somatic

somatic psychology

In a book by British dance movement therapist and psychotherapist Linda Hartley defines "somatic psychology" as:

18 notes

  1. on being irrational

    We live in a time when facts wear ties and feelings wear clown shoes, and trusting your instincts gets called irrational.

  2. myths and constitutional types

    Each of us blends endo softness, meso firmness and ecto fragility, moving toward, against and away from people.

  3. subdued images of vitality

    When we live concepts and images not grounded in our body, we do not believe in who we are.

  4. handwritten or typewritten journaling

    Handwritten journals excel at rereading, as objects of time and craft, but typing suits a mind that thinks very fast.

  5. cartesian mechanistic physics vs quantum mechanics

    Freud’s psychology was based on a Cartesian mechanistic physics of static, limited energy; somatics is based on quantum mechanics.

  6. proprioception and kinesthetic awareness

    For Marty Klein, bodies attune through proprioception, knowing how to move your arms to hug, and kinesthetic awareness, sensing how far and how hard.

  7. authentic movement

    Authentic Movement, developed by Mary Starks Whitehouse in the mid-twentieth century, uses dance as the medium of active imagination.

  8. body as an object outside or subject inside

    Behavioral psychology studies the body as an object from outside, while somatics studies it as a subject from inside.

  9. attention to the subjective or phenomenological body

    Somatic education attends to the body, to many senses at once and to the here-and-now, for healing, education and self-discovery.

  10. body epiphany the somatic insight

    The body epiphany, a first discovery of body and mind as one, helped begin the Somatic Movement and matures into lasting embodiment.

  11. somatic interest studies and practices

    Authenticity is a function of embodiment: somatics arose as it grew clear that the body is a key to a more authentic reality.

  12. somatic movement founders esalen workshops

    The late 1960s atmosphere around the Esalen Institute brought the work of Rolf, Lowen, Selver, Whitehouse and Fritz Perls together.

  13. somatics educate what it means to be human

    Just as the humanities seem almost defunct in academia, somatics offers a basis for answering the age-old question of what it means to be human.

  14. third wave humanistic psychology

    After psychoanalysis and behaviorism came a third wave, a humanistic psychology that took subjective experience seriously.

  15. visually dominance hearing and touch

    For the visually dominant, seeing influences how they think, in sharply separated objects, and how they see themselves: eye equals “I”.

  16. insider perspective of the body

    We know other things from outside, by their contours, but bodies we also know from inside, by what acting in them feels like and means.

  17. understanding other bodies

    Babies look at what they are thinking about, and at twelve months they look longer when the goal of a reach changes than when its means do.

  18. human capacity for self-detachment

    Viktor Frankl finds the uniquely human capacity for self-detachment in two places: heroism, as in the concentration camps, and humor.