As people drawn to healing work, we want to support others and we are (hopefully) trying to do the opposite of causing harm. Because of that desire, it is perhaps even more painful when we hurt others without meaning to, because our intentions feel so clear to us. But it is inevitable that through our differences in experience and understanding tha

The unique characteristics of each method evolved from particular locations in history and geography.

undoing my own poisonous feelings around fatness, I also need to undo toxic internalizations of all of the systemic oppression that is compounded into our culture’s body ideals. I need to be actively working to dismantle all of the systems of oppression that are wrapped up in how I have learned to relate to my body. In this writing, I am not attemp

An older meaning of “body” in Anglo-Saxon carried this meaning. Bottich or bodig was derived from the term used for brewing vats, the containers in which spirits were distilled from grains and fruit. Before the eviscerating assaults by Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and others, which cleaved the interiority of the imagination, feeling, and sensation f

Ideas emerge from bodily practices in two very different forms: from what is done to us, and what we do, both just going about our lives—infant handling, walking, sitting, breathing, studying; and deliberately chosen activities such as exercise regimens, dance, diet, and meditation practices.

have feared slowing down because I have always been on the move. My body feared stillness because of the vulnerability I would encounter. I slowly began to trust the feeling of letting go in my physical body, as well as my mental and spiritual bodies as well. Thich Nhat Hanh says that when we let go we are letting go of something. What was it that

The original innovators of somatics emerged in the climate of two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the residues of slavery in the United States and the devastations of our indigenous populations. Most of them were fully aware that personal and small-group healing, though necessary, was not enough to assure a truly human life within institutions that

both shared the notion that the body and its sensibilities are central factors in social change.

Sometimes I place my hand on the center, massaging it gently like you would a clenched muscle. The goal is to disperse the sensation so that my whole body can be used to digest and metabolize it, so it does not just become an acute burden for a small part of me to manage.