'Bodyfulness', Mindfulness, and Somatics: Experiencing Yourself as a Whole Person
The term ‘bodyfulness’ was coined by Christine Caldwell (in a 2014 article). Her main aim was to highlight that the ‘voice of the body’ is too often ignored, or marginalized, in therapeutic practices, in contemplative practices including ‘mindfulness’, and in our wider culture.
Caldwell discusses the power and importance of words, and also her own experience of her body as a child - an experience that resonated with me, as it may also with you.
Caldwell recalls dancing, at age 6, for her family. She loved dancing, but felt enormous shame because of her family’s tight-lipped response to her joyful performance. So, she stopped dancing… and didn’t dance again till she took a class in college.
When she took that class, and started dancing once more, she ‘recognized [her]self for the first time in a long time’ - ‘not just as a dancer, but as a conscious mover’.
This reflects how I - along with very many of my clients - felt on discovering Hanna Somatics, and how we feel doing our Somatics practices. It makes you feel more like a complete, whole person - a conscious mover, not someone ‘stuck’ in your body, or someone who’s disconnected from your body, your movements, and the world around you.
So… amongst other things, Caldwell writes about ‘mindfulness’ and its relationship to ‘the body’.
In its practice as ‘moment-by-moment awareness’ (a definition used by Kabat-Zinn and others), mindfulness sometimes asks us to notice bodily sensations and then dismiss them - or set them aside for a while - as merely a type of thought, nothing more. This is often done during meditation, especially that which asks you to aim for ‘stillness’… You might be familiar with that approach.
Other times, mindfulness practices incorporate aspects of embodiment, for example through practices such as qi gong, yoga asanas, and being mindful in an everyday activity. But even then, it tends to focus on ‘the mind’, most often inhibiting, restricting, or otherwise treating movement and the body-that-moves as secondary to this thing, your ‘mind’.
These approaches are, I suggest, very problematic - not least because movement is ‘the system through which the body knows, identifies, and enacts itself’ (Caldwell 2014).
I’d go further than Caldwell, too: I’d suggest that movement is how the soma knows and enacts itself - the soma not being ‘a body’ and/or ‘a mind’, but a whole, complete person. A soma. You are a soma.
It’s also important to note that the ability to ‘pay attention’ - to have ‘moment-by-moment awareness’ at all - is a somatic process. Being a living, breathing, moving soma is essential to being able to have awareness, to pay attention: these are not things your ‘mind’ can do on its own: it requires sensory input.
So, I agree with much of what Caldwell says - and urge you to read her article! But what she says is even more powerful, I think, if you upturn the notion of ‘mind’ and ‘body’ in thinking about yourself, and instead really try to make sense of, and embrace, that you are a ‘soma’. (You can read more about what a ‘soma’ is in Thomas Hanna’s book, Somatics, as well as on my blog and in my online courses.)
There’s a whole bunch of research that evidences a variety of beneficial effects of ‘mindfulness’ practices on mental, emotional and physicial health, and Caldwell outlines a range of them. She also points out that what’s needed is to figure out which benefits come from a focus on the ‘mind’, and which from more ‘embodied’ aspects of mindfulness practices. This is very true!
Overall, though, a key point she makes is that all of this ‘needs to be explored’.
Yes! And this is what practising Hanna Somatics does. It allows you to explore - to learn more about about yourself as a complete, sensing, embodied and bodyful being - as a soma.
Somatics works with the insights of philosophers and thinkers from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Thomas Hanna, Luce Irigaray and many others that, as Theresa Silow (2012) puts it, ‘[t]he body is not a thing we have but an experience we are’.
What does this mean, practically, for you?!
It means that sensing that you are embodied, and enhancing your ability to sense your embodied sensations, is important - to your self-knowledge, to your health & well-being, and to your ability to move well and deal with aches, pains, stiffness and the like (whatever your age, and whatever your limitations).
Doing SoMA Somatics exercises (movement and sensing exercises) helps enormously with that - giving you the guidance and the tools you need to better sense yourself, to observe patterns and habits in your body, in yourself - and to identify which of those patterns are helpful, and which might be causing you stress, tension, and pain.
As you practice Somatics more, so your self-awareness and self-sensing increase, and you become better equipped to address and get rid of troublesome patterns and habits, and to create and promote more easeful, comfortable, beneficial patterns and habits of movement, emotion and sensation in yourself.
To use Caldwell’s terms, SoMA Somatics first helps you better sense how you are embodied. Then, as you learn more about yourself, it gives you the tools to become more bodyful - to reflect on your embodied nature, and to work with yourself to be more efficient, and less ‘stuck’ in bad habits and patterns. This all gives you ‘bodyful’ skills to help you deal with the stresses, strains and traumas from your past, and to address those that inevitably emerge as you move through life.
Recognising that you’re not made up of a disconnected, distinct ‘mind’ + ‘body’, but are a delightfully complete soma - a whole, embodied person - is something that helps life make more sense!
That’s a big part of why being more bodyful - more somatic - enables you to address stress, pain and tension ‘stuck’ in your body, helps resolve trauma held in your soma, and empowers you to move through your life with far greater efficiency, comfort and ease - and helps you feel more at home in your own skin, more confident in yourself.
Want to learn more about SoMA Somatics, classes and courses? Click here.
Christine Caldwell's article: ‘Mindfulness & Bodyfulness: A New Paradigm’, The Journal of Contemplatice Inquiry, no. 1 (2014): 77-96.