Your experience of yourself is you own unique experience. This is what we practice when we embark on a somatic movement practice. Somatics means to experience your body from the inside perspective. This is in contrast to the outside or objective perspective. One that others may have of us. Our body is the vehicle for our own unique experience of this lived life. Our perceptions, emotions, wants, needs, sensations are all unique to us and it's what makes this a beautiful once only experience of life.
When you embark on a somatic movement practice, some might call it mindfulness, you open up your understanding of how you are participating in life. This doesn't have to be just movement, although this is what I teach here, but it can be anything you do in your life; eating, talking, relating to others. A somatic movement practice helps you become more aware of yourself in life.
Somatic movement helps us understand ourselves. It is a process of enquiry. Do you feel stiffness in some areas? Do you feel mobile in other areas? Do you feel balanced between one side of your body and the other? Uncovering these things and understanding them for yourself will help you to self-correct and improve your posture as you move through your daily activities. This is the beauty of a somatic practice, because although an outside person can tell you where your imbalances are, you won't change unless you can access this information from your own bodily perspective.
It's not only physical aspects that you learn about yourself through somatic enquiry. The body stores emotional information and this affects how we carry ourselves through our days. We can enquire into how we are feeling and what we are carrying emotionally through the way we move and how we move. Are you embodying light-heartedness or are you carrying around the weight of difficult and unprocessed emotions? There's not judgement if you are, in fact we all carry unprocessed emotions to some degree, but somatic work will help you to uncover and examine the way you are moving and holding yourself.
Now, my forte is not in trauma therapy to process such difficult emotions, but in teaching somatic awareness I can guide you to understand where you might be holding on to things that may need to be let go of; uncover those nuggets that you never knew were stored in your body. When you take the time and space to enquire, you tap into unlimited information about yourself. You can access this by being in touch with your body, the way you move and the way you feel when you move.
Becoming aware is the first step to understanding yourself and then you can choose to dig deeper into where you may be holding stuck energy in your body, find a way to let it go, improve your health and free your movement as a result.
So although the movement practices I teach here all differ, what ties them together is you enquiring into your own experience of movement - somatic awareness. How does this body move? How does this body experience the world? Enjoy the unique information that comes through to you and enjoy the experience of being you in the world.