What is Somatics?

To date, my favourite explanation of somatic therapy is from generative somatics elder Staci Haines:

The word Somatics comes from the Greek root soma which means “the living body in its wholeness.” It’s the best word we’ve come up with in English to understand human beings as integrated mind/body/spirit, or a psycho-biology. This understanding is that people are not mind over matter (“if I think differently I will be different”), nor matter over mind or spirit (“a change in chemistry or medication will wholly change my experience”), rather we are all of these things combined - we are thinking and conceptual, we are emotional, we are biological, and we are spiritual. Somatics approaches people as this integrated whole, working with all of these aspects of who we are.

Perhaps what is most unique about Somatics is that it integrates the body (ourselves from the neck down) as an essential place of change, learning and transformation. You can think of it like muscles having memory and the tissues having intelligence. We have learned a more objectifying or dissociated view of the body as a pile of bones and tendons we think of as a science project.

Somatics looks at the body as a place of evolutionary intelligence and learning. Somatics sees the “self” or who we are as inseparable from the psycho-biology. Of course, the mind and body are never really separate (a mind cannot live without a body and vice versa) but we certainly try to operate as if they are. When we reconnect the vast intelligence of the body with the mind and spirit, powerful things happen.