"Contrary to many forms of movement and exercise, you focus more on the pleasure and creativity of your body in motion rather than what you look like. Rather than whipping yourself into shape to fulfill a goal, you let health benefits accrue naturally by consistently working from the inside out."

Somatic Expression

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Somatic Expression, developed by Jamie McHugh, is an easy, pleasurable and creative way to learn about your body and its movement potential. It is the physical education class you never had! Somatic Expression was designed to help you become more literate and empowered as a thinking body (soma). In this approach, you are guided through the inner landscape of your body so you can explore and become well-versed in the preverbal technologies of breath, vocalization, contact, stillness, and movement. These languages are actually not so foreign - we unconsciously use somatic languages automatically all the time. When we hurt, we instinctively touch ourselves. When we feel tired, we yawn. When we are trying to figure something out, we pace.

These reflexive actions can be made conscious and deliberately used when you understand their purpose. For example, yawning disperses the buildup of tension by releasing the muscles of the diaphragm. So don't wait - go ahead and yawn when you feel tense and see what happens! Walking processes information by using the early motor cross-crawl pattern of right and left-brain integration. So, when you feel stuck, simply go for a walk. Somatic literacy, like any other intelligence, gives you choices and solutions through informed experience. You then have the power and wisdom to change moods, pain, and anxiety through self-initiated somatic dialogues.

A primary intention in Somatic Expression is to befriend your body, making it your ally rather than your enemy. How your body feels rather than how it looks is a priority in Somatic Expression. Contrary to many forms of movement and exercise, you focus more on the pleasure and creativity of your body in motion rather than what you look like. Rather than whipping yourself into shape to fulfill a goal, you let health benefits accrue naturally by consistently working from the inside out. When you take time throughout the day to make contact with your body, it becomes progressively easier to feel at home in your own skin and in the world. By feeling at home, personal comfort and safety increase while fear and discomfort decrease. This incremental change over time slowly transforms the nature of your body and how you feel about yourself. The body of appearance becomes eclipsed by the body of feeling. Daily practice becomes an oasis in ordinary life, whether you take minutes sprinkled here and there, or give yourself a more luxurious time frame for practice.

Rather than dominate your body, you collaborate with it. This is a new paradigm for physical education and exercise, clearly different from my early conditioning. The use of the five somatic languages helps you generate an inner dialogue and understand what your body is trying to say to you. In Somatic Expression, you are not just developing a body; you are growing a brain as well. According to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, somatic awareness is the foundation for self-awareness and consciousness. You cannot have higher states of consciousness without bodily feedback. Using the five somatic languages transforms ordinary consciousness by giving your body's perception - proprioception - a greater place at the table and a larger share of the pie!

Go for a walk outside. Once you get into your stride, with your arms easily swinging in opposition to your legs, pay attention to where your eyes are landing. Now notice how your skull is balanced on your spine. Are you looking down at the ground as you walk? Is your neck flexed forward or your head cocked back? See what happens when you extend your neck vertically and let your eyes rest on the horizon as you begin to walk again. When you look forward this way, your skull easily balances on your spine and you can see more with your peripheral vision. If your habit is to look at the ground to stabilize yourself as you walk, you might feel insecure trying out this option, creating a tightening of both your breathing and your leg muscles. When we are afraid, we tighten, as the function of fear is to STOP movement. Consciously take a few deep breaths in through your nose and out through your mouth to re-center and soothe the anxiety. Go back and forth between your habit (looking at the ground to see what you are walking on) and this new option (looking out on the horizon to see where you are going). Let your inner attention begin to focus more on your feet, noticing your contact with the ground. Wherever we put our attention, the body adjusts itself. And after some time switching back and forth, both habit and option become equally familiar, so then both are possibilities.

This type of activity is not only physical exercise, even though it happens through the medium of your body. When your mind is actively engaged in small postural and respiratory shifts based on sensory feedback, you are also reshaping your neural network. The dialogue between awareness and action makes this activity a somatic exercise. This exploration is the thinking body in motion. Each time you move a muscle, you activate the nervous system through a specific neural pathway. When you walk in your habitual way, you follow a specific neural pathway. When you change the movement by looking ahead rather than down, for example, you are interrupting the habit and charting a new pathway. Interrupting the pattern with new input is the first step - stabilizing the new information through repetition is what helps it take hold. The process of learning with somatic explorations and expressive play literally keeps you supple and alert.

Walking backwards or sideways, crawling or rolling, shaking or rocking – by embodying these simple, non-ordinary activities, you chart new pathways in the motor cortex of your brain. When you breathe in a non-ordinary way, you also add a new pathway. When you touch your skin, you activate other neural pathways. Thus, diversity in movement exploration and expression interrupts stasis and engenders neural innovation.

Learning these five elements is experiential and didactic, including cognitive understanding about your body to help create a motivating context for practice. For example, proprioceptors are the sensing mechanism in muscles that tell us their relative degree of tension or relaxation, as well as where we are in space. When muscles are habitually tight, you cannot get an accurate report from your proprioceptors. As the choreographer Erik Hawkins always used to say, "A tight muscle cannot feel". Excessive tension in the neck inhibits the flow of blood and oxygen to the brain, limiting the brain’s functioning. Imbalances in the easy, upright position of the skull contributes to postural distortion, resulting in maladies such as back pain and headaches. And since fifty percent of your proprioceptors are located in your head and neck, you deprive yourself of alot of sensory feedback when your head is tied up in knots.

So, generate more sensation through self-contact, small movements, or sound vibration to wake up your proprioceptors!

Rub your scalp and tap the back of your neck to generate more circulation and warmth in your tissue.

Move the skull on your atlas (the very top vertebrae which is in-between your ears). Circle in one direction with the inhale and in the other direction with the exhale. This helps fine-tune the subtle balancing of your skull.

Breathe out through your mouth to ease tension patterns in your jaw and breastbone - we all have something to "get off our chest".

All these activities stimulate and awaken more self awareness, making these internal dialogues as much for self-mastery as they are for preventative health care. When you stimulate the sensory feedback process and get a clearer inner reading, you know how to respond. The conversation of bodily listening and response is a fundamental skill that has never been properly valued or taught in our educational history. It has taken me decades to discover the remarkable gift of being a sensing, feeling creature with a mind, rather than a mind with a sensing, feeling creature on a leash! As the bumper sticker proclaims, "It is never too late to have a happy childhood".

Giving daily attention to yourself through the languages of your body becomes simply common-sense behavior. Learning to live comfortably and securely in your own skin to weather the anxiety of change and the constantly shifting landscape of thoughts and moods may be the biggest challenge of this life. And knowing how to steward the garden of your body so you can age with as much grace and health as possible is important as we live longer and longer as a species.

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