Introduction to Somatics

By Richard Strozzi-Heckler, Ph.D.

All virtues are physiological conditions;
Our most sacred convictions
Are judgments of our muscles...
Perhaps the entire evolution of the
spirit Is the question of the body;
It is the history of the development of the higher body
That emerges into our sensibility.

—Nietzshe

I come from the tradition of the martial arts, meditation, competitive athletics, and body-oriented psychology. In these disciplines I learned fundamental principles that profoundly influence my work today. In martial arts dojos, meditation halls, and track stadiums, I experienced that I am my body and that I am more than my body. In my somatic work with individuals and groups, I learned that we are a living process shaped by experience, and this, in turn, shapes our experience. Slowly I began to understand that the body lives only in the distinctions of language. At the same time the directness and simplicity of these disciplines revealed to me an energetic field that exists before language, out of which emotions, action, and perception are organized into the form we call body. We are an energetic process that is awakening, becoming, containing, undoing, and re-awakening. Energy, body, and language are intimately linked, and as a unity they become the cause of our life. The body we are is the life we live.

We are connected to others and the world through this energetic process. Pulsations, vibrations, streamings, expansions, and contractions of our bodily life build boundaries, express emotions, shape attitudes, forward new relationships, and end others. Living from this field of energy generates community and social responsibility. Life is formed from life, and there are cycles of beginnings, endings, and in-betweens. We can learn to organize this energy to build an identity, form communities, and make alliances to take care of what matters to us. There’s also a time to surrender to this vast, resonating field of excitation and let it organize us. This teaches us to trust the territory beyond the self and to dissolve into the intelligence that reaches beyond the dominion of the personal “I.” This is transcendent membership in the universal community of space, wisdom, and being. This energy simultaneously seeks balance and disruption, homeostasis and growth, becoming and dying. To live in the center of this contradiction is how we continually form, contain, release, and re-form the body we are.

Through these disciplines I also discovered that the body we are goes beyond the physical form. While we are in a living process of becoming different selves and different bodies, there is a parallel process in an entirely different domain. The first time I became aware of this phenomenon was when I was running for the United States team in the pre-Olympic meet in Mexico City in 1967. In one particular race, I suddenly found myself above the track watching myself and the other competitors in the 200-meter dash. I was both running and watching myself run. A mantle of calm had settled over me, and my concerns about competing and winning had completely vanished. While I was seemingly powerless to affect anything, I was powerfully joined to everything by a pulsating, unified field. A few steps past the finish line, I re-entered my track body. I was both perplexed and refreshed. I could see by the way the judges and other competitors treated me that they were oblivious to my experience. This event initiated me into an inquiry about expanded states of awareness that continues to this day.

Years later during aikido training a similar episode occurred. I was thrown in an exceptionally fast and powerful throw by my teacher, and I again stood apart from my physical body, watching everything with lucidity, including the expressions on the faces of the other students, the teacher’s technique, and my body hurling through space. I wasn’t afraid and I wasn’t concerned, nor was I particularly ecstatic. The personal “I” through which we normally act and perceive simply wasn’t present. I felt part of something much larger than what I was normally accustomed to. I wasn’t bound by the self. In that timeless moment, I became a member of a community whose scale diminished vanity and generated unity.

Through these experiences and others that followed, I wasn’t satisfied with explanations that contrived me to be out of my body. Rather, I conceived that I was simply in another body—a body that has its own organizational structure for perceiving, acting, and feeling. Further experiences in dreams, intuitions, and meditative states supported the existence of a time/space domain that resides beyond the physical form. Our common sense and historical tradition of language haven’t embraced this phenomenon, and thus do not offer a structure to support it. I believe that not only are we many bodies over a lifetime, and even a day, but we also live in bodies that can’t be reduced to the traditional criterion of analysis and inspection.

When I speak of the body I’m referring to the shape of our experience; not the collection of fixed, anatomical parts inherited from the Cartesian discourse. The body is not a machine; its boundaries are not clearly defined. Our experience is subjective, self-responsive, and at the same time constantly responding to the world. We are self-contained, and we merge with others and the environment. We are our bodies when we’re engaged with the air, our neighbors, the landscape, making promises, planning our future, thinking of our loved ones.

The way we expand towards warmth and recoil from pain is too complex to understand in a diagram or mathematical formula. Moreover, our bodies produce a language and a thinking by which we coordinate with others to build a mutually committed future, or not. When we allow ourselves to be touched by the rhythm of life, by sensations, streamings, waves of excitation, and fields of energy, we grasp the possibility of becoming self-healing, self-educating, and self-generating.

The Rationalistic tradition that portrays the body as a machine is the foundation for the present-day psychological language of insight. This way of thinking reduces embodiment to understanding, which relies on gathering information. In addition, the body-as-machine metaphor is currently extended to equate the mind with a computer, another machine. When this machine metaphor determines our life, we feed ourselves information in order to form a theory about living and acting. Our decisions and choices, then, are based on this theory, not drawn from living our energetic process. To its credit we owe much of our advances thus far in science and technology to this way of thinking. I say “thus far” because it is now producing more breakdowns than breakthroughs in our capacity to take meaningful action in our lives. The vast amounts of information to which we have access have not made us more fulfilled, effective, or peaceful. For all of our understanding we still live in fear, anxiety, and uncertainty. Our labor-saving devices and material wealth haven’t salved the wounds in our families or communities, nor have they evolved us to a more satisfying way of being. How can a machine live the richness of an incarnate spiritual life?

To highlight this distinction between information and embodied knowledge, consider this example: I’m in Mexico having a conversation with two friends from the United States. There’s a disagreement about the meaning of a particular Spanish word. Dictionaries and phrase books are brought out. One person is adamant about his position and gains ground in his claim by repeatedly referring to the texts. The other, who has been working in this country, is not convinced but is acquiescing under the weight of the other’s argument. Unexpectedly there’s a knock at the door and a man says something to us in Spanish. The friend who is academically knowledgeable in the language shrugs unknowingly. The other friend replies in Spanish. There’s a brief conversation in which directions are given, and the Latino thanks him and leaves.

Embodied knowledge is the skill to act appropriately at the appropriate time. Embodied knowledge has a historical and rigorous formal training behind it. It lives in present time in its immediacy, availability, and directness. It anticipates and corrects for breakdowns in the future. Skillful performers such as athletes, dancers, equestrians, teachers, musicians, and pilots are exemplars of embodied knowledge. The man who helped the Latino at the door was the embodiment of knowledge. He was an actor in the world in his capacity to engage and respond.

Information is not instantaneous. It’s formless until organized. While embodiment is alive, information is static. Information is stored in computers, books, fiber optics, and theories. It is not interactive, self-forming, or responsive. You program and access information. Embodied knowledge acts to take care of the concerns of living. The difference between information and embodied knowledge, we might say, is like the difference between knowing a word in a Spanish/English dictionary and speaking Spanish.

This point was consistently and faithfully brought home to me in the many dojos, schoolyards, and playing fields where I was schooled. When a newcomer, for example, would show up at the dojo bragging about his prowess or telling us why something we were doing wouldn’t work, somebody in due time would offer, “Put it on the mat. Let’s see what works.” Inevitably, the pretense of the boaster would fall short of the embodied expertise of the trained athlete.

Don’t mistake this example as an endorsement for physical strength or machismo. Often the winner was smaller, somewhat reserved, and not particularly strong. The difference was that he had been training rigorously with equally rigorous training partners under a qualified teacher. This person embodied a certain domain of knowledge. The other was a repository of information for this domain.

Where I’m leading is that if you want to produce new behaviors or competencies—in short, if you want to evolve or improve yourself—it isn’t sufficient to be just cognitively knowledgeable about a subject. It is necessary, however, to have a teacher, to commit to a practice, and to practice and study with a community of learners. This notion shifts learning from understanding information to embodying actions. In my opinion one of the failures of contemporary psychology is that it doesn’t provide practices that lead to fulfillment, new competencies, and the satisfaction of taking on that which is difficult. Most talking therapies offer insight, which can be valuable for orienting historically to our present situation, but they often drive us inward, away from a larger world of social sensibility, the politics of care, and stewardship of the natural world. Its reductionistic bias has a tendency to rigidify and fortify a self that ultimately becomes isolated from others and the environment. This, of course, can also be present in somatic therapies, but dressed in a different cloak.

Many somatic therapies emphasize feeling states that are disconnected from any meaningful activity. While it is meaningful to expand one’s capacity to sense and feel, I believe it’s a beginning point, and not the conclusion for living a life that embodies actions for taking care. If we don’t outgrow a self that is defined only by how we feel or what we want, we remove ourselves from membership in the larger community of humans, animals, and landscape. Isolated, we become part of the narcissistic plague that is now a national epidemic.

Human beings live in bodies and they live in language. When I work with someone, I look to see how and where life has been lived in their bodies, and where life has been denied. I listen to how they live the stories they tell themselves, or how they live in a gap between their stories and their actions. I look at how they have allowed their energy to express aliveness and where they are rigid and lifeless. I listen to the stories they tell about their life, and I listen to how these stories live in their body. I’m interested in how they’ve shaped themselves around their stories and how this shaping brings them satisfaction or despair.

To listen to people this way is to include their past, present, and future. We embody a history that is constantly influencing us; we act, feel, and perceive only in the present; and we are like a radar screen that is invariably scanning for the best future we can imagine. I don’t see minds, bodies, and spirits. I see identities, biology, history, a certain bearing, mood, and a future-forming language that expresses a unique quality of aliveness we call the self. I see a life of becoming that is formed by a process of intertwined events, images, actions, emotions, and a thrusting into the future.

I am alert to what wants to come to life in the person, that which is long buried. For some this may be withheld grief, for others rage, perhaps the capacity to declare their mission in the world, or it might be the yearning to freely receive and express love. Whatever it is, I am interested in how it is withheld, both in their body and in the story they have about their life. I work with their resistance and their becoming through touch, movement, breath, expression, conversations, and practices that support a new way of being.

At a ranch in Petaluma, California I operate Strozzi Institute, The Center for the Study of Somatics and Leadership. We offer educational programs and consulting services to individuals and businesses. We have worked with Fortune 500 companies, Olympic and professional athletes, The Marine Corps, Army Special Forces, Navy Seals, private and public schools, urban gang kids, executive leaders and management teams in the public, private and non-profit sectors. Our commitment at SI is the development of a discipline in which people learn to embody generative, life-affirming interpretations of the world and are able to act in integrity with this ethic. We see the possibility of individuals and organizations being self-educating, self-generating, and self-restoring, thus producing a discourse of skillful action, compassion, wisdom, and a deep listening for the concerns of others and the non-human world. As brought forward in this book, we see that when the mind, the body, and the spirit are unified, one has the capacity to create a life of fulfillment and meaning.

We recognize through our work with people privately and in the workplace that it is fundamental for all people to have a sense of place. Place is located in the natural world, in communities, and in the body. For us, the self is not separate from community or the place in which we live and work. “Holding the Center,” the title of this book, refers to the profound inter-connectedness between these elements in our lives and how they are the cornerstones for living a satisfying life. “Sanctuary in a Time of Confusion” acknowledges the sanity this center provides in a world of uncertainty and constant change.

Reflecting on the perils of the human trajectory, the eminent Harvard biologist, E.O. Wilson, writes that once we acknowledge our proper relationship with life, we will be able to “acquire the knowledge on which an enduring ethic, a sense of preferred direction, can be built.” But, he warns, if we continue on our present course, we will have “doomed its most beautiful creations.” This book is an inquiry into embodying the knowledge that will allow us to walk in that “preferred direction.”