Somatic practices are trending, but do you know where this mind-body practice originated? Today I want to explore the history and principles of somatic yoga. How it emphasizes the importance of the mind-body connection and the role of emotional release in your physical practice. From influential figures in the somatic space to common misconceptions.
Learn how to connect with your body on a deeper level as we look at how:
🔹Sensory awareness is crucial for understanding our body and emotions.
🔹Traditional yoga often focuses on transcendence, while somatic yoga emphasizes connection to the body
🔹Pleasure and fun can enhance the healing process in somatic practices
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🎧 Also Listen to:
#324 – The Importance of Emotional Processing and Regulation: DENT Model Trauma
#330 – Somatic Yoga vs. Traditional Yoga: Breaking Down How 5 Poses Differ in your Yoga Practice
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Transcript:
Brett:
Hello my friends, buckle your seats for a kind of nerdy episode today in which we’re going to talk about the history of somatic yoga. Where did this practice come from? Is it new? Is it recent? I wanted to record this because I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about the style of moving. Like somatic yoga is only for people who are physically fit or that it can exacerbate health issues for people who have chronic illness.
or that it requires individuals to relive or re-experience traumatic memories.
So we are going to time travel, we’re going to go back in time, because I know for me and so many of my students, we really want to know the origins of what we’re practicing, whether it’s Kundalini yoga or somatic yoga or a Hatha Vinyasa lineage, we want to know the why behind what we’re doing.
set the stage here if you’re new to this whole somatic yoga concept or you’re not doing somatic yoga with me in the uplifted membership or on YouTube is this idea that in the West or Western medicine has split the body and the mind into two unrelated entities to be treated separately. And if you look at our medical system, that’s we see that right. Often the body is treated as a bag of chemicals.
Or we have this reductionist mindset of taking the body apart, the muscles and the bones and things in dissection. When probably if you’re listening to this podcast or I’ve done any of my teacher trainings, you know that really we have this integrated fascial system. have all these bones and muscles in one fascial matrix. So
Compounding this is the fact that we are also living in the information age. Most of us are working at desks, sitting at computers. We have more information available to us than ever before. And we can see from our smartphone use and our posture that we are living up high in our body. We are living up in our head with lots of ideas. But the danger of that is that you can also have a lot of anxiety, right?
So in the past few decades, there’s been slowly this shift, this idea that the body is equally important to the mind. And if we look at the vagus nerve, like the vagus nerve is 80 % sensory, meaning the vagus nerve is pulling all this valuable information from your body to the brain, that the body has intelligence. If you’ve done the Kundalini teacher training, you know, we talk about like the heart brain and the gut brain. Even science is really saying that the
digestive system, the gut is similar to like its own being a brain.
stretching and strengthening your body through yoga is a fantastic thing to do. You’re probably already doing that if you’re listening to this podcast. But if you also want to incorporate this sense of emotional release through your body, you need somatic yoga. And why would you want to do that? Well, if you’re experiencing irritation, anger, frustration, well, that’s your fight response, right? Back in the day, we would actually probably fight off a predator or another person would have a kerfuffle, a scuffle.
And the hormones and peptides that had secreted as part of that fight response would get a chance to release, do what they needed to do in that fight, in that action of my limbs moving or screaming or kicking another person or pushing an animal off me. And that release would close the stress cycle and then allow my body to shift back into a parasympathetic or rest and digest system. Think about if you feel fear or anxiety or worry, all of that is your flight response, right?
You want to run away potentially from a predator or something that scares you. But today, what might be scaring you is email or you’re never ending to-do list or criticism or fear of putting yourself out there.
Or maybe you feel disconnected and confused and helpless and like you just can’t get anything done or you’re like a deer in headlights. And that of course is your freeze response. And I think it’s really important to know that, you know, fight and flight and freeze, fawn, all of these are normal reactions to life stressors, but what’s not normal and we all unfortunately do in part because of societal norms.
in part because we’re so disconnected with our body and just living up in our head, is that we shove these emotions down, perhaps it’s even unconsciously, we repress them instead of releasing them.
why I’m so passionate about somatic yoga is that it gives you movements to actually close the loop, close the stress cycle, close the loop on those fight, flight, freeze stress cycles. Yes, it’s great to simply do exercise, do yoga and breathe, but if you want to take it a step further, you should do actions like kicking, stomping, punching, crying, emoting, actually using your voice to make some sound to close those stress cycles.
