In the last few years I’ve noticed a distinct shift in the way that Pilates, and other movement teachers (including myself), describe their practice as ‘somatic’. As I was scrolling through facebook I came across an ad for a ‘somatic workout’ which showed a video of someone making their way through a number of ‘moves’ (a cross between pilates and yoga). I had to take a step back and calm myself down a little, because I just couldn’t get my head around how this material could ever be considered ‘somatic’. I wonder whether the term isn’t being overused, just like the catch-phrase ‘body-mind’ or the term ‘holistic’ that infiltrated the fitness world in the naughties and led to a series of movement classes like ‘yoga-lates’ and ‘body-balance’. I’m not against these classes, in principle, they serve a purpose if only by making both yoga and pilates accessible to a wider community, though perhaps at the risk of being somewhat reductive/ simplistic versions.

So to get things straightened out a little, I thought I’d set out a few definitions to get some clarity around the word ‘somatic’ before I then delve into what I actually mean when I use the term in relation to my teaching. In this blog I set out to argue that ‘somatics’ is not a set of ‘moves’ - the content of what you do - but is, instead, an overarching approach to how you move.

The History of the Term ‘Somatics’

The term ‘somatics’ was first coined by the movement practitioner Thomas Hanna in 1986. Hanna defined somatics as:

‘...a field of study dealing with somatic phenomena: i.e., the human being as experienced by himself from the inside’ (Hanna, 1986).

However the field had been in existence since the early twentieth century. Writing in 2009, Martha Eddy provides a historical account of the several practitioners who all emerged with their distinct disciplines over the course of the last century. Many had some connection to dance and had been forced to move out of Europe during or before the second world war (the connection between the field and the notion of displacement being a particularly interesting one). These practitioners included the likes of Moshe Feldenkrais, Ida Rolf, F.M. Alexander, and Imgard Bartenieff amongst many others. Pilates practitioners often throw our own Joseph (and Clara) Pilates in here, but whilst they were indeed a member of the displaced community of movement practitioners who set up practices in New York, and were influenced by many of the same practitioners who informed the somatic movement community, I believe Pilates’ technique of ‘contrology’, with its emphasis on ‘control’, had drawn different conclusions to those of their somatic movement peers. I’ll come to that later.

The Features of a Somatic Practice

What’s significant is that the term ‘somatics’ emerged as a shared perspective across multiple movement disciplines. Each discipline had its own formats, but they shared common features. For anyone curious about the breadth and range of these practices, Don Hanlon Johnson’s Bone, Breath and Gesture provides a useful taster of the writings of key somatic-movement pioneers of the twentieth century.

Martha Eddy explains the common features running across the vast range of practices. I’m pasting this description in full here, because I think it gives a clear picture of the ‘how’ of a somatic approach, if you take away the ‘what’ or content:

'Each person and their newly formed ‘discipline’ had people take time to breath, feel and ‘listen to the body,’ often by beginning with conscious relaxation on the floor or lying down on a table. From this gravity-reduced state, each person was guided to pay attention to bodily sensations emerging from within and move slowly and gently in order to gain deeper awareness of ‘the self that moves’. Students were directed to find ease, support, and pleasure while moving – all the while paying attention to proprioceptive signals. Participants were also invited to experience increased responsiveness as they received skilled touch and/or verbal input as ‘fresh stimuli’ from a somatic educator or therapist.' (Eddy, 2009)

As a movement educator I find this description quite enlightening. If you take away the content of my classes, you’ll recognise (I hope) the above features in my approach to teaching. It’s one of the reasons why many participants who come to my class for the first time (though not all) may be surprised by the slowness of the pace and the level of detail that this affords. How can you sense-into the weight of the thigh-bone dropping into the hip socket if you’ve already completed three reps before I even finished the sentence? It takes time for sensory data to land, for our awareness to shift from the external perspective (the what) to the internal perspective (the somatic).

The Internal / External Dialogue

This is not to say that the internal/ somatic perspective is somehow ‘the best’. Hanna identified that there were two perspectives that human beings are capable of: The somatic perspective, as described above, which allows for the perception of a soma, and the third-person perspective, from the outside, which leads to the perception of a body. As Hanna notes, ‘neither mode is less factual or inferior to the other: they are coequal’ (Hanna, 1986). I think this is an important point. At the time of Hanna’s writing, the body was something that was being worked-on by external factors. Medical practice, exercise regimens, all imposed an external sense of ‘correct-ness’ with little or no acknowledgement for the somatic experience. I feel that the popularity of the Pilates technique rides somewhat on this wave, since its approach is often one of ‘correction’ with Pilates dictating to clients to follow his instructions to the letter so as to gain the benefits of the practice.

However, on the other side of this coin, many somatic movement practitioners, especially in the field of somatic-dance-making, tend to get trapped in sensation, leading to a mush of moving that, whilst enjoyable for them, might feel alienating to observers and participants. Most of us, myself included, need some kind of external framing, some content, that gives structure to what we do, allowing us to settle into a somatic perspective.

This is where things get a little complicated, because, in order to aid students in attending to the internal, Thomas Hanna did in-fact develop a series of exercises that he termed ‘Clinical Somatic Exercises’ which uses the technique of ‘pandiculation’ to re-educate neuro-muscular connections and alleviate pain. When practitioners describe their practice as ‘somatics’ (noun) this is the field of practice that they are often referring to.

