The Mind-Body Connection (Somatics)

As my bio states, I have been intrigued by the mind-body connection for decades. This is why I chose to receive my masters in Counseling Psychology and my doctorate in exercise science. What I didn’t realize until I was drawn to yoga a few years later, the study of the mind-body connection is much older than the western approach I sought in traditional academia. As an exercise physiologist and a counseling psychologist, I just knew it worked.

The mind-body connection was called “Somatics” in my college courses. Soma, or “the body as perceived from within,” focused on work by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, the  Alexander technique, the Feldenkrais Method, Rolfing Structural Integration and Dance. The term referred to techniques based on internal sensation, in contrast with “performative or competitive techniques”.

As an instructor of exercise physiology and counseling psychology, I found movement extremely helpful in building self-esteem and self-acceptance and I gravitated towards that practice. I moved more in counseling and wove psychology into my work as a physiologist especially as regards the autonomic nervous system and habituated patterns. At this time, I also became  intrigued by yoga. At first, this seemed separate from what I was doing in my work life. It just felt so good to be on my mat, practicing in a way that was noncompetitive, investigative, thoughtful and even, spiritual. I took a Yoga Teacher Training from Erich Schiffmann who taught, “Why do we do yoga? Because it makes us feel good!” I felt I’d come to the source! 
I was lucky to take several YTT’s after that which reinforced and facilitated the mind-body-spirit connection. From them, I learned that many traditional Asian movement disciplines influenced the Western somatic practices I had studied, especially “the oldest and most widely practiced somatic discipline of yoga.”

Shiva Rea’s teacher training was another big thunderbolt of recognition. She taught that yoga physiology described a system of interconnected bodies and that the practice worked on the energy flow throughout them. Here is a quote from her training manual,“During my first year of coursework in Dance Movement Therapy, I encountered an article entitled Some Ways of Disembodiment and Re-embodiment by somatic psychologist Sidney Jourad that help me understand, from a Western perspective, what I was experiencing in yoga class. He noted that the average man in the West is not “in his body”. If not in his body, then where is he? and who is he?

To be embodied is to experience one’s body as the center of one’s existence, to feel alive, to perceive bodily states as they change from pleasure to pain, energy to fatigue, from vitality and excitement to calm and tranquility. It is argued that such a state of embodiment is rare: more typically, people repress body-experience and find themselves anesthetic to their bodies. Increasing numbers of people in the West have begun experimenting with healing techniques originating in Eastern philosophies and religions.

All these techniques share one common feature: they entail an abrupt cessation of destructive, anesthesia-producing life-styles and they enliven consciousness in general and somatic perception (a person’s awareness of the response of his body to the situation in which he finds himself in particular). Jourard goes on to mention the potential for hatha yoga as a practice of re-embodiment.”

Shiva continued with a deep historical dive into the connections and contributions of yoga to classical psychotherapy and modern movement philosophy which awarded her a masters of arts degree in Dance. Below are some of the resources she references in her masters thesis. 

• Cohen, Bonnie Bainbridge, 1993, Sensing, Feeling, and Action: the Experiential Anatomy of Body-Mind Centering.
• Criswell, Eleanor, 1989, How Yoga Works: an Introduction to Somatic Yoga.
• Goyeche, John R.M. Towards the Integration of Eastern &  Western Approaches to the “Mind-Body” Problem. 
• Jung, Carl, 1936, Yoga and the West.
• Kasulis, Thomas, 1993, Self as Body in Asian Theory and Practice.
• Murphy, Michael, 1992, The Future of the Body: Exploration into the Further Evolution of Human Nature.
• Whitehouse, Mary, 1995, The Tao of the Body. Bone, breath and gesture: practices of Embodiment.
• Wilbur, Ken, 1979, No Boundary.

For specific work with Trauma, I recommend work by Julian Marc Walker, Micheline Berry,  Jason Tougaw and Sumitra Rajkumar. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-elusive-brain/201812/how-our-bodies-remember-trauma