So beyond the moving and breathing and alignment work we’re doing in yoga, a somatic approach to yoga is also working on helping you discharge stress, express emotion, and potentially even release repressed rage. And we have to keep in mind that traditional yoga was a practice that was designed to help people transcend the physical body.
It was originally for the equivalent of monks and nomads. So somatic yoga in contrast actually gets you more in touch with your body’s true feelings and your body’s wisdom. And if you’re living most of your life on zoom, in a computer, up in your head, overthinking everything, we have so many more options and information available to us than ever before. It’s likely that you’re disconnected from your body’s true feelings and
That is where we see all these symptoms of your body being like, hello, listen to me, which could look like a dysregulated menstrual cycle. It could look like not being able to fall asleep, insomnia. It could look like.
heartburn, digestive issues, fertility issues, your body’s literally sending alarm bells, being like, hello, pay attention to me, hello, pay attention to me.
And what I love about the somatic yoga practice is that it actually kind of becomes a form of body therapy. Not only are you exiting the fight, flight, freeze, trauma responses you may be unconsciously trapped in, but your yoga postures actually stop being about alignment and achievement and perfectionism, like having the thin chin parallel or the thigh parallel to the ground, right? Or achieving that next arm balance. Instead,
The postures become containers for processing emotion. It’s like you holding yourself to take a break to feel what you’re really feeling and then actually express what you may have been repressing for a very long time.
That was a very long-winded intro. Let’s get into where do we see this lineage of somatic work coming from. And for that we have to go back in our imaginary timeline to the 1930s. Now we could go back even further, but I sort of limited my research to 1920s, 1930s onward. And I wanted to focus first on William Reich. So he was a
An analyst, right? A psychoanalyst. And he’s so important in the story of somatics because he started to figure out that people had physical manifestations of emotional symptoms and to really start to formalize that idea, which seems very obvious right now. If I’m depressed or maybe afraid to use my voice, you know, maybe I’m curved over, hunched over, or if I’m really proud and…
You know, I was told that I should show, show up and be strong. You know, maybe my, my chest is forward. So he started relating what he was seeing in people, muscular tension that they had and saying, Hmm, if we can release this muscular tension, maybe we can also release the pent up emotions stored in the body as well. And what he did is coined this term body armor, body armor. So.
Those of you who’ve done 300 hour teacher training with me, you can also think of this body armor as like the way that your facial system is glued and moving through space.
So William Reich noticed that after a successful course of psychoanalysts…
So William Reich noticed that after a successful course of analysis, his patients, over a period of time, would actually hold their bodies differently.
And he started to noodle into this idea that like, okay, if we can simulate physically the effect of a certain emotion, maybe we can trigger it and then maybe it can release from the body.
And then the body can return to homeostasis and maybe start to move through space or the fascial system can reorganize in.
more easeful way. So he actually went as far with some of these ideas to asking his patients to remove their clothing and lie down and kind of breathe deeply and rhythmically and he would massage them to try to loosen their body armor. What I would call like facial restrictions. The problem was he didn’t really have permission to do that. there was a period where he was kind of ridiculed and
exiled for a time. Everyone thought what he was doing was crazy. I think it’s also interesting to note that up until his work, therapists, analysts always were behind their patient. Like they’d talk to the patient, but the patient couldn’t see the therapist. Therapist would be like kind of walking around behind the patient while the patient lied on a couch or a chair. And he actually was the first to be like, no, a therapist should sit across from their patient because I want to see.
how they’re holding their body, how they’re mirroring my body, how.
how what my patient’s body language is kind of revealing about what they’re telling me. Maybe they’re saying they’re fine, but they’re actually, you know, if I was sitting and facing them, I can see they’re actually crying or that they’re actually the cords in their neck are standing out.
