Somatic Movement: Entering the subject

In teaching somatic movement, one of things I work convey to students is holistic self-perception and perception of environment as the fertil ground of the work we do together. This is a subjective, living landscape, it is a landscape we enter through the senses, including the proprioceptive senses of movement, equilibrium and orientation.  This is different from an external object orientation that focuses on the images and roles as others relate to you.  This felt sense of self comes from within and is connected to the physical, emotional and mental life that lives within us, that is not fixed and static, but that is living and dynamic, morphing and responsive.  It is the verb of life.  The root word "somatics" comes from the Greek "somatikos"  meaning "of the body".  In the field of somatics, we are interested in the whole living breathing feeling body, as contrasted by the Western medical model that arises from a study of cadavers and isolated organs and parts.

To enter subjective landscape of individual, personal perception requires leaving the shores of the familiar, the predigested, the world of easy cultural stereotypes.  We free ourselves by entering the present, through breath, through felt movement and through sound.  The idea is to break up the conditioned tensions and responses enough to open up fresh perception and to be able to surrender and allow something new to unfold.  As new patterns of movement and experience unfold, so too do new expressions.  We leave the world of limited mechanistic expression into a much more complex living unfolding matrix of experience that is deeply nourishing.  As we are able to move from a limited organization of movement into a much more open breathing feeling matrix our experience of ourselves undergoes sometimes vast changes in favor of well-being, the pleasure of being alive that is our birthright.

The use of "felt movement" is a kind of movement/dance meditation, that is to say, it is bringing awareness to movement and allowing movement to arise from authentic or felt impulses.  This is different from the trained patterns and responses of a ballerina, that while aesthetically appealing, may in fact be carried out at great expense to the body, in denial of pain, and out of touch with the natural movement  impulses of the body.  In our work, we tune into the individual body, your body and its movement capabilities, needs, impulses, that naturally reveal our inner self.  As we play in this field, our "range of play" expands, our movement capabilities expand, as does our sense of self.

The use of the breath is key.  As Anna Halprin has said, "dance is breath made visible". The breath is the one part of the autonomic nervous system—responsible for the unconscious functions and responses that keep us alive—that we can easly consciously control. By slowing and lengthening the exhale, we can activate a parasympathic response.  The parasympathetic nervous system is associated with nourishing and restorative relaxation responses as opposed to the sympathetic branch which is in charge of the fight or flight response which serves us well when there is a threat, however it it often gets stuck on "on" due to modern life stressors, thus not allowing the rest and restorative cycles of the parasympathetic nervous system to balance us.  Once the parasympathetic response if activated we can slip into deeper layers of self-awareness and discovery.

The use of sound is also incredibly useful for entering deeper, more expansive and subtle layers of awareness.  The work of Jill Purce and Emily Conrad have been a deep influence on my work in regard to the use of sound.  Consciously using the vibration of the sound of our own voice allows us at once to use breath and subtle vibration to stimulate body tissue and muscle and the nervous system in ways that rapidly open up new dimensions of perception, breaking up habitual patterns of tension that keep us bound to very limited perceptions of self, other, and the environment.

Tension serves to block sensation.  For many of us, traumatic events in childhood, or family and cultural legacies, are held as tension in the body that limit our development and keeping us from the richness of life at later stages in life.  While there were certainly valid survival strategies involved in developing the tension patterns to "hold us together," we often find that these habits no longer serve us, and in fact are holding us back from living a full satisfying life.  Through the use of movement, breath and sound, we can enter into a living dynamic, gentle and loving relationship with all that we are and as we begin to enter into ourselves, we also paradoxically step out of ourselves into a larger world of possibilities and statisfying relationships with the people and world around us.