What Does “Somatic” Mean?

The word somatic comes from the Greek word sōma (σῶμα), meaning the living body. Not the body as an object, but the body as it is experienced from within. A breathing body. A sensing body. A body that feels, perceives, remembers, and responds.

To speak of the somatic is not to speak about muscles and mechanics alone, but about the body as a field of awareness. The place where experience happens before it becomes thought. Before it becomes story. Before it becomes belief.

In this sense, somatic awareness is not something we learn. It is something we remember.

A Thread Through Time

Long before the word “somatic” entered Western academic language, human cultures understood the body as a site of intelligence.

Indigenous traditions across the world oriented knowledge through the body—through rhythm, breath, movement, ritual, and sensation. Yogic systems in India mapped the body as a subtle network of energy, perception, and consciousness. Taoist traditions understood the body as a living landscape through which life force flows. Buddhist teachings described awareness as something cultivated through direct observation of sensation, breath, and internal experience.

These were not “body practices” as we might frame them today. They were ways of knowing.

In Western philosophy, this thread was later carried by thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who challenged the split between mind and body, proposing that perception itself arises through the lived body (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012). We do not merely have bodies, he suggested. We are bodies in relationship with the world.

The modern field of somatics took clearer form in the 20th century through the work of Thomas Hanna, who used the term “somatics” to describe the study of the body as experienced from within (Hanna, 1988). Around the same time, pioneers across psychology, movement, and neuroscience began to articulate what many traditions had long held: that experience, memory, emotion, and meaning are not held in the mind alone, but are woven throughout the living body.

Somatic Awareness Today

In contemporary contexts, somatic approaches now appear across psychotherapy, trauma studies, contemplative science, and embodiment practices.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio demonstrated that feeling states arising from the body are central to consciousness, perception, and decision-making (Damasio, 1999). Psychiatrists and clinicians have increasingly shown how experience is patterned not only cognitively, but physiologically and relationally (van der Kolk, 2014). Research continues to affirm that sensation, emotion, posture, breath, and internal awareness shape how we interpret and meet reality (Mehling et al., 2018).

Yet even as somatics becomes more visible in scientific and therapeutic language, its essence remains simple.

Somatic awareness is the practice of listening.

Listening to sensation.
Listening to rhythm.
Listening to the subtle ways life moves through us before it becomes words.

The Body as a Living Interface

A relationship with the body offers us something quietly radical.

It returns us to direct experience.

Rather than relating to life only through interpretation, we begin to relate through sensation. Through resonance. Through subtle shifts of feeling, tone, and presence.

Over time, this kind of listening refines perception. It strengthens intuition—not as something mystical, but as the natural capacity to sense coherence, incongruence, openness, and contraction as they arise. The body becomes a living interface between inner experience and outer reality.

As this relationship deepens, many people notice that connection also changes.

Connection with self becomes less conceptual and more immediate.
Connection with others becomes less reactive and more responsive.
Connection with source, life, or meaning becomes less distant and more embodied.

In this way, somatic awareness does not pull us inward away from the world. It roots us more fully into it.

It offers a way of inhabiting experience where thought is no longer the only guide. Where wisdom is not abstract. Where awareness moves through flesh, breath, and perception.

To cultivate a relationship with the body is not to control it.
It is to remember that we are already in conversation.

And that this conversation has always been one of our deepest sources of knowing.

References

Damasio, A. R. (1999). The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. Harcourt Brace.

Hanna, T. (1988). Somatics: Reawakening the mind’s control of movement, flexibility, and health. Addison-Wesley.

Mehling, W. E., Acree, M., Stewart, A., Silas, J., & Jones, A. (2018). The multidimensional assessment of interoceptive awareness, version 2 (MAIA-2). PLOS ONE, 13(12), e0208034. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0208034

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1945)

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.