What is Soma? The Body That Knows

Your body has been trying to tell you something.

Not loudly. Not dramatically. In the tightness that lives between your shoulders at 3pm. In the breath you keep forgetting to take. In the exhaustion that a full night's sleep somehow never fixes. In the feeling — vague but persistent — that something is held. Something is waiting.

You have probably tried to think your way out of it.

Most of us have.

And most of us have discovered, eventually, that thinking is not enough.

This is where soma begins.

From the ancient Greek — soma means the living body as experienced from within. Not the body your doctor measures. Not the body your mirror reflects. The body you are, from the inside out. The body that breathes and trembles and braces and opens. The body that knows things the mind has not yet caught up with.

Somatic practice is the art of coming back to that body. Of learning its language. Of working with it — rather than over it, around it, or in spite of it.

It is not a wellness trend. It is one of the oldest forms of human intelligence. And right now, it may be the most urgently needed.

The Science Is Clear — The Body Is Not a Passenger

For centuries, Western culture placed the rational mind at the top of the hierarchy. The body was something to be managed, disciplined, pushed through. Descartes gave us the split — mind above, body below — and medicine, psychology, and culture followed.

That model is now being dismantled by neuroscience.

Antonio Damasio's research was groundbreaking: people who lost connection to their body's sensory signals also lost their ability to make decisions. Emotion, he showed, is not a mental event — it is a bodily event first. The body is not separate from how we think. It is the very medium through which we process everything.

Bessel van der Kolk went further. Working with trauma survivors for decades, he demonstrated that what we experience — especially what we experience and cannot fully process — does not just live in memory. It lives in the body. In bracing patterns and breath restrictions and a nervous system that never fully returned to safety. His conclusion was unambiguous: the body keeps the score.

And then there is interoception — the brain's ability to sense its own internal state. Emerging research shows that the brain's primary function is not abstract thought. It is body budgeting — reading the signals from every organ, every muscle, every system, and using that data to regulate your entire experience of being alive.

You are, before anything else, a sensing body. Thought, emotion, memory — they emerge from that. They do not precede it.

The Lineage Behind the Work

Soma practices are not new. They stand on the shoulders of extraordinary minds.

Thomas Hanna coined the term somatics in 1976, naming what he observed in body after body — not structural damage, but sensory motor amnesia. A nervous system that had forgotten how to feel itself. His work showed that the path back was not force. It was attention.

Moshe Feldenkrais built an entire method around the idea that the nervous system learns through curiosity. Thousands of gentle movement explorations, each one asking the body to notice rather than perform. To sense rather than achieve. The results were — and remain — remarkable.

Peter Levine watched animals in the wild complete stress cycles through spontaneous trembling and discharge after threat had passed. Then he looked at humans — and saw what happened when those cycles were interrupted, suppressed, or left incomplete. Anxiety. Dissociation. Chronic pain. Hypervigilance. He developed Somatic Experiencing to help the body finally finish what it had started, sometimes decades before.

Different methods. One shared truth: the path to real change runs through the body.

Why Now

We are more disconnected from our bodies than at any point in human history.

We are screen-saturated, adrenaline-run, chronically overriding. We have optimised everything except our nervous systems. We push through the signals. We intellectualise the feelings. We reach for the next thing before the last thing has been integrated.

And quietly, the body accumulates it all.

Every unprocessed stress. Every unexpressed emotion. Every moment of bracing, holding, contracting to get through. It does not disappear. It layers.

This is why people come to the Soma Series not once, but again and again. Because life keeps adding layers — and the body needs regular space to release, to reset, to remember its own natural state.

Not as a luxury. As a necessity.

Sound Soma. Yin Sound Soma. Beyond Soma.

Three ceremonial practices. Each one complete. Each one a different layer of the same deep return.

Come once. Come back. Come as many times as your journey requires. There is always another layer — and the Soma Series will meet you there.

→ Explore the Soma Series Events | → Work with Severine Privately | → Train in Somatic Coaching

Next: Part 2 — Why the Body Holds What the Mind Cannot



