Somatic Meditation
What do these words even mean?
The deeper I get into mindbody science, the more I am blown away by what it has to teach me. In this newsletter I’ll dig into an approach to meditation I never really understood until now. I’ll share my perspective on what makes it powerful and explore how it differs from my traditional longstanding meditation practice. 1
First, the groundwork. A basic search of word “somatic,” or, “relating to the soma,” will lead you to the Oxford English Dictionary definition where you will learn that “soma” is a fermented ritualistic intoxicant (aka a Vedic version of Kiddush or Communion).
As truly fun as that drink sounds (and it does sound fun), I prefer Thomas Hanna’s2 definition of soma as described in his groundbreaking book: “the body experienced from within, emphasizing the mind-body connection and the body as a living, self-aware process.”
In other words, somatics is the study of how humans experience their bodies from within. This is a more nuanced take than I understood a few years ago, when I thought, like most people do, that our bodies are external objects moving through space, and that somatic simply meant “of the body.”
It’s an important distinction, and it relates to why somatic meditation has been misunderstood and underexplored. If your mindset is “a meditation for a body moving in space,” then somatic meditation is a pretty simple thing. In fact, as part of my early work on How We Feel in 2021, I produced this video on walking meditation:
If you had asked me then, that video ^^ is what I would have pointed to as an example of somatic meditation. And it is! But I believe it is missing some of the most important features of “the body experienced from within” kind of somatic mediation that Hanna describes. To understand what I mean, take a look at this popular Youtube video on somatic mediation hosted by Sukie Baxter:
Note that in the past, I may have written off Sukie’s video before watching it due to a misunderstanding of what trauma actually is,3 but I encourage you to avoid that mistake. That said, most of you will not want to spend the 13 minutes it takes to watch the video, and as a consummate fast newsletter skimmer, I support that. Here’s a breakdown for all of you fast skimming readers:
In both traditional and somatic mediation, you are…
Building your awareness of the present moment
Creating space between you and your thoughts
Grounding your body in the present moment (e.g. “Notice the ground underneath your feet, the cushion underneath you”)
In somatic meditation, however, you are also…
Keeping your eyes and ears open in order to engage with your environment
Using your surroundings for intentional nervous system regulation4
Building a psychological bridge between the outside world and your inner world5
Grounding your body through intentional, slow movement (e.g. “Wiggle your toes and feel the carpet underneath them”) which gives your brain more sensory information that allows it to recalibrate at an unconscious level
Doing a very lightweight version of the kind of movement found in EMDR therapy6 by allowing your eyes to move bilaterally
Bringing attention to the felt experience of the body without lingering on pain7
Expanding your sensory inputs through bilateral listening (7:20 in Sukie’s video)
Orienting your nervous system to the present moment which allows it to discharge the stored stress you aren’t even consciously aware of
It’s taken me about a year to really understand the power of somatic meditation, so if this all feels a bit confusing, just know you are not alone. The information I have shared in this newsletter is very hard won — there isn’t much information I could find online that talks about this topic in this way. That’s even more a reason I wanted to share this with you all today. I’m sure this topic will come up more in future newsletter, but for now I’m glad to have shared the basics, and hope it will inspire you to give this new approach a try.
If you do end up trying somatic meditation, I’d love to hear how it worked for you. Share in the comments below!
Footnotes from original Substack piece
Here’s a very short newsletter I wrote in 2017 inspired by my daily Headspace practice. From 2015-2018 I meditated for at least 20 minutes most days, graduating from guided mediation on Headspace to a simple sitting practice with my own visualizations — a gong to signal every ten minutes that passes — using Insight Timer.
Thomas Louis Hanna (November 21, 1928 – July 29, 1990) was a philosophy professor and movement theorist who coined the term somatics in 1976. You can learn more about him in this interview I did with Sarah Warren, the founder of the Clinical Somatics practice I love.
This newsletter one year ago: “I never thought of myself as someone who was in the “trauma” category. Trauma is a very serious word. I never thought my small daily struggles rose to the level of “somatic trauma response. I now know that many different things can lead to lower case “T” trauma response,” or, as Dr. Gabor Maté states, “Trauma is not what happens to you, it's what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.”
Allowing your eyes to land on something that catches your attention, then spending time taking in details helps move your nervous system from sympathetic to parasympathetic, fight or flight to rest and digest.In her video, Sukie asks, “Notice the movement of your breath, the rhythm of your heartbeat. Are you able to attend to that feeling inside your body while maintaining that connection to your external environment?” This is intentional conscious bridge-building between what is happening inside vs outside.
In her video, Sukie asks, “Notice the movement of your breath, the rhythm of your heartbeat. Are you able to attend to that feeling inside your body while maintaining that connection to your external environment?” This is intentional conscious bridge-building between what is happening inside vs outside.
I’m saying this even though I know (as you’ll see in the EMDR piece I link to) that there is no consensus around what makes EMDR work and some people will say, for example, “it is not the bilateral stimulation that works in EMDR, but dual attention accompanied by physical stimulation.”
This helps your primitive brain (which loves to focus on negative feelings) to understand that there are always a wide variety of sensations happening inside our bodies at all times, allowing the space for that variety.
