The consequences of relying on hope without new practices lead to a downward spiral of frustration, resignation, and hopelessness.

It’s important to remember that these moments that begin to define us are not disembodied thoughts or memories, but experiences that find a home in our musculature, voice, posture, in our very way of being.

It’s evolutionary in that it asks us to confront our own compulsion for separateness and how separation breeds aggression and violence against our self, others, and the environment. It’s evolutionary because it’s the next step for human beings to embody the principles of harmony that are explicit in nature, and in the cosmos.

When our awkwardness (a sure sign of learning), resistance, and impatience to learning arise we’re coached to see how this reaction is historically embodied. Becoming aware of the frustration that can accompany the learning process allows us to more easily deal with our shame, embarrassment, or striving as we travel this new ground. We’re encourage

Most of us live out lives that we’ve unconsciously inherited, and we’re mimicking patterns of living that have been passed on to us by family, school, religion, government, economic institutions, and the media. We have lost touch with the rich, subjective life of being in the human body, upon which our entire experience is based. The body, the soma

Stepping into our body can quickly reveal a deeply ingrained fear of uncertainty, the resistance to letting go to something larger than our self.

From a somatic point of view living any distance from our bodies is dodgy and the consequences harmful, even grave. Now we can scientifically ground, through technological advances in the emerging field of neuroscience, that distancing ourselves from our body places not only our physical health at risk, but our emotional health as well. Furthermore

The term somatics derives from the Greek somatikos, which signifies the living, aware, bodily person. It posits that neither mind nor body is separate from the other; both being part of a living process called the soma.

The value of connecting with Spirit through the soma is that it keeps us authentic and aligned around our spiritual aspirations and the issues of our everyday life. Spirit in the somatic sense allows us to be in the world taking action, but not of the world in an overly attached ego way.