What is Somatics?
Soma means “the living body in its wholeness”
In 1976, Thomas Hanna coined the term somatics to refer to the discipline of movement re-education that seeks to foster internal awareness of one’s body.
The system of movement Thomas Hanna created is called Somatics. It is also referred to Hanna Somatic Education or Hanna Somatics.
This system of movement teaches us to reverse the chronic and habituated effects of stress on our muscular system so we can again move freely.
The idea that everything we experience in our lives is a bodily experience is the somatic viewpoint. We experience ourselves from our first-person perspective — which is our somatic perspective.
Thomas Hanna held that the first-person human experience must be considered of equal scientific and medical importance as outside, third-person observation.
In this way, somatics was and continues to be a revolutionary way of understanding life.
Thomas Hanna
Thomas Hanna, PhD (1928-1990) was director of the Novato Institute for Somatic Research and Training and editor of Somatics: Magazine - Journal of the Bodily Arts and Sciences. He authored seven books including:
Bodies in Revolt: A Primer in Somatic Thinking (1970)
The Body of Life: Creating New Pathways for Sensory Awareness and Fluid Movement (1980, 1993)
Somatics: Reawakening the Mind’s Control of Movement, Flexibility, and Health (1988)
Hanna was greatly influenced by his teacher Moshe Feldenkrais and other somatic pioneers including F. Matthias Alexander, Elsa Gindler and Jean Ayres, as well as Hans Selye’s research into the impacts of stress on health.
Thomas Hanna was a philosopher who asked the question “Why are people not free?” He observed that by increasing our awareness of our own body, we gain control over our own life.
Hanna was interested in functional distortions — distortions in our awareness. He believed these are missed by contemporary medicine and psychotherapy, which see the body and mind as separate, and ignores the integrated being who stands before them.
He believed that the typical mental and physical diseases of our society are learned, rather than the inevitable result of aging.
Thomas Hanna sought to help people interpret their lives wisely and live healthily in an age confused by rapid transition.
Hanna’s motto for the twenty-first century was “Anything is possible.”
“If life means movement and death means non-movement, then it may be permissible to think that more movement means more life and that less movement means less life.”