Somatics Institute

In Your Body, In the World   These first two practice videos help bridge the practices from Week Eight with the practices you will explore in this week.   Integration Practice: Pulling   Integration Practice: Pushing   How does your inner awareness inform you about your interactions with the world? Every interaction you have in…

What does your body tell you about the space you inhabit? Anatomy of Walking and Grounding     Integrative Practice: Hips Thomas Hanna’s Cat Stretch series contributes a very effective way of connecting the psoas, lower back and walking movements.  Here are a couple of examples of working with the ‘Superman’, without and with a…

  Where Does Your Breathing Begin?   Where Does Your Breathing Begin? Sensing Practice: Noticing Yourself…with a Beanbag   Exploring the Edges of Breath   The most common thing you might notice when you bring awareness to your breath is how it is limited.  The most common approach to working with that limited breath is…

How do sensations guide our interaction with the world? Noticing Yourself   Anatomy of the Spine   Practice: Spinal Ball Rolling   Practice: Spinal Walk Walk for a few minutes, noticing the quality of movement through your spine.  Put a weight on your head – it could be a book or a beanbag.  Notice how…

How Do You Know You Are Breathing? From your first breath to your last, breathing expresses your relationship to the unfolding moment.  How much you breathe moderates the charge in your body, feeding the fires of passion or banking your energetic engagement down to the lowest embers. As an expression of our interaction with life,…

photo by Sylvia Chard How does movement begin? Five Rhythms Movement Warmup For more on Gabrielle Roth’s Five Rhythms/Waves work: https://youtu.be/CA_RlOzHlSI Sensing Inner Landscapes: The Pelvis When you move, sensations we feel come most commonly from two sources – pleasant and unpleasant.  But there is a third category, quietly available to inform your movement, feeding…

How Do I Know That I am Moving?   How Much am I Moved by My Moving? Introduction to Sensations and Movement   How Sensation Organizes Movement   Movement is the expression of your interaction with your environment. In 1917, a movement instructor in Berlin was watching her students move through the ‘natural’ movements inspired…

      Notice Yourself.   What is the shape of your organism in this moment?  What space do you take up? What areas of your body are most noticeable and what areas are missing from your awareness? Create a Baseline of Everyday Awareness   Sensation gives you information about what is happening in this…

  When You Touch…how much are you touched? In every class, I start by inviting you to just notice yourself, the core practice of the course.  As an internal practice, you may want to close you eyes and just listen to the audio. Opening Practice: Notice Yourself   The Subversive Nature of Sensing Practices  …

Welcome to the Embodiment Project. Over the next nine weeks you will embark on a journey into your body, your identity and the space you take in the world. Each week starts with essential somati cs principles, introduces embodiment practices that illustrate the focus of that week, and ends with an introduction to simple experiments…