The Body as a Domain
We recently caught up with Richard Strozzi-Heckler during our One-Day Summit. Here’s what he had to say about the body as a domain of action, learning, and dignity. Click HERE to read our previous article where Richard speaks about The Importance of Learning from a Coach.
The Body as a Domain of Action
It is where we act from. You can call it Soma, or even Embodiment. By act, I don't necessarily mean movement. We can be very still in mindfulness or meditation and still be able to connect to a narrative or a story for ourselves that has a deeply embodied sense of movement.
Often, if someone says, How are you? We’ll say I’m great! Yet our shoulders are up to our ears (protecting our jugular). We’re saying one thing while our bodies are doing another from the inside, which predisposes us to fear.
Then we can ask how do we allow ourselves to be informed by our emotional life? Our emotional life tells us what we care about.
The Body as a Domain of Learning
In the traditional educational system, we’re taught and warehoused in a room with a lot of chairs and other people our age. We’re told to sit down for hours and memorize things. Do you really learn when you do this? Sure, and some essential things like law, medicine, engineering, etc., come out of that, but it simultaneously atrophies a certain part of our nervous system in the process.
The sensory part of our nervous system, including our capacity to feel, will begin to atrophy in such a learning environment, affecting our sense of intuition, of being able to feel others, and to truly feel life. It also atrophies our capacity to have intimate conversations with others and with the world around us. Somatics allows us to reestablish and nourish that part of ourselves, revealing the capacity to truly be in the world while gaining more resilience and resourcefulness for ourselves.
The Body as a Domain of Coordination
It's through our bodies that we coordinate with others - even if we're doing this while we're texting, typing, or talking. By working through the body, we begin to get a sense of a conversational place that might even lead to conflict.
The Body as a Domain of Dignity
This is the inherent value that we, as human beings, possess just by being human. We are seen as having inherent merit and value as human beings - a concept that can also get pruned out of us. Once we start to drop into our bodies, we align ourselves with natural forces like gravity and temperature, and we can find a place to move through those with dignity.
In somatics, we don't say we have bodies. We say that we are bodies. We also say we're more than bodies, but we are bodies. We don't have language. We are language, and we have poetry. There's no safety in silence. There's safety in us speaking what's true to us, what's equitable, what's just, and what's respectable.
Learn more about how you can become a certified Mind-Body Coach and harness the power of somatics to help others transform their lives, actualize their goals, and live a life of authenticity, freedom and wellbeing with our 120-hr Mind-Body Coaching Certificate.
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