What is Soma?
Soma, your soma, is the organism of your body and all the intelligence of experience it holds. It is the fabric of your being – threading your experiences through the organism of your body. Soma is the vessel for which you give and receive life. It holds your emotions and expresses your thoughts and habits. You are made of soma, and you are soma itself.
If I was to connect Soma with an element it would be ether, or Akasha, because of its all encompassing yet subtle quality.
Soma holds your manas (memory), your samskaras (mental grooves), and your unique causes and conditions that makes you who you are. In greek soma means “of the body”. In english it is defined as “the body of an organism” and in sanskrit, it translates to “the nectar of immortality”.
Somatics is the study and practice of exploring and understanding the fabric of your soma through your internal awareness. These are techniques that invite you into a deep awareness of what it feels like to be inside your own skin you inhabit.
Somatic practices develop your embodiment and awareness – your proprioception, how you body moves in space and your interoception, the experience of your body’s internal sensations and movement.
This word encompasses the practices that we connect with and explore in yoga, embodiment, ritual. How can we use our body, our soma, to guide us into a deeper relationship with our life. Not to simply transcend the body but to respect, understand, and move it in a way that expands our relationship with our outer and inner worlds.
The more deeply we come into right relationship with our body, the more deeply we can expand our field of knowledge and awareness. As a human , we have a wide range of emotions and expressions, unfortunately we don’t also know how to express them. We try to find words for something that that just needs to scream, we try and label something that is just trying to shake, we try dissect our emotions intellectually instead of letting them flow. And in this we hold back what what wants to move, what needs to tremble, and whats trying to heal naturally. We interrupt our body instinctually cycle to please, perform, or conform. Maybe we’ve been taught to believe our natural expression is too much, too loud, too sensitive. Or maybe we think it will make others too uncomfortable or we believe its not socially acceptable. Whatever the reason, we have collectively become severed from the very intelligence that sets us free. Our Soma.
When your soma sends you a signal that it wants to release, cry, shout, step back, leap forward, laugh, or instinctively respond, do you listen? Do you respond? Do you stuff it down?
When we deepen our ability to listen, respond, and release, we gain deeper trust between our mind, body, and soma to navigate our inner and outer landscape. Your soma is always communicating. The practice is learning how to listen and respond.
