CHAPTER FIVE: DECOLONIZING SOMATICS
What is somatics?
Somatics describes a set of practices, methodologies and dispositions that position the body as the primary site of healing and integration. For a long time, Western psychology has seen the mind as the primary site of healing and integration and the Western world has set up entire societies that are rooted in the supremacy of the mind.
Somatics is a new word, but describes a much older and more ancient philosophy / ontology that works with the whole organism - or as it is named in Greek, the soma. Somatics is a broad umbrella term that describes many different traditions; existential kink, sexological bodywork, breathwork, ngoma, yoga, pranayama and countless others. All of these technically fit within the category of somatics.
In the past few decades, somatics has emerged into a growing field of knowledge that includes trauma resolution, practices to cultivate body awareness and has emerged into methodologies like Peter Levine’s somatic experiencing. However, I see somatics as ancient and ancestral with a modern name and twist.
Long before the world of Westernized therapy emerged, humans have been healing through dance, song and movement. In truth, somatics by the name of somatics emerges in the 20th and 21st centuries as a healing response to the disembodiment of colonial and capitalist rule. But before these systems emerged, there didn’t need to be a body of work called somatics because the massive wound of colonial disembodiment had not yet been created.
I think this is incredibly important in understanding somatics so that we can understand the truth that somatics is a response to the mass wound of disembodiment that we are facing as a species, and that somatics by other names has existed for centuries and even millenia; in truth, for as long as we have been human.
Dance, song and movement have been ways for humans to connect, tell stories, and be in union with their whole selves even if this is not the language that people would have used. People may have said: we use dance to be, we use song to be, we use movement to be. That is the core of somatics. Somatics is how we connect to the whole of our being and experience. Through somatics we can learn to relate to the whole of ourselves, and to know ourselves not just as our thoughts but also as our sensations, our impulses, our emotions, our urges and desires. We move down through the realm of the head into the realm of the unified head, heart, body and spirit.
Somatics is an art.
In a world where so many of us have traumatically been severed from connection with our bodies it is an art to be in connection with the body, to move in union with the body and embody a kind of flow that allows for what is truly present within us to emerge. Under disembodied capitalist-colonial indoctrination, we learn the art of suppression. We suppress our emotions. We suppress our deepest feelings. We suppress our truth and what we know through the intuition of our body. We suppress our desires and fantasies. We suppress through shame and dissociation and avoidance. Somatics is a way for us to become aware of this suppression, and to choose something different. Somatics is a gateway to ourselves and our cells. Much like our shadow, our soma is vast and much of it is a mystery to us. Both seem to function without our conscious awareness and both control us and our actions far more than we wish to give them credit for.
Somatics is a bridge between us in the present moment and the knowledge of our ancestors that has been given to us through these ancient and wise bodies. Somatics is a language for unearthing what lies in the body, what lies beneath the surface and outside of the purview of the naked eye. Somatics, as a language, is felt, sensed and embodied. It is a world of touch and tears and tingles and pricks. It is a world of numbness and pain and pleasure. It is a world of nuance, a world that holds duality and paradox. It is a world of spirals and curves and straight lines and jagged edges and smooth ones too. The body is an entire universe unbeknownst to us. The great mystery - right here - beckoning us to look down and within. We are the earth. We were formed from the earth. We will return to the earth. Somatics is a path within and without - a journey into the micro and macrocosm. Somatics is an invitation. We get to be the curious explorers who choose to accept.
This body is a time - traveling body. These arms will hold my children, my grandchildren. This body will become soil, and become another body at another point in so called time. This body is traversing through different moments in space-time, over and over again. And yet, this body can only be here-now. That is the only place where the body can reside - the only point that we can track the body to.
Here-now.
Here-now is the meeting of space-time. The spatial dimensions of our existence meeting the seemingly time bound ones to create a unique phenomenon of consciousness - the body. The body binds us to space-time. The body becomes the cross upon which the soul - the spirit - is crucified. The body is the site of suffering and the site of bliss - the site of awakening and the site of sleep. It is all happening in the body, right here-now.
