What is Somatic Education? Imagine a practice that helps you truly understand the conversation happening between your body and your emotions. That’s somatic education — a transformative approach to deepening our awareness of how our physical selves are intimately connected to our emotional landscapes. This field of study teaches us to recognize and regulate the profound impacts our bodies have on our emotional health and overall life quality.
Assessing Our Learning: Take a moment and ask yourself: When and where did you ever learn about how your body responds to the world around you? Chances are, the answer is a resounding “nowhere.” Our educational systems, cultural narratives, and even medical advice have largely overlooked this fundamental aspect of human experience.
I grew up consciously unaware of my emotions, body responses, and relational interactions. Like all of us, I had moments when I felt happy or sad. If I were to think about my emotions, I would assume they were in response to my environment. I was just a passenger on the train.
Back in the late 1970s, when I found myself in Boulder, CO, in the epic center of somatic therapies, had an awakening. My emotions were linked to my body. Before I had an awareness, I had an emotion. Before I had an emotion, I had a subtle body response. Over time, repeated situations of unfelt and unexpressed emotions began to store themselves in my soft tissue, creating more than tension. I discovered from my studies and experience that my tension produced structural and emotional patterns that became self-perpetuating. I began to realize that even without an external situation triggering a stress response, my body’s behavior patterns would create stress responses.
My belief that my mind was in charge melted away. It was as if I had another operating system running in the background. The wizard behind the curtain was my physiology-unconscious-emotions triad driving the bus — not my conscious mind; I was told my conscious mind was or at least should be driving the bus.
Historical Perspective: The split between mind and body can significantly be traced back to The Enlightenment Era, particularly to René Descartes’ philosophy. His famous statement “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am) positioned thinking as the essence of human identity, effectively sidelining the body as merely a vessel or machine. This philosophy laid the groundwork for a medical and educational system that often treats the mind and body as separate entities, leading to a segmented approach to health that overlooks the interconnectedness of our physical and emotional selves.
Enduring Impact: This Cartesian dualism has long-lasting effects on how we perceive and treat mental and physical health today. It is reflected in how symptoms are often treated in isolation rather than looking at the whole person1. The result? A culture that often promotes disconnection and disembodiment.
Educational System’s Gap: Look back at your school days. Was there ever a class that taught you how to tune into your body’s signals, manage stress through bodily awareness, or cultivate emotional resilience through physical practices? Probably not. Our education systems are primed to prioritize cognitive development, often at the expense of emotional and somatic education.
Schools in The Industrial Era were designed with standardization at their core, primarily to prepare students for factory work, where uniformity and compliance were highly valued. This system, characterized by fixed schedules, rote memorization, and a one-size-fits-all curriculum, aimed to produce workers who could efficiently fit into the industrial economy. This approach, while effective for manufacturing needs, often overlooked individual learning styles and emotional development, focusing instead on producing a homogeneous workforce ready for the demands of an industrial society. Such a system, still evident in many of today’s educational practices, can neglect the development of critical thinking, creativity, and emotional intelligence, which are crucial for holistic human growth.
Consequences of Disconnection: This gap has real-world impacts. Without the skills to manage bodily responses to stress or understand the link between our emotions and physical state, we are at a higher risk for chronic stress, relationship difficulties, and less resilient health. Moreover, a disconnection from our bodies can diminish our overall enjoyment of life, leading to a numbed existence where stress and discomfort may go unaddressed or misunderstood.
As we wrap up the first part of our exploration into somatic education, it becomes clear that to live fully integrated lives, we need to relearn and reclaim the wisdom of our bodies. This journey is not just about adding another tool to our wellness toolkit; it is about fundamentally changing how we relate to ourselves and our environments.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series, where we will dive deeper into how we can reconnect with our bodies through somatic practices, learn about the dissociation of the freeze response, and explore how MELD is pioneering this crucial education.
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