Integrating personal somatic practices in daily life

Click on the image to listen to my conversation with Jamie McHugh
A conversation with somatic therapist Jamie McHugh
What is a “somatic practice,” why should you have one, and if you do have one how can you integrate it into daily life?

Somatic practices are, in a broad sense, any practice during which you have the safety, space and time to feel sensation in your body and to respond to that felt experience. In the sense Jamie and I discuss, it can be a springboard out of climate despair and into action. Jamie is the creator of Somatic Expression®, an integrative approach to the art and craft of embodiment.

prac·tice

/praktəs/

Noun: the actual application or use of an idea, belief, or method, as opposed to theories relating to it.  

Near the end of our talk, Jamie said “I’d probably be a wild eyed maniac if I didn’t have my own practice!” I think that’s doubly true for those of us who work as educators and therapists. Daily, we inquire into emotional, physical, cultural, and ecological truth. It’s a lot to hold without freaking out. The energy we bring to it really effects outcomes.

Jamie has lived a life of dance and movement exploration, healing, communal ritual making, and integrated activism on behalf of our beautiful planet. His experience is a bridge between “modern” dance, somatic practice, and ancient indigenous ceremony. Our conversation covers a journey from The Catholic Church, to smoking pot, to the first dance department in the United States, and finally to Anna Halprin, Emilie Conrad, and Lorin Smith, Kashaya – Pomo healer from my native land of what we now call California.

Somatic practitioners, in Jamie’s view, are continually re-discovering what ancient people already knew.

What we call “somatic” experience is one of the most useful of ancient resources: the felt resonance within ourselves with energies from the natural world. Water, earth, fire, air. Still, it’s up to us to make our own practices, ones that come from our own experiences and history. As teachers, it’s not enough, for me, that we carry forward certain traditions. Nor is it ethical to simply learn and claim someone else’s practice. In the end, we are responsible for creating our own.

We need to have the courage of our own convictions and conduct our own personal research. Scientific proof of the efficacy of somatic practices is important. We are asking folks to give their precious, hard won time to a particular form of study. But think about it; science is studying us! Without our continued practice and experience, there would be nothing to study.

When we are able to feel our bodies as we move through life, we are better able to regulate our nervous systems. This doesn’t mean we don’t get triggered, stressed, or out of balance. It just means we have the capacity to eventually return to balance. That balance is not only within ourselves, but in relationship to the larger ecosystem we are a part of.

If we can regulate ourselves, we can then also co-regulate with others.

This is a core principle of training in the Alexander Technique. We spend one whole year tuning ourselves in relationship to gravity before we start to touch others with our hands.

If we can co-regulate, a whole world of relationship, learning, collaboration and creativity opens to us. This can be with our own fellow humans as a species, other animals, or even trees, rocks, and streams. Given our current state of poly-crisis, we won’t be able to do any of those things without a practice of some kindthat returns us to our own senses.

It’s easier to stay with the flow of sensory experience as you go through daily life… if you practice often enough. Sensation is always flowing and changing. Even when you have an unpleasant sensation or experience, it is often likely to pass. Returning to balance feels good, and is foundation from which we can allow ourselves new feelings, experiences, thoughts and actions.

As Jamie says near the end of our conversation, it’s the getting moving that is hardest. Once you get moving, it’s so much easier to keep going!

I will leave you with this quote from Jamie, via Emilie Conrad:

“When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”

Go HERE to connect with Jamie, and register for his free upcoming series of conversations, Earth Matters: Ecosomatics in the Anthropocene. There are also recording of past conversations available there.

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