COMPANION NOTES: on somatic first-aid
Reflections on the capacity for listening to the language of the body, plus unexpected indie-rock, and a soulful poetry choice.
Somatic practices and somatic therapy ask us to pay close attention to the interconnected field of our bodymind. In this act of paying attention, we create a temporal space in which information about our experience can be collected. The capacity for gathering information about where we are in our environment is mediated through one, some, or all of the five main senses and this capacity may not be the same for each of us.
In addition to these five key senses, we might also be able to connect our body to the environment through the sense of proprioception - knowing where your body is in space and how it is arranged: are you sitting as you read this? are you leaning into a chair? are your feet on the ground? Furthermore, we might have access to a kinaesthetic sense that tells us how our body is moving - when you next go walking, notice that you can become aware of whether you are moving fast or slow, whether your arms are swinging, or if one heel strike is heavier than the other.
All this information is traveling through our nervous system from external sources, however, we might also have a capacity for noticing things about our experience that have an internal source. This might be about feelings like hunger and tiredness, or emotions like joy and anger. This type of information depends on the capacity we have for something called interoception.
I wrote this longish introduction as a way of acknowledging that the concept of “somatic first-aid” is reliant on: 1) a capacity for feeling safe with the body, 2) the ability and willingness to tune into experience and gather information about it, and 3) the skills to interpret the information in a meaningful way. None of this is a given for a variety of reasons and we do what we can. I can testify, however, that it is possible to become more fluent in the language of our own body and like many things practice helps.
GUIDED PRACTICE
The movement exploration practice I’ve recorded expands on how we might make a side-bending movement and how we use language to initiate and experience the same movement in different ways.