He’s a very fascinating character. He…
had an affair with a pupil of Elsa Gindler, who was a dancer. We’ll talk about that in a little bit. He was in the mix with Anna Freud. He hung out with Fritz Perls a bunch who later went on to develop.
Gestalt therapy. He even worked with Einstein and he was arrested eventually by the FBI. So very fascinating character, but the number one thing to remember is this idea of body armoring and
He said, every muscular rigidity in the body contains history and the meaning of its origin. And this is really core to all somatic work. Like you are moving through space. You have, we all have heard of mindset, but now we’re talking about a body set. You have a body set that has been informed by how you grew up. Maybe you were yelled at a lot as a child. And when that happened, you…
you know, clenched your belly and rounded forward slightly and tensed your neck a little bit and your shoulders elevated and that becomes imprinted and forms who you are.
and how you move through space. So he really became known for the idea that muscular tension reflects repressed emotions.
And because he was eventually expelled from the psychoanalytic mainstream because he was touching people and just getting too weird, it’s a little bit of a pity because a lot of body psychotherapy, I think because it was so associated with him, was also marginalized within the mainstream for years and years and years. And then in the early 2000s, we start seeing this renaissance of body psychotherapy coming back.
After him in 1940s Europe, we have some other really interesting characters. One of my favorite who is probably Elsa Gindler. So I mentioned that Reich had dated one of her dance students. So she was a gymnastics teacher. She had her own school of movement education and she eventually got sick and she was unable to afford to go to a sanitarium in the mountains. So she decided, she was like, no big deal. I’ll just heal myself at home.
And I’ll start doing that through basically sensing my inner response to everything that’s happening during the day. And she actually ended up doing this and healing herself from tuberculosis simply by observing how her body, you know, kind of her body mind interaction as she literally just got up in the morning. So she’ll describe like lying in bed and thinking about different parts of her body and, know,
really thinking about how she sits and stands and walks through space. So those of you who’ve done the 200 hour teacher training with me, you know, we talk about being a body detective and I feel like she was sort of the grandmama of this concept, Elsa Gindler, like observing, I, you know, do I always step up the stairs with my left foot or my right foot? And maybe I should cultivate the opposite.
She was also friends and collaborating with Henrik Jacobi. He was a music teacher, a German musician, and he was using, he was doing things like practicing flower arranging or archery as like a path to greater awareness, as a mindfulness activity. So he was also really interested in this body mind connection. And then another person in the mix in 1940s Europe was, you’ve maybe heard of this one, Feldenkrais.
Feldenkrais is from the UK, also really interesting person. I believe he was in the military. He got a knee injury from soccer or something. And then again, kind of like Gindler, he was like, no problem. I’m just going to self-heal myself. And in doing so, doing all of this self-observation of the body, he basically not only cured himself, but he developed this whole method.
where self observation of the body can lead to self rehabilitation. I know some of these concepts seem so obvious now, like, if I observe what I’m doing with my body and how my body moves through space, like I could potentially heal myself from different fascial or muscular constrictions by changing the way that I move through space and doing that with a lot of awareness. But these three really formalize this whole idea.
One of my favorite quotes from Elsa Gindler is that life is playground, life is the playground for our work. So, you know, this doesn’t have, it doesn’t have to be in a yoga studio, right? Our daily life is giving us enough opportunity for self-discovery, whether it’s combing our hair, washing the dishes in our tone of voice of how we speak to someone.
She was really saying that even in unimportant areas of life, we can experience the same attitudes that we have in important areas of life. So basically, you know, how you slam the car door or brush your teeth is maybe how you’re doing everything.
And she also started talking about our own original nature. Like we are doing this sensory awareness, this self-awareness. Often it has therapeutic effects, like it can help you cure tuberculosis or your knee injury or whatever you’re dealing with. But really it’s to become more conscious and to actually become more in accord with your true self.
And I really love this idea because I think the more that you shake off these habitual bracing patterns or try to complete the stress cycles that are, you know, creating tension in your body through a practice like somatic yoga, it’s like peeling back the layers of the onion, right? The more you are able to shine and be your true self. So now we’re going to flash forward to the sixties. The bell bottoms are coming out. We have those beautiful, you know, hippie flowers and the long hair. And in 1960s California, we see another
really important person in the history of somatics, Charlotte Selver.