However, as an approach, a somatic (adj.) practice could be anything. It could be walking, running, cycling, swimming, pilates, yoga, weight-lifting etc. The only restriction (and this is not as simple as it sounds) is that you need to find this balance point between the content of what you’re doing (the framing) and your attention to your somatic experience within that.

So, for example, if you’re lifting weights in the gym, you need to balance the resistance of the weight, your external ‘form’, and the general disturbances of being in a public space (with often booming music), against your internal sense of yourself. If the weight is too heavy such that all your attention is overpowered by ‘getting through the reps’ then you’re not going to be able to consciously engage through your centre and breath fully.

Another problem is using the eyes to orient our movement/ behaviour, which is so common in our culture, and, I think, taken to an extreme in the form of social media images that seem to celebrate ‘what looks good’ over what is genuinely beneficial. We want to be seen to be fit and healthy (and happy, and successful, etc.) despite what we actually feel. I write this as someone who spent most of their movement education staring at themselves in a mirror. In fact, when I entered full-time dance training, our teachers were so fed-up of us constantly staring at ourselves that they had curtains installed across the mirrors in every studio to literally ‘cut-out’ this external stimulus. Afterall, there’s no mirror when you’re standing on stage facing an audience. This is why I often have clients turn away from the mirror during standing sequences. However, when re-integrating the learning from the floor-work to standing (which is, afterall, where we carry out much of our lives), I’ve found it useful to re-introduce the feedback of the mirror to help clients self-correct their sense of how they move. This can be particularly useful in ankle/ knee/ hip tracking, especially since our sense of ourselves (somatically) may become obscured proprioceptively. Sometimes looking in the mirror can help us re-calibrate our perceptual awareness in a useful feedback loop.

Is Pilates a Somatic Movement Practice?

If you visit the Wiki page on Somatics, you'll find a section in which the writer/s note that Pilates himself did encourage a somatic approach to movement, emphasising breath and proprioception, however, they state: 'most contemporary forms of Pilates focus on correct physical technique more than proprioceptive awareness.' In my experience, not all Pilates practices tend towards the somatic, though I wouldn't go so far as to exclude them either.

In many matwork classes, for example, the bias towards ‘dynamic flow’ often sacrifices the somatic perspective completely. This is not to say that ‘flow’ isn’t important (it is one of the principles of Pilates) but I question why it’s often used synonymously with ‘speed’. Speed is useful and necessary within our practices. We need to practise quick acceleration and deceleration in order to run for the bus, or suddenly stop or catch ourselves from falling. But, I’d argue, that the way speed is used in dynamic/ flow classes, is often to do with covering as much material/ content as possible within the hour slot, rather than attending to how you move (whether that’s fast or slow). Sadly, the rise in Reformer Pilates classes has amped up the flow/dynamic emphasis of Pilates delivery too, this time against the resistance of springs. I don’t want to write off a whole field of practice. Reformer classes can be very beneficial and they meet the needs of those who swear by them. But I’ve rarely seen/ experienced a class that creates the balance between the internal/ external perspective. Instead I often find I’m spending most of my time trying to keep up with the constantly changing straps, springs and bar, leaving me wondering: what’s the big rush anyway?

What’s more worrying is the watering down of teaching cues that results from being in such a great big rush leading to a kind of ‘scripting’ of cues like: ‘pull your tummy in’, ‘pin your navel to your spine’ and the worst offender ‘tuck your tailbone’. Whilst these cues are often offered with the intention of keeping everyone safe, they’re simplistic generalisations that can obstruct, rather than encourage, functional movement patterning.

The Client/ Teacher Balance

What, then, constitutes an somatic-informed practice of Pilates?

In my view, this comes down to the aims and approach of the teacher working in collaboration with clients. Martha Eddy describes the role of a somatic movement teacher as follows:

'The goal of the somatic movement professional is to heighten both sensory and motor awareness to facilitate a student-client’s own self-organization, self-healing, or self- knowing.' (Eddy, 2009)

The teacher, therefore, is neither ‘all-knowing’ or ‘instructing’ a client. We might well be creating a frame – giving the client a structured class that they find accessible – but beyond this our intention is to ‘facilitate’ (rather than dictate) their own somatic awareness within that frame.

I think this is one of the hardest things to do in an hour-long group class, and the proportion of framing/facilitating may differ according to the knowledge of the client/ group. I think the key is to trust that we can allow some breathing space around the moves, the choreography of exercises, to invite some of the internal/external dialogue into the mix, to not be afraid to get rid of the mirror, or to re-introduce the mirror, according to where we find ourselves in our client/teacher journey.

Ultimately, a somatic approach is not about lying on your back and breathing for an hour (although that sounds lovely too). It’s about expanding our awareness internally to balance out the bias towards external perception, or vice-versa, to re-introduce some external markers to bring us out of a purely internal frame. And striking that balance is always a conversation between teacher-client/class.

References:

Don Hanlon, J. (1995), Bone, breath and gesture, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley.

Eddy, M. (2009), "A brief history of somatic practices and dance: historical development of the field of somatic education and its relationship to dance", Journal of dance & somatic practices, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 5-27.

Hanna, Thomas (1986), "What is Somatics?". Somatics: Magazine-Journal of the Bodily Arts and Sciences.

Pilates, J.H. (1945), Return to life through contrology, by Joseph H. Pilates and William John Miller, J. J. Augustin, New York (State).