where the body of water changes

Our bodies remember joy, resilience, survival and trauma – quite literally. Somatics takes this knowing, and supports us to have new or different responses, often based in an increased capacity and more aliveness; allowing us to take a different embodied shape, one more aligned with our inherent dignity and wisdom.

 

Somatics can also be understood as a modality that supports us to renegotiate trauma, so that a charge or numbness can be released from the body, while honoring everything that shows up along the way, including dissociation. Considering that trauma can be understood as “too much too fast, or too little too often”, somatics usually works gradually, supporting our capacity to grow into our new shapes, and not overwhelming the system with sensation.

 

Often times healing modalities (i.e. therapy) can be ahistorical and decontextualized from systemic and societal structures and experiences. Politicized somatics recognizes that society and history (personal, family, community and systemic) are all a source of shaping us. In other words, we are shaped and hold the impacts of racism, patriarchy, whiteness and white supremacy, capitalism etc. These are not abstract concepts, but lived and living experiences in our somas (aka. bodies).

 

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Below from: Prentis Hemphill, Finding Our Way podcast, S1Ep5

 

"The western world puts a name on things, oftentimes a white guy's name on things, and pretends it's new. But all of our cultures have practices. Most cultures ARE practices of embodiment. Our dancing, our singing, our relationship to land, the places where we make contact, the stories we create to make meaning of our lives, all of that to me is somatics.

 

The word somatics exists in a Western context to point out the break that happened between our minds and our bodies. Somatics doesn't make sense in some ways, without that break having happened, it's a term and a field of study that emerges from that break of colonization. But before that, we still practiced embodiment. Before that, there were still practices across the world that helped us feel ourselves and our internal worlds.

 

There's absolutely a white washing of the field, but it's also because we have not been taught to look at our own practices as knowledge. We're not always trained to look at the little morsels of truth that have been passed down through the subtlest of movements and motions...It's important for us to keep looking in, looking in our own lives and our own histories, for the route of embodiment"

 

~ Prentis Hemphill, Finding Our Way Podcast, S1Ep5

More of Prentis' work can be found here: https://prentishemphill.com/, including The Embodiment Institute: https://www.theembodimentinstitute.org/ and the Black Embodiment Initiative: https://www.theembodimentinstitute.org/bei