What are somatic exercises? Somatic exercises involve performing movement for the sake of movement. Throughout the exercise, you focus on your inner experience as you move and expand your internal awareness. Somatic Movement is a type of therapy that helps treat post-traumatic stress physical or emotional and effects from other mental health conditions.
In somatics therapy, we tend to regard the body as the self. Emotions are produced in the body as sensation and interpreted by the brain as stories about how we feel. This gives us our sense of self over time. But, even that isn’t such a straightforward dialectic. Thought, emotions, and sensations are all interconnected and influence one another. A somatic movement, generally speaking, is one which is performed consciously with the intention of focusing on the internal experience of the movement rather than the external appearance or result of the movement regaining the movement as it was supposed to be.
Somatic therapists guide patients to focus on their underlying physical sensations. From there, the mind-body exercises may include breath work, meditation, visualization, massage, grounding, dance, and/or sensation awareness work.