She was born in Germany, so she actually studied with Gindler and Jacobi, like all the people we talked about before in 1940s Europe, but then she came to California.
And she further formalized this idea of sensory awareness. If we deepen our sensory awareness as a gateway, it can be used as a gateway to basically know ourselves better and deepen our connection with ourselves and the world around us.
So a lot of her work had to do with bringing people back into bodily sensations through how they’re experiencing through their senses. it, you know, touch, smell. She loved to study and work with nature. Her work was very much about trusting one’s inner body awareness and nonverbal experience.
And if you do my embodied yoga life coaching program, you’ll see that this work with the senses, as well as this concept of nature as a way to heal us and us as a way to know ourselves better. All of this is stemming from Charlotte Selver’s work and she influenced so many people that you’ve probably heard of.
influences and was a teacher of Alan Watts, Ida Rolfe, the founder of Rolfing, which later led to, you know, it kind of a precursor to myofascial release. So I’m a huge fan of Ida Rolfe. Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy. talked about him earlier. Ron Kurtz, he founded Hakomi Therapy. Some of you may have heard of it and then it had, you know, many branches of different somatic schools under it.
And she also was a teacher of Peter Levine, who is the founder of somatic experiencing and that book, Waking the Tiger that everyone loves, that’s about trauma. Now we’re in the 1970s and there is another very interesting person who comes forth, Thomas Hanna. He starts introducing more somatic exercises. He was influenced by Feldenkrais. And again, he’s saying that all life experiences lead to physical patterns in the body.
He’s a big deal because he really coined the term somatics. It wasn’t really a word or a term in the formalized way that it is now until him. And he used this term to encompass various movement awareness practices. A lot of what his exercises are, are like very slow, gentle breath and coordinated movement. like,
inhaling, looking over your left shoulder, and then exhaling, gently like coming back to center, like kind of unwinding. So like a coiling and then a gentle coming back to center or homeostasis. And he coined this word, sensory motor awareness.
and sensory motor amnesia. So sensory motor amnesia would be like we don’t do a certain movement pattern anymore, perhaps because it was traumatic or, and then, and the good news though is that through sensory motor awareness, we can relearn how to do it, how to move in that way.
And Thomas Hannah really applied his insights to help people with chronic pain and unresolved medical issues. And I think this is really when it’s like, if traditional, you know, forms of medicine or drugs or therapy don’t work, you know, maybe you want to try this somatic approach.
One of the somatic yoga poses in my embodied yoga life coaching manual are these kind of pelvic rocks. And we can actually see Thomas Hanna, those videos of him on YouTube, however long ago, doing those exact same movements with patients. So I was, I thought that was really cool when I, when I found those. then going forward even more in the 1990s, we couldn’t not mention Stephen Porges. He is the author of an unproven theory.
about the role of the vagus nerve in emotional regulation.
He is the author of an unproven theory about the role of the vagus nerve in emotional regulation, social connection, and fear response.
So for years and years, it was thought that the human nervous system basically oscillated between rest and digest, doing our housekeeping activities, everything’s cool, and fight or flight if there was a problem. And what Pauli Wegel theory, his theory says, is that our nervous system uses not just one, but actually multiple defense strategies, two defense strategies when faced with danger. So instead of just fight or flight, there’s actually the second defense system.
that’s designed not to mobilize someone to kick or punch or run away, but actually to immobilize the person. And this is often called the freeze response. And this freeze response can manifest in all sorts of different ways, like disassociation, claps, feigning death, or actually the, the fawning behavior.
So Polyvagal theory says that there’s two very distinct branches of the vagus nerve. There’s a more primitive dorsal branch that is kind of responsible for feigning death or like this freeze response, like kind of like what a mouse would do if it was caught in the jaws of a cat, right? It often like just pretends to be dead. So the mouse will get bored of playing with it. And then he said there’s this other more evolved branch that is linked to social communication and self-soothing behaviors.
And what he was basically saying is that, you know, when our self-soothing behaviors or social communication like fail, that is when this more primitive dorsal response, right, comes online.
In all this research I did, something that I thought was interesting is that Stephen Porges is not a physician or a PhD. A lot of these people are. That’s not really a big deal, but I just thought it was interesting. And also that there was a lot of remarks that his, theory isn’t proven. And I thought that again, take it or take it or leave it. I think there’s definitely so much value in his, his work, but there’s, there’s no way to know for sure, or at least there is not yet.
So if you’re wondering why does embodied yoga work, I use the words embodied and somatic interchangeably. You could also call it somatic yoga. Why should I care? You what has all this history been building up to? Well, I think science is really catching up now and it’s showing that if we move in patterns that we’re not familiar with, so instead of just down dog and just warrior two, but if we move in more…
you know, on the diagonal or in more in between movements or intuitive movements or free form movements or just like hitting places in space with our body that we would not normally do, like getting in some weird different positions. This is actually enabling neuroplasticity in our brain and neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to reorganize itself and form new neural connections.
And this helps mind-body awareness because it basically helps your brain remap your body or remap movement patterns or places in space that in the past it has been avoiding.
embodiment work and somatic yoga help us close the stress cycle because it incorporates movements like punching and kicking and screaming and moving the body, shaking, know, kind of moving in atypical ways that are like kind of anti-society norms. It helps close the stress cycle on those flight-freeze responses that may be subconsciously running or it aids in that process.
And as you shed more and more of those away, you’re able to really uncover your own authenticity, your body set and the way you move through life and the world may change.
One of the criticisms we could give yoga is that, you know, yeah, we do engage, you know, our parasympathetic nervous system a little bit, like meaning we’re working hard and maybe a little bit stressed out, like when we’re holding a chair pose or something. But for the most part, we’re really, okay, cut that, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut that, don’t say that.
One of the things I love about somatic yoga is that it’s saying, rather than trying to soothe or calm away anything that’s upsetting or our anxiety by moving or stretching or foam rolling, actually it could be really valuable to play in the tension and the discomfort by stomping and kicking and actually going into some of those activated hyperarousal, like primitive dorsal vagal states. think often when people see the
There’s a common image you see if you Google or look at polyvagal theory where it’s like, you don’t want to be.
You don’t want to be in fight, flight, or freeze.
But Somatic Work says, there’s actually deep healing by going into, you know, anger or some of these more dysregulated states if you’re in a safe container, if you’re doing it, you know, again.
consciously with a lot of embodied presence, which is why safety, you know, the ability to just kind of feel safe in your environment is the first pillar of my embodied yoga life coaching program. It’s without safety, no healing can occur. That’s the first pillar. But if you do feel safe, you can alchemize anything. Really, you can.
slowly start to trust your body and your own direct experience and kind of realize that you are nature and nature is a self-healing system. And the more you work with that, you start to uncover your authenticity and then actually, I think, feel more pleasure. And I actually believe pleasure can actually accelerate your healing, make you heal faster.
and that healing can be fun and somatic yoga can be fun.
So I would love to hear your thoughts after listening to this episode. If somatic therapy is something you want to explore, you can definitely look and try to find a somatic therapist in your area or a therapist who has a movement background. If you’re looking for a somatic coach, like a life coach who’s also certified in somatic yoga, you can take my program to explore that and become certified or work with one of the people I’ve certified. They are absolutely amazing.
We’ve graduated the first cohort at this point and would be happy to connect you with one of them.
The way the session is structured is you’ll basically talk for a little bit and then they’ll guide you through a personalized yoga private, but in the somatic yoga style so that you’re actually moving and working on emotions or conflicts or things that you want to embody your desire that you talked about earlier in the session. And then there’s an integration period afterwards.
As always, your reviews here on the podcast mean everything. So if you could take a moment today to leave a review, if that’s something you haven’t done, just leave, you know, the stars, the comments, whatever that is so, so helpful. makes this podcast more accessible to other yogis who are interested in this information and means so much to me personally.
Thank you so much for being here and listening all the way to the very end. I’m sending you so much love from my heart to yours. Namaste.
