What Is The Somatics Approach To Yoga?

Another typical day where you show up to the mat and do a series of movements. During that intimate time with yourself, did you take time to sense how you feel in each asana and experience the movements? Taking a somatics approach to yoga can strengthen your practice, giving you new tools to deepen your mind-body connection.

What Is Somatics?

Coined by Dr. Thomas Hanna, Somatics is a movement therapy method that encourages the practice of mind-body connection to help in scanning and listening to the bodies signals.

According to Hanna, sensory motor amnesia, “a condition in which the sensory motor neurons of the voluntary cortex loses some portion of their ability to control all or some of the muscles of the body.” He believed sensory motor amnesia caused “perhaps as many as 50 percent of the cases of chronic pain suffered by human beings.”

Somatic practices can help you develop an even greater awareness of specific parts of your body, find relief from pain, trauma, and understand more fully how your body works.

Benefits Of Somatics Yoga

In yoga, each pose is done slowly and is followed by one minute of deep breathing, self-awareness, and integration. As you mindfully move through each asana, you expand your inner awareness by focusing on your inner experience.

Integrating somatics into your yoga practice can aide in improving posture, decreasing pain, improving mobility, improved breathing, relieving headaches or any type of chronic pain.

Deepening your relationship with your body can support emotional awareness. Somatic practices can aide you in noticing physical responses to repressed emotions.

The most important benefit is that your yoga practice becomes a time of self-care. Listening to our bodies is likened to our relationship with lovers and friends. Perhaps through this simple therapeutic practice we can also learn to develop an awareness of those around us.