Hi there,
Zoë here, from Thirdspace Somatics. Welcome to my SubStack. This is the new home of my newsletter, as well as occasional writing, poetry, and audio offerings. I’m excited to share more of my work and writing with you in addition to updates about my practice. I won’t clog your mailbox, but you’re welcome to unsubscribe below.
In this edition, you’ll find some words about somatic practice, and a link to learn more about my upcoming 10 week practice group beginning January 11th, 2023.
“Social structures do not come into being or survive except through human practices.”
-Pierre Bourdieu
Very early on in my gender journey, I was enthralled with the writing of Kate Bornstein. I loved her playful way with words and her playful approach to gender. One of the things she said that has really stuck with me over the years is this:
The way you do anything is the way you do everything.
She means gender. She means posture. She means attitude. She mean everything.
As I’m writing this newsletter, I’m practicing.
At first I was practicing urgency: “I have to get it out today!” Then I was practicing overriding my needs: My body was begging to be stretched, but I sat curled into my chair staring at the screen instead.
Then, thankfully, I began practicing my commitment to aliveness by stopping, slowing down, re-centering, getting some fresh air, and returning to the screen inspired to write.
The more I practice with people, the more I’m stunned by the truth of Bornstein’s observation. If a client feels like they are always walking on eggshells in their relationships, I might ask them to actually walk, and it’s quite likely that they will walk as if there are eggshells all over my office.
When I began studying somatics, I heard my teachers constantly repeating something similar: We are always practicing something.
The question is not are you practicing, but what are you practicing?
In the 16th century, the philosopher René Descartes made the famous statement “I think therefore I am.” These words solidified a cultural turn that would pit the mind and body against each other.
He wasn’t anti-body, but he was convinced that the body and the senses are not trustworthy purveyors of the Truth. In setting up the mind-body problem, he gave an unequivocal amount of power to the brain and established a culture of suspicion toward the body.
Yet if we could think and therefore be whatever we want, we would be gods.
We now know, confirming the theories of Descartes critics, that the body and mind have a symbiotic relationship. Our bodies learn new actions by doing them, not just by thinking about them. This knowledge is then stored in the sensory-motor system and operates largely independent from our brain. This allows us to act from habit (like tying our shoes) without having to think about it.
Our muscles and tissues remember the past and store that information so that they know how to respond and act in the future without the input of the brain. This applies to habit as well as to our reactions to situations, people, and the world around us. We remember the past so that we can act quickly in the future.
We can trust this knowledge AND we don’t always have to act from it.
Relying on habit is great for many things, but not for breaking cycles. Habitual actions include more than simply gesturing or tying a shoe, we can become stuck in embodied habits of urgency, of mistrust, of shutting out emotion, of anger or fear.
When we act out of habit, we don’t change or transform.
Habits are often socially acquired, we learn by mimicking, we learn what is appropriate to say, do, think, and feel. We learn when to speak up and when not to. We learn how to walk and gesture. We learn which gender we will be read as if we move in certain ways. We develop our unique bodily schema through our experiences, and through repetition this becomes solidified as habit, which becomes who we are (aka our embodied selves). This is largely a process happening below the level of conscious awareness.
As our bodies learn and acquire habit, all of the social and emotional content wrapped in the conditioning of that habit is imprinted, stored, held. Our bodies keep the score, not just of trauma, but of everything we do.
Somatics allows us to bring unconscious habitual ways of being into conscious awareness so that we can integrate our mind/body connection and act with choice instead of habit, reflex, or reactiveness. The 10 week somatic practice group beginning in January 2023 is a chance to become aware of what is embodied in you and practice something different.
Descartes wasn’t completely off. Sometimes our sense of the world is accurately remembering the past but not accurately applying it to the present.
Yet our bodyminds hold the power to integrate and even transform the past through practices of somatic awareness. Not only can we unlearn old habits through somatics, but we can practice new ways of being, moving, and thinking and begin to integrate these new shapes into our body schema. By practicing new embodied skills, we can transform how we move through the world, and the kinds of worlds we create in our winds.
Who do you want to be? How do you want to be?
Perhaps it’s not I think therefore I am, but instead I practice, therefore I am.
Click below for more information on my upcoming 10 week practice group!
