languaging

What is…Exploring Soma?

by Victoria McMahon and Lori Candon

SOMA = Living Body

Soma includes not only the physical body but also the intelligence of the entire organism that can change itself.  As living organisms we are born with the impulse to move toward safety, connection, belonging.  Depending on our experiences, beginning in the womb, our bodies shape around our biological responses to safety/lack of safety, connection/lack of connection and belonging/not belonging.

Do you have recognition that you are a somatic being? 

How does being somatic register in you?

Somatic being is the innate way of listening, observing, and operating in human form.  We all experience ourselves on a continuum of Somatic being – from the awareness of our Soma, just coming into awareness of Soma or not engaging in awareness with the Somatic system. 

If you haven’t been introduced to the experience or languaging of Soma until now, celebrate your expanding curiosity for how you long to engage with life.  If you already operate in relationship to Soma, what ways are you longing for more or deeper access?  Either way, you are inviting yourself into a new way of operating in depth of knowing, embodying who and what you are! 

 Is your interest piqued?

What is it to operate in life through the lens of experience and language of Soma?  We have access to our organic nature through mind, emotion, body languaging. 

 In gaining access to mind languaging, we are exploring and building our capacity of attention.  Attention is about recognizing our words, thoughts and actions that follow a thread of either being life-enhancing or life-depleting.  Moving into the observing of being with these threads, we are deepening our connection to the rise of emotion and body languaging.  Discovering the woven patterns in-forms and invites us into practices that move us beyond mental mind thinking. Then we are able to organically re-shape into a mind that operates in unity.  

The languaging of emotion is about listening and following the ebb and flow in the emotional field. This organic flow invites somatic opening up into the gift of being emotionally present.  Engaging emotional presence with mind and body, we experience how emotion shapes thinking and physical body sensing/shaping.  This interweaving sustains our capacity to observe and be with rise and release, flow and restriction, and interruption or completion of energy in motion.  

Body languaging is the third access point of Soma.  Typically, when you hear the word Soma, you think of paying attention to the body, registering sensation.  Registers can include muscle tension/relaxation, pain/ease, temperature changes or tingling energy sensation.  Observing and tracking the intelligence of body sensations connects us to our body shaping,  informing our mood and mental mind thinking. The integration of body, emotion and mind generates the potency for deeper exploration of Soma.  

 Observing from this deeper exploration, we can develop practices that create choice:  

• Shifting language of mind, emotion, body
• Operating in connection as somatic beings
• Engaging in life-enhancing ways with Self, Others and the World
• Generating purposeful action towards your longing in life

Are you ready to step into this way of operating in your being, giving you a deeper connection to your organizing design?

Register here:  https://www.loc-institute.com/product/what-is-exploring-soma/

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.”- Rumi