Somatic. A word that, thankfully is becoming mainstream, but is still a bit out there for people to fully understand. I heard an amazing definition of it the other day: Somatic work is any work that teaches people how to recognize their emotions as physical sensations in the body. Your emotions are speaking to you frequently through your day. They speak through sensations in the body. So, reconnecting to your body is about learning the language of the emotions. And they never taught it to you before. At the end of this blog I'll share a complimentary guided audio to one of my favorite somatic practices!
I went to therapy for years. And never once did we try to connect my emotions to the sensations in my body. Therapy taught me that I was indeed traumatized, that there were a lot of connections between the trauma I had in childhood to the issues I'm having today, that I needed to calm down when upset, and that my emotions needed to be controlled. I'm actually really grateful for my therapist, she helped me survive the toughest revelations of my trauma. But she didn't help me thrive.
Thriving was never talked about in therapy. And I get that. Therapy is an archaic structure to helping people. Talk therapy is still based on the horrendous "research" of Freud. It was sexist, misogynistic, racist, ableist, and homophobic. And today they'll try to convince you that that stuff has been phased out. But how could a methodology built on those things ever be truly transformative? Talk therapy was one flawed man's attempt to understand the complexity of the human mind. And it just caught on.
This also kind of makes sense. People back then were not talking much. Men would go off to horrific wars and come back home and say nothing for years, if ever, about it. Women were struggling to find any autonomy or power over their own lives, and you would been seen as insane if you dared to speak your desires. Black and Brown people had no recourse against blatant racism, torture, and lynchings. Western society had been expanding under colonialism for thousands of years, disconnecting us from our own indigenous knowledge of the body. Talk must have seemed revolutionary at the time.
Wow, we let this man share about his trauma and he felt better? Incredible! What else does Freud have to say?! But the indigenous peoples of this world have known about the body since the beginning of time. The collective knowledge of humans contains all that we needed to know about the body/mind/energy connection. But some overprivileged, white genius who studied this for a little while was (and still is) more revered than that collective knowledge? No wonder modern society is in such shambles mentally.
Somatic work started gaining popularity in the mid 20th century with many researchers starting to notice the connection between the body and the mind, and the many pitfalls of traditional talk therapy. Things really started to evolve in the 60's and 70's when Eastern mystics started to come to the West and teach body-based transformation. Yoga, Tantra, Taoism, Tai Chi, Zen and more came to the West with answers to the many problems that had become rampant in modern Westen society.
These thousands-of-years old ways of life were deeply connected to the body/mind connection. The body was not something to be ignored or bypassed, but actually were the portal to the transformation. They saw the body as a divine miracle of life, and an integral part of living. And they had ways of reconnecting that lost connection. Tantra, especially, was very focused on getting people out of the minds, into the bodies, and learning the language of the emotions in the body. Practices would focus on breath (to open the unconscious connection), sound (to awaken the chakras), movement (to stir the muscles and tissues), energy (to bring awareness to the body), and mindfulness (to explore that connection).
Then there was a radical acceptance of whatever came up that lead to liberation. Through Tantric practice you can liberate all the things stuck in the body and find your most authentic self. You had to go into the dark, scary places of the body and mind and befriend those pieces with love, gratitude, and acceptance so that you could live free. And this was actually revolutionary in the West.
As soon as people could experience the transformative power of these practices they were hooked, and they saw the flaws of the psychology system. Talking, alone, was not enough to liberate you from this trauma. It was helpful, but didn't access the primal brain, where the healing needed to happen. Studies were done, although difficult to get funding for. And almost every study has shown that somatic practices are more effective at healing than talk therapy. However, changing an entire psychology tradition proved to be difficult. The people in power don't want to have to retrain all the people who have psychology degrees. They don't want to have to rewrite every text book. They don't want to admit fault.
And I get that. It would be a TON of work to redo it all. So, in my mind modern, university-driven psychology is getting left behind. Less and less people trust them. And eventually they will become obsolete. Freud is dead. Somatics will be the next new frontier in healing and transformation. It will be helpful only for people who need to talk through their issues, then, once those people feel ready to start to explore the body, they will move on to new methods. Psychology has to start funding more studies into somatics if they ever want to evolve. They will be forever held back by their ability to fund these crucial studies.
But Tantra does not need studies. We have thousands of years of "case studies". People whose lives have been radically changed by the practice of learning the language of the body, radical acceptance, and honoring the divinity in it all. In my coaching, which uses a combination of ancient Tantric practices combined with cutting edge somatic healing to bring your whole-life liberation, we start with the language of the body. We start with dropping into the sensation and noticing. We start with learning what the body is trying to say. Then we explore from there. But the most important part is getting them in touch with the sensations in the body.
Here's a complimentary practice for starting to awaken to the sensations in the body, even if you've never consciously done it before: Body Meditation | Lona Teaches Bliss
INSPIRED ACTION: If you feel disconnected from the sensations in your body then try this practice for 7 days in a row. Journal about the experience throughout and notice what changes by day 7. If you get to day 7 and find no meaningful changes, then my condolences for what has gotten you here, and I recommend trying this practice for 21 days to begin to awaken this essential practice of the body/mind connection. Somatic work is liberating work!
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