“These conscious somatic practices are a form of conflict resolution, working out through the body many of the tensions, frustrations and competing agendas circulating inside.”

Somatic Expression

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Somatic Expression is a form of physical education, sustainable bodywork and the therapeutic/ expressive arts. You learn about your inner landscape with the pre-verbal elements of breath, sound, touch, stillness, and movement. Exploring these five elements nurtures your nature, creating more aliveness, ease and awareness. They are pre-verbal “technologies” hard-wired in your system to support health and harmony.

The use of these elements and the attention to felt experience becomes an oasis in everyday life, whether you take minutes sprinkled throughout the day, or give yourself a more luxurious time frame for practice. This on-going practice over time transforms the nature of your body, with slow, incremental changes becoming a sustainable and self-generated form of bodywork.

A primary intention of this work is to befriend your body and cultivate safety, acceptance and freedom. 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 creates the conditions for expressing yourself creatively, and connecting with others and your environment.

How your body feels rather than how it appears is a priority in Somatic Expression. Contrary to many forms of movement and exercise, the focus is on working from the inside out, maximizing the pleasure of your body in motion rather than whipping yourself into shape. Health benefits are gained naturally as you pay more attention and collaborate in this process of being a living body. This is a new paradigm for being with ourselves. It certainly is contrary to my conditioning. No one ever told me my body was a source of intelligence and of knowing. No one ever told me I could live comfortably and graciously inside of my own skin. As a result, 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!

You are not just developing a body through this form of physical education; you are growing a brain as well. According to brain researcher Antonio Damasio, somatic awareness is the foundation for self-awareness. The conscious use of the five elements of breath, sound, touch, stillness, and movement transforms consciousness by giving your organism another language of perception.

The learning of the five elements is primarily experiential and process-oriented, but also inclusive of cognitive principles about the body and its organization to create a context for practice. Giving daily attention to ourselves becomes common-sense behavior. For example, when muscles are habitually tight, we cannot accurately feel ourselves. Lack of feeling contributes to an absence of self-perception, or proprioception. (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.) Since fifty percent of our proprioceptors are located in our head and neck, it makes sense to give attention to that area daily to generate more feedback and response. 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 balancing of the skull create postural distortions, resulting in maladies such as back pain. Generating more sensation enhances the feedback process; knowing how to use this sensory information, such as aligning our spinal column or deepening our breath, allows us to respond in a manner that serves our freedom and ease.

Breathing out through the mouth eases the tension patterns in the jaw, allowing the jaw to come forward and down. Aligning our spinal column by smiling up and back is a way to shift the balance of the head and neck. Moving the skull on the atlas, circling in one direction with the inhale and in the other direction with the exhale, helps us attend to the subtle balancing of the skull. And rubbing the scalp, tapping the back of the neck, stroking along the jaw line forward and downward while simultaneously making the sound ‘AW’ … all of these activities stimulate and awaken more self awareness.

This conversation within our organism, between listening and response, is a fundamental self-dialogue. It can be viewed as physiological self-regulation, or preventative health care; psychological self-activation, or self-mastery; and even spiritual practice, or self-awakening.

Increasing somatic literacy parallels increasing awareness of your psychological states in this work. Attending to your body with mindfulness creates the self-support and grounding for exploring feelings and obsolete belief systems. Sensation illuminates what you are actually feeling in the present moment. Feeling can then be experienced as it is now and differentiated from any automatic and habitual assumptions about what it means.

These conscious somatic practices are a form of conflict resolution, working out through the body many of the tensions, frustrations and competing agendas circulating inside. Tension is a tangible indicator of internal conflict. For example, this could be conflict between what you want to do and what you are obliged to do (a psychic process). Or it could simply be a conflict between how you have habituated yourself to move, and how the organism is actually designed to move (a somatic process). In my work, I have discovered that most tensions are usually a combination of the psychic and somatic. By re-educating your body to work in concert with nature, you can free up more energy. You are able to remove many of the physiological impediments to well being, and can attend more easily to the psychic ones.

Re-organization of bodily tensions and old trauma is at the heart of a personal reconciliation process. In this reconciliation, you are renegotiating your experience of the past and integrating it into the present. How you have been formed is not irrevocable. Yet, it is also not dispensed with easily. Your formation never disappears. It only loses its power over you. As Marjorie Barstow, the great teacher of the Alexander Technique, used to say, “It is not about letting go of our tensions, but is a matter of re-organizing them so they serve us.”

Learning to live comfortably and securely in our own skin with a stable center to weather the anxiety of change and the constantly shifting landscape of thoughts and moods may be the biggest challenge of this lifetime. As outer life becomes more complex, how can we stabilize ourselves to withstand the non-stop barrage of stimulus so we can live with more peace? And, paradoxically and complementarily, how can we mobilize ourselves into action and participate in the complexity of the world so we can live with more aliveness?

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Jamie McHugh.