What are Somatic Practices?

In the large family of somatic methods or somatic education, we find common denominators.

They are often known as “gentles” and “alternatives”. Those methods (Alexander, Feldenkrais, Eutonie, Rolfing, holistic gymnastics, Body-Mind Centering… amongst other) started to emerge at the end of the XIXe century, alongside new experimental fields in human and social sciences; from physiology to neurosciences, psychology, sociology and psychoanalysis.

- They use imagery in the visualisation and imagination of a movement.

- Their approach is holistic and the body is experienced and understood in its cognitive, motor, affective and sensory dimensions.

- A strong emphasis is put on subjective experience in order to refine perception and particularly the kinesthetic sense (which allows us to know which position we are in, if we are still or in movement, and where each part of our body is in relation to the others)

Beyond those common principles, somatic approaches are multiple and each of them invent and diffuse different imaginations of the body.

Some map the tissues and their biological characteristics – fascias, muscles, skin, bones, guts – to examine changes in movement or posture. Others base their observations on the construction of coordinations, and the repertory of habitual gestures that we can learn to recompose by cultivating plasticity. Still others favour a work on perception.

Their common aim is to transform neuromuscular patterns of movement through visualisation or touch to reprogram the nervous system, responsible of sending impulses to the muscles.

And because the nervous system consist of two divisions – sensorial and motor – that function hand in hand, everything that affects the one affects the other. Automatisms and certain habits limit our faculty of perception; therefore of interpretation, creation and adaptation, and it becomes difficult to adapt to new and changing situations.

Somatic education is based on the idea that changes in movement do not only occur with voluntary repetitive motor exercises but also through sensory refinement.

Developing the ability to sense in order to act, becomes a somatic leitmotiv.

Carla Bottiglieri, paysage (inachevable) des pratiques somatiques, drawing realised for the seminar « Le fond gestuel », La Manufacture, 2016

Sources: https://www.pourunatlasdesfigures.net/element/pratiques-somatiques