If you as a cosmic explorer are ever needing to situate yourself within space-time, you need only ask one simple question: “where is my body?” and the body will have but one answer - the only thing it could ever answer: “here-now.”
When we say we have left the body, disappearing into our minds or into further off places, we are leaving the here-now to be somewhen and somewhere else. When we disassociate, we are saying: “something about this here-now is too scary, too much, too fast, too big, too indigestible, too incomprehensible. I would love to be somewhere/when else”. The here-now is vulnerable. It is the site of great vulnerability, the site of pain, emotion, bliss, unbearably exquisite or intolerable sensation. All existing here-now.
The aim of most spiritual practice is to learn to fully inhabit the here-now with some modicum of grace: to say, with our two feet rooted on the ground, that we are here-now to be with whatever this here-now may present. We are unflinching in the face of a fearful here-now, we are unwavering when the here-now brings us grief, shock or trauma, and we are unattached when the here-now brings us bliss and pleasure. Our only consistency is that we remain open, and vulnerable, and affected, and present, in the face of what each here-now will bring, knowing that this is ultimately the greatest mystery. To be enlightened is simply to be fully awake to the reality of the here-now. To be awake to the changing nature of the here-now, remembering that everything changes, everything shifts, everything moves.
“Where does the time go?”
A common refrain I hear as I move around the world, from week to week, from year to year. Time seems to slip through my fingers, making me realise that everything changes. The wheel of fortune always turns, and if you live long enough you will experience the upstrokes and downstrokes of fate. But the wheel will keep turning. We all become villains - heroes - victims - judges - juries - executioners. It is our fate to be everything and everyone until we realise that it is all part of one whole. And the body will carry all of these stories for us, lifetime after lifetime. Call it the ancestors. Call it intergenerational trauma. Call it what you like. But this body remembers.
This body stretches out into so-called time. This body is long and unending. This body is a shape-shifting body, and we are all shapeshifters. We are the cycads in one age, the humans in another, the single-celled organisms that created life and the multi-celled organisms that benefit from it (and that consume it). We cannot escape the largeness of these bodies. We cannot escape their ceaseless stretching backward and forward through time, bringing with them their inconveniences of the past and their longings for the future.
These bodies carry with them the whispers, and shouts, and screams of other here-nows. This body remembers. This body is only seemingly contained and bound in space-time by our limited human perception that sees birth as beginning and death as ending and the meat of the story as what happens in between. This body is multiple and plural.
We are all complicit within the complex web of life. And the more that we try to disentangle ourselves from the web of complicity - the web of co-happening - the more we feed into the delusion that we are not the filth that we see in the world. The more that we believe that we can easily rub and wash our hands of that which we don’t like and say “that is so not me”, the more (funnily) we become that thing. It lurks in the shadows, pulling our strings like a puppet master as we insist that we are in control.
This is the shadow and the ego. The puppet and the puppet master. Life becomes more fun, and we become more human, when we learn to see and know ourselves as the puppet and the puppet master; when we begin to see how our strings are being pulled and applaud the artistic genius necessary to pull off a feat such as this.
I propose that we learn to roll around in the filth, in the soil, in the humus. The word human comes from the Latin word “humus,” meaning earth or ground. During the enlightenment period, humans became obsessed with moving upwards, moving away from the earth - the body - and into the mind - the air. Buildings have become higher, sky-scrapers have become a regular fixture of cities, and mind exists over body. This era has seen booms in technological advancement, humans’ first voyage to space, and the proliferation of philosophies and schools of thought that keep pushing us into the realm of upward/forward.
Our society has an obsession with moving forward over moving backward, with moving upward over moving downward, with being right over being left.
“He’s so backward”
“They’re going on a downward spiral”
“You’re right!”
“She’s really moving up in the world!”,
“They’re an upright citizen!”
“Keep going forwards, never backward!”
This bias towards going forward - going up - growing - is a defining characteristic of our contemporary society.
And we habitually disassociate from the backward, downward, left-hand nature of our experience. We are children of the soil reaching towards the sky - which also makes sense, because we are children of the stars as much as we are children of the soil. The cosmos are our oldest ancestors and we have looked to the stars for thousands of years to make sense of our human experience. But what happens when this looking, and this reaching, happens at the expense of our human bodies and of the earth?
What happens when we reach for logical answers in the mind more than we reach down towards the mysterious realms of the deep within our bodies? What happens when we become obsessed with ascending and we forget about the importance of the descent? What happens when we become like billionaires who are quite literally reaching for the stars at the expense of the health and wellness of our planet and its peoples? What happens when we only orient towards the conscious mind at the expense of the unconscious mind? We create shadows.
The body is a representation of the shadow; everything within us that is disowned, forgotten, and left out of sight and quite literally out of mind. The body is where all of our human experience happens, and if we are to do the work of love, if we are to reach out to our world in a loving way we must first begin with reaching into ourselves in a loving way. We must learn to turn inwards towards the body with a disposition of love and tenderness and care and curiosity, for to love is to be curious. We must learn to fully inhabit these bodies, because we can only know and enjoy the fruits of love and of our loving labour if we are present at this moment in space-time to receive them; if we fully embody this here-now.
The body is the first foundation of love. All relating happens between bodies - in the meeting between our body and another, and the mystery of what unfolds within the alchemy of that meeting. Colonisation has taught us to reject these bodies, to see these bodies as shameful and sinful, and to see the desires of these bodies as something to be rejected and renounced. I am here to say that this body is to be embraced, to be remembered, to be held - and that to do so is to reveal the source of your greatest strength and gifts. To do the work of love we must remember our hearts, our loving hearts, and to do the work of love is to remember that there are others ways and sites of knowing outside of the logical mind. Love is about union, including the union between the heart, mind, body, soul and the larger consciousness of the earth. May it be so.
“it’s okay to say that it hurt”
This is a line from one of my favourite movies about South African history, Red Dust. When I think about racism, I think about how it is just as somatic as it is about systems. Racism lives in the body and in our relationships as much as it lives within our institutions, laws and governance.
I feel this every day being a biracial South African with Pedi / Indigenous and European ancestry. I feel the ways that racism winds itself into my sinews telling a strange story of oppressor and oppressed, and leaving me to do the alchemy in the places where these two meet.
It’s okay to say that it hurt.
Something that I encounter in my coaching practice is how much my clients have been gaslit by their families and by society, and ultimately by themselves. I don’t say gaslit to describe some grandiose narcissistic overlord that my clients have been subject to (although capitalism and the capitalist fantasy and its proponents are the grandiose narcissistic overlords that we are all subject to). I think gaslighting happens in quite mundane ways when we continually lie to ourselves about the nature of our reality.
When we are continually lying to ourselves, often because we are forced to lie to ourselves in order to survive the horrors of late stage capitalism, we must necessarily lie to others. We lie to maintain the illusion, the bubble, of untruth. Those who dare to see the bubble are punished, shamed, and gaslit. Those who dare to expose the bubble are punished, shamed, and gaslit.
Witches and gogos and artists and oppressed peoples are often those who find themselves with the burden and the privilege of exposing this bubble for the world to see. And to each other we say “it’s okay to say that it hurt”
It is okay to say that it hurt - and that it is still hurting. It is okay to say that capitalism, patriarchy and colonisation, far from being things that we experience “out there” are things that we intimately experience “in here”. They too weave into the sinews of our flesh and make a home inside of our bodies, dictating who we love and how we love, dictating how our body moves through space and time and how free we feel to move. They dictate the way our mouths open and close, the tension that we keep tight in our jaws from words left unsaid, the chronic pains and points of tightness that we carry with us every day. These “systems” (a word which only captures one aspect of them, truly they are energetic patterns) find their way into our cells and into our speech and into our voice and into our wombs and into our deepest most private inner thoughts. They dominate us into submission from the inside out.
This is why talking about the trauma of colonisation, the trauma of apartheid, the trauma of capitalism and the trauma of non-consensual dominator consciousness is not enough to free us. We must journey into the sinew, into the muscle, into the flesh and the blood and the bone and we must retrieve the stories of how it hurt; not just for ourselves, but for our ancestors too.
And when we do this, the child stands within us - crowned and glorious and conquering. Not conquering ourselves or other people, but conquering as in “to be victorious”. The child stands within us in their untamed, unrivalled glory, glowing and sparkling and indomitable. For this child, we must say “it is okay to say that it hurt”, we must refuse to gaslight ourselves into unseeing any truth that we do in fact see. We must refuse to punish ourselves for seeing and knowing truth and we must allow this child with all their gifted sight to see the truth of reality and the truth of the bubble and we must allow them to pop it.
We owe it to ourselves to affirm our own experiences. We owe it to ourselves to say “yes, that happened. you are right. that did hurt. that did injure us psychically, spiritually and somatically. you are right. I see you in your hurt and I will not punish you for feeling it. I will make it true and real with you. Together we will break the spell.”
The spell of this reality is a spell of untruth and collective illusions and social lies that we collectively maintain because that is what our ancestors had to do and that is what this society tells us we have to do. but we are living in the aeon of MA’AT - an aeon of truth and justice and reconciliation of seeming opposites. In this time, we must be willing to speak truth, we must dare to do the unthinkable and unspeakable and honour our sight in all of its clarity. And to do that we must first turn inward, first turn to the abandoned and exiled child who is waiting to be redeemed. And we must say:
It is okay to say that it hurt.
It is okay to say that it hurt.
It is okay to say that it hurt.
How do we honour our past experiences, our traumas, our wounds without gaslighting ourselves? How do we meet ourselves with deep honouring and respect and reverence?
I find that, when living under dominator consciousness, we most often feel that we need to dominate ourselves into healing and dominate ourselves into transformation. We feel that we need to be poked, prodded and forced into a new and evolved version of ourselves and I just do not think that that is true. When I engage with my clients, and when I am sitting with a coach, what I find to be most impactful strategy and approach is being with. How can I be with my exiled parts? How can I be with the parts of me that I have judged, that I have cast aside, that I have seen as less worthy and deserving of love? In our recovery, we must learn to affirm ourselves and our experiences. Not in a way that makes us delusional or self-centred, and not in a way that necessarily affirms our dualistic story of what happened and what it meant, but in a way that makes us turn inwards and say:
“That emotion you are feeling - it is okay that it is there. That sensation you are feeling - it is okay that it is there - that pain in your left hip that you are feeling - it is okay that it is there.”
I’ve woken up with a pain active in my left hip again and I feel how resistant I am to writing. “I have nothing to say, but I want to get to my word quota for the day” I think.
The body says: “Energy is stuck, you have to move first.”
Even in my writing practice, it is tempting to dominate my body. My head says: “We have goals, agendas - we have deadlines to meet.”
The body says: “I will wait here until I am listened to.”
The body is an amazing intelligence and it stores all of our experiences, and all of our ancestors’ experiences, until we are ready to see, meet and understand them. When we are not yet ready to process an experience, the intelligence of the body says “let me hold that for you” and it finds a place within us to store it. When we are ready, the body says “give me safety and I will unfurl unto and into you” - and like a gem or a jewel waiting to be discovered, the body reveals something that we have previously not been able to look at or make sense of.
The body is an infinite source of wisdom and intelligence. The body says “I just want you to listen to me” - the mind says “we have plans, goals, things on our to-do lists” - the body says “I am a creature, I am an animal, I have needs and my needs are important”. The body is infinitely more powerful than any of our egos’ goals, to dos, tasks, and if the body doesn’t want us to do something - it will not happen. The body has veto power. Sometimes, when we have ignored this voice we become sick. We become unwell. The body says: “I demand that you hear me. I demand that you listen to me. I demand that you make space for me.”
We are simply creatures of this earth. We love. We attach. We hunger. We thirst. We have drives and impulses and urges. We fear. We move. We orgasm. We cry. We express. That is all that we are here to do. We are here to be in our animal body. The body in its infinite intelligence says “you cannot bypass me.” How often do we create the space for our body to express itself on its own terms? How often do we close the laptop or the work or the practice because our body has said enough, or I need water, or I need to pee? How do we return to the innate intelligence of the body? We can only do this when we deeply identify with the body and allow the body to be listened to as it is with love, acceptance and curiosity.
IT’S OKAY TO SAY THAT IT HURT ❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