite distinct from our society’s emphasis on the body as perceived from the outside.

Working with the soma is the basis of somatic practices. These practices are not about the development of muscle or some specified body shape. They are about internal awareness, the flow of breath in the body, releasing muscle tension, developing our own natural movement, and being healthy.

Whatever your choice of somatic education, know that choosing to live in your body with awareness is the most important step that you can make toward good health.

History of Somatic Education

The following is adapted from The Way of the Flesh: A Brief History of the Somatics Movement by Don Hanlon Johnson, Noetic Sciences Review #29, Page 26, Spring 1994.

Somatic education dates back to the mid- and late nineteenth century Gymnastik movement in Northern Europe and the Eastern United States. At a time when physicians were still engaged in the crudest uses of surgery and medication, and when psychotherapy was just beginning, the practitioners of various branches of Gymnastik were already doing sophisticated healing work using expressive movement, sensory awareness, sound, music, and touch.

To uncover the early history of Somatics, we depend on oral history, fragments mentioned by the way in exercise books, a passing reference to a teacher, or a footnote in a history of dance. However, we do know that early pioneers of this movement included, for example, Francois Delsarte, Genevieve Stebbins, Bess Mensendieck, Leo Kofler, and Emile Jacques-Dalcroze. These people shared a new vision of embodiment which differed from the dominant models in biomedicine, physical education, religion, and classical ballet. For example, instead of training dancers and athletes to shape their bodies to fit a normative classical form, they encouraged individual expressiveness and a return to a more natural body, allowing forms of movement to emerge from within rather than imposing them-what Somatics practitioners refer to as "inhabiting" the body.

In the late 1800s, F. M. Alexander in Melbourne, Australia, and Leo Kofler in New York were coincidentally afflicted by chronic laryngitis for which physicians could find no cause or cure. Both men conducted independent healing investigations and discovered that as they learned to fully inhabit their body movements, posture, and voice, they were healed. Similar stories are told of Moshe Feldenkrais, Ida Rolf, Gerda Alexander, Ilsa Middendorf, and many others who discovered healing capacities inherent in heightened bodily experience.

Because the innovators of Somatics lived within a comparatively silent world of non-verbal practices, few texts have articulated the early work. Much of the early knowledge, therefore, has been lost. World War I broke up the early interdisciplinary Somatics community, leaving individual schools intact but isolated and fragmented. World War II further dispersed the pioneers, forcing many to put aside the more visionary aspects of their work, and to eke out a living as refugees, marketing their work under the more acceptable forms of physical rehabilitation or psychotherapy.

Then, in the 1960s, the Esalen Institute and a growing counterculture exploring different states of consciousness provided an opportunity for a revival of the Somatics vision.

By the end of the 1980s, international conferences on Somatic Education had been held in Paris, Zurich, Naples, Montevideo, Montreal, Strasbourg, San Francisco, and New York. Today, at least three international professional organizations use a version of the name "Somatics," and the Association for Humanistic Psychology has a Somatics wing. In California, the Coalition on Somatic Practices is a professional group lobbying for state licensing. Masters degree-level programs in Somatics and at least one doctoral program (at Ohio State University) are currently offered in the United States.