Our Somatic Experience – movement workshops

From a very early age, all we are taught is to pay attention to our minds.

We are taught how to read, how to write, how to add and subtract. We are taught our political, geographical and philosophical history. We are taught how the moon orbits the Earth, the Earth orbits the Sun, and all the exciting and complex physical laws that govern these movements.

We are also taught the names of the muscles and bones of our body, how our lungs deliver into our blood the oxygen that fuels our cells, and how that same blood distributes nutrients to our organs. All that very interesting information nourishes our curiosity and brains, and sets the grounds for who we will become in the future, when we choose a profession and spend hours and hours assessing, researching or teaching one of these subjects to the future generations, who are also keen to understand how life works.

There is another important aspect of life, though, rarely addressed during our childhood, or even during our adulthood: our somatic experience.

How we breathe, how our bodies contract, how we experience fear, anger or pain, how we lose our hope or feel defeated by the challenges of life are subjects rarely tackled even though these experiences constitute a very relevant part of our lives and are key to how these lives will develop.

Later on, in teenage or adulthood, when we wake up to life and start meeting the many challenges awaiting, we come to realise that there is a phenomenon called tension —never addressed in Biology class— that builds up in our muscles and creates great discomfort. We soon notice that moods —such as anger, fear, lack of confidence, anxiety— get stuck in our experience, colouring many of our days, bringing sadness, despair and hopelessness to our lives. We eventually understand that some ideas, thoughts or conclusions can settle very comfortably in our minds and affect many decisions I make, constricting or defining who I end up being for many years or a whole lifetime.

Learning about our somatic experience can help us understand how our body and mind work and how to become responsible for our own wellbeing.

I can let go of tension in my body by learning how to relax a muscle. I can get rid of a belief or conclusion in my mind by gathering enough attention and mental discipline to stop it from repeating over and over. I can drop a mood off my experience by focusing my attention and allowing the fear, anger or pain that fuels that mood in my body. I just need to learn how to do any of that.

The ability to relax a tension, stop a repetitive idea or drop a mood exists within our bodies. It is deeply connected to our attention and willpower. By strengthening our willpower, learning to control our attention and developing our bodily awareness, all these somatic experiences will fall under our control. We will not get rid of growing tense, becoming worried, or getting angry, scared or frustrated, but we will have means to address those experiences when they happen.

Developing our attention and bodily awareness will give us tools to be more efficient in anything we want to achieve.

It will open a path to become more of who I really want to be, not being diminished by the tiredness that tensions create in my body, the constrictions that conclusions and beliefs create in my mind, or the heaviness that moods add to my life.

Learning how to deal with our somatic experience and how to take control over it will allow us to have more energy every day —more energy to do or achieve whatever we want to. It will help us become more responsible of our own health as we will be able to notice more clearly what harms us and how to stop it. We will start grasping the possibility of avoiding conditions and even certain illnesses that may develop in the body after a long time of holding tensions, beliefs or moods in our lives.

This learning won’t come easily. Like all other subjects in life, it takes time, commitment and discipline. You don’t become a professor in Physics after a weekend workshop. But the knowledge exists. The possibility is here. And the reward is tempting; learning about our somatic experience will help us live a healthier, happier and more fulfilling life. Worth giving it a try?

Ivan Andrade, Somatic Trainer & Founder of The Conscious Body

www.ivanandrade.info

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