It has been almost 100 years since Freud opened western culture to a world of somatics, considering body and mind as one. In one way, there is nothing new under the sun. Throughout history ancient and non-Western cultures have most always seen the body and conscioiusness together. Yet it has been easy to forget these traditions. And of course our more recent theories themselves can get static and stuck in the inflexible, much like our bodies. They need to open and evolve through regular movement and creative engagement. For me, somatics theories are long overdue for a workout, and our map of the human is due for major revision.
I am not pointing to the tsunami of research in neuroscience and trauma when I say this. I am not even talking about new work being done on race, gender, and injustice, though it is massive and important. I am not talking about AI. The shift I have been advocating for since 2012, is one to embrace a deeper understanding of aging, dying and grief in our theories of human life. This shift radically changes how we see body, consciousness, spirituality, vitality, relationships, the natural world and community. It forms the basis of our natural intelligence. Can we call that NI?
I have studied aging, death and grief as a somatic therapist for 20 years. I can see that these studies are completely essential for holistic practitioners, especially in somatics, psychology, medicine or ecology. They are not a footnote to some more real story of life, or something we can put off to an indefinite later. This study is not a condiment or a side dish, it needs to be part of the main course of training. AND, of course, it is intrinsically connected to other current movements mentioned above: neuroscience, trauma work and embodied social justice work. If you want to get a sense of how this work is connected to these other revolutions, check out this lecture by social scientist Sheldon Solomon, or the work of he and his colleagues who have promoted Terror Management Theory. You will start to get a feel for the massive place that death actually has in our psyche, and how much trouble we can get into when we don’t work with its teachings consciously or intelligently.
I have been gratified to have been practicing somatic therapy work since 2003, and part of the death awareness and education movement since 2006. Thanks to the pandemic and demographics, aging and death awareness is now popping up everywhere in the culture like spring crocuses. Yet I am still perplexed that we are not aggressively embracing these teachings in somatics. It is like we have created a whole cosmology and a zillion techniques based on a fraction of a picture, like one panel of an ancient triptych. Imagine that we found another panel of our picture that forced us to change our ideas. What then? We would only have two choices. Either ignore its message, or completely re-interpret our picture. So far in somatics we seem to have mainly ignored and denied the importance of aging, dying and grief. That, in my view, has given us a very inadequate view of the life of the human body and consciousness. It has limited our ability to work with the many people racked with existential anxiety and feeling disconnected from their own changing nature.
Something much more exciting happens when you bring what you know about growth and development into connection with what the body shows us when we age and die. You will be invited to see patterns you cannot unsee. These patterns give human helpers a much deeper view of themselves and their lives, they inspire helpers to work with deeper insight and depth. You may read this as a marketing statement for the school I started to teach it. It isn’t. It is a call to action and a deep invitation. It is a call to re-draw our map of consciousness.
To that last point I have one last thing to say.
It has seemed to me that mindfulness based techniques and therapies have been engaged in an unnecessary war with older, and more directive Neo-Reichian therapies. This war just isn’t useful. These two ways of seeing and working are not oppositional. When we back up and look at life’s larger patterning, and what Reich called the “vegetative force”, you can recognize the a deep intrinsic regulation in the core of our being we can “resource” for re-regulation. This is kind of the ultimate “resource” in mindfulness language. I am putting out a call to unite these views and form a community of inquiry about the rhythm and regulation in our life force itself. We are trying to do this in SoULL.
So somatics folