As movement teachers—whether in yoga, Pilates, dance, or other disciplines—the emphasis may have often been placed on guiding bodies through precise movements, postures, and techniques. But what if we shifted that focus? What if instead of teaching to a body, we began teaching to a soma—a living, sensing, and self-aware being?
In Somatics, we embrace this fundamental shift. The difference between teaching to a soma and teaching to a body is not merely semantic. It’s actually a change in the way we approach every aspect of our sessions from beginning to end.
Soma Rather than Body: A Shift in the focus of Movement Teaching
Teaching to the body is often externally orientated and focused on producing specific shapes, forms, and postures in space. In this model, the body is treated as a mechanical entity that needs to be moved, corrected, or aligned. While sometimes valuable, this approach can totally overlooks the internal experience of the person moving.
When we teach to the soma, it’s about inviting our students into an ongoing dance of awareness and movement within themselves. Rather than focusing on the outer form, we guide attention inward to the living, sentient experience of moving. This shift in focus emphasises sensation, awareness, and the dynamic relationships between muscles, joints, breath, and the nervous system.
This is a powerful change that opens up new possibilities in movement teaching. This change shifts the emphasis away from performing a move and into personal exploration of the experience of moving. Classes become opportunities for internal discovery rather than external achievement. Students are no longer trying to ‘get the posture right’ but are invited to sense, feel, and reorganise themselves from within to enhance the felt sensing of themselves in motion.
Neurology and Movement: Engaging the Sensory-Motor System
Another key distinction in Somatic Education is the integration of neurology into movement teaching. Traditionally, physical physical education was focused on guiding the motor system—moving the body through space, working muscles, improving strength, or increasing flexibility. However, by guiding neurophysical activity, we engage not just the motor system but also the sensory-motor system.
Why is this important? It is the sensory-motor system that coordinates how we sense and perceive movement, and in turn, how we organise and initiate movement. By engaging both the sensory and motor aspects of movement, we can assist our students to become more aware of how they move, not just do the movements they are doing. This level of awareness creates the potential for more profound changes in coordination, balance, and ease of motion in general.
An example of this shift is where, rather than instructing a student to ‘lengthen the spine’ in a posture, we might invite them to feel the relationship between their pelvis and the crown of their head – noticing the distance between them. Or, instead of saying ‘engage the core,’ we might guide them to sense the support that naturally arises when they exhale fully and release the back of their body. In this way, the neurological aspect of movement becomes a focus, and our students learn to tune in to how their entire system is working together as they follow your guidance.
The Power of Undoing: Accessing a Neutral State
One of the profound shifts that can also occur in teaching somatically is the emphasis we place on the undoing of an action. While traditional movement practices often focus on doing—on achieving a posture, performing a movement, or mastering a technique—Somatics recognises that the way we release and undo a movement is just as important as the production of the movement itself.
Why? Because the undoing of an action allows the body and nervous system to return to a neutral state. This zero state of totally released action is a place of liberated potential and a profound starting point from which new possibilities for moving can then emerge. By fully releasing out of a movement, posture, or process, we help our students access a beginner’s mind-body state—one that is open, receptive, and ready for the next experience and unencumbered by the last.
In a practical sense, this xould show up as giving as much time in a class – guiding students out of a posture as into it. Additionally it might mean introducing moments of rest and stillness in between movements. These additional periods of stillness allowing the neurology to recalibrate and integrate new sensory and motor information to change the way your students approach the next movement. These pauses are not simply breaks; they are essential periods of neurophysical absorption, where the physiology can be reorganised at the neurological level, utilising new information received from the previous movement they engaged in.
Resting for Integration: Learning in the Inactivity
In Somatic Education, we recognise that profound learning and development benefit from the decreasing activity. Just as in the undoing of movement, periods of rest are crucial for the neurology to absorb and update how the body is organised.
When we intersperse periods of neurophysical activity with moments of rest within movement teaching – we give the sensory-motor system time to integrate new patterns and insights. This might look like inviting a student to lie down in constructive rest between movement sequences, or simply allowing a few moments of stillness before moving on to the next exercise. These periods of inactivity are not a pause in the learning process; they are a vital part of how the nervous system reprogrammes itself.
Elevating Your Teaching with Somatics
These principles—teaching to a soma, guiding neurophysical activity, engaging the sensory-motor system, and the importance of undoing—are just a few of the distinctions that set Somatic Education apart from more traditional approaches to movement teaching. They create space for deeper awareness, more profound learning, and greater potential for transformation in your students.
If you’re a yoga, Pilates, or dance teacher looking to elevate your teaching and expand the possibilities of what you offer, these concepts can open up new pathways in your sessions. Our online Masterclass, Elevate Your Teaching with Somatics, goes deeper into these and other areas, providing you with the tools to guide your students into more meaningful and transformative movement experiences.
Beyond that we offer a 100hr Somatic Teacher Training which is designed around five distinct aspects of Somatics – core movement sequences, developmental movement patterns, somatic breathing, somatic meditation and somatic dance. Our next training starts in February More details here
By embracing the soma, you invite your students into a richer, more self-aware relationship with their own bodies, creating lasting change from the inside out.
Recent Comments