What Is Somatic Learning?
Somatic Learning is listening to the whole self to understand the information received from the interaction of self with others and their environment. Somatic or embodied knowing is experiential knowledge that involves senses, emotions, perceptions, mind, and body action and reactions. Somatic learning and understanding is a tool used to assist in achieving focused transformation; therefore, a prime coaching tool.
The origin of the word somatic, “Soma”, is Greek and means the living body in its wholeness: the mind, the body, emotions, and the spirit as a unit – total coherence. Coaching using a somatic learning frame of reference incorporates more than just linguistics, logic, rationality, and patterns of behavior. It is even more than observing the body, or including the body as an aspect of learning. Additionally, somatics goes beyond experiential learning. The understanding of somatics assists you in creating an awareness and alignment of mind, body, spirit, and emotions by exploring historical discourses, experiences, worldviews, insights of patterned behavior, physical and emotional triggers that will help you transform and learn the desired skills and interpretations. We learn to shift behaviors that we wish to change. Somatic learning can improve our connections, and relationships with others and find new opportunities for living more fully.
How Do You Use It?
Create an awareness of the whole self by going beyond the story; what is the experience from more than the neck up; what is happening emotionally and where does the story live or resonate in the body
Identify through questions, observations, listening, and intuiting the physical, emotional, and linguistic triggers that have been stimulated
Develop questions that help you to discover what is being practiced and whether this practice enables or disables the desired outcomes
Check for a shift in awareness, emotionally, spiritually, and physically
Establish and follow up on relevant practices that you can realistically do to begin to master and sustain the shift to the desired behavior, interpretations, and emotional coherence; this may involve getting an accountability partner or coach
What Are Some Key Concepts?
The body is an essential domain in which new actions can occur – the whole of body is where we experience life
The body has a memory beyond the brain, remembering and expressing its history, experiences, beliefs, interpretations, values, moods, emotions, and qualities that comprise individual identity or the “self”
Somatic learning uses the emotional, spiritual, physical, linguistic, and ontological approaches to achieve a depth of learning that academic learning alone cannot accomplish
Learning somatically enables you to develop practices that allow you to transform and achieve sustainable results
The state of the body and mood are often predispositions for action; certain moves, are more difficult when attempted from certain moods or emotional triggers
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