What is Somatic Yoga
Somatic Yoga is a therapeutic form of embodied movement for everyone! Classes can be done seated or lying down, and can incorporate standing movements. If you experience chronic pain, illness, or fatigue, or if you just want to improve your body-brain communication to create greater comfort or excel in your sport, this style of yoga is for you. It combines smooth breath with slow, mindful motions to safely release old patterns, hidden tension and trauma. The awareness is on the internal experience and re-educating muscles toward fluid body movement. There is also emphasis placed on the energetic benefits of the movement and working with prana (life-force energy).
Welcome to Somatic Yoga - The Space of Grace
Our society is taught to admire intellect over intuition – to respect doing more than being – to value the material above the natural – to focus on consumption instead of preservation – to expect expansion without contraction – and to pursue the scientific before the spiritual. What about finding a state that balances these seemingly opposing forces? Somatic Yoga can bring you into the Space of Grace where you remember that you are neither one or the other of these complimentary opposites. You are simply resting in your natural state of being. Somatic movement helps you to feel and release the tension of opposites and recognize that your body is here to support you in everything you do.
The body as Soma
“Soma” is the Greek word meaning “living body”. Viewed from the outside, a human being is a body with a certain shape and size. However, when a human being looks at him/herself from the inside, he/she is aware of feelings, movements, sensations and intentions – a very different fuller being. What an individual sees from his/her first person, living, sensing, internalize view is a soma. To yourself you are a soma. To another, you are a body.
The somatic viewpoint is that humans are self-aware, self-sensing and self-moving and therefore, self responsible somas who can change themselves, as well as bodily beings who are subjected to physical and organic forces.
Why Somatic Yoga Works: Harmonizing Pandiculation and the Breath
We learn about ourselves through movement. Specifically Somatic Yoga beautifully entwines a type of movement called pandiculation with breath. Neurologically, pandiculation is when we contract into tension that is already present, slowly lengthen through it and completely release. It is a biological function in our body that resets muscle length at the sensory motor level. We pandiculate on a small scale every time we yawn. If you have animals, you have undoubtedly seen them pandiculate time and time again when they get up after any period of inactivity.
In Somatic Yoga, the natural spaces of contraction, expansion and relaxation within the cycles of breath are appreciated as our most innate pandiculation. By synchronizing our instinctual necessity to breathe with physical pandiculation of the muscles, we learn to self-regulate our nervous system. When we close our eyes and enter the somatic space, we find sensation. All we are asked to do is notice that sensation. The benefits are immediate in all of the systems of the body.
try a somatic Yoga class on YouTube
If you are new to Somatic Yoga and want to see if it is for you, Megan has over 100 free classes to practice to.
You can also contact Megan if you have specific questions about how you might benefit from Somatic Yoga classes in person or virtually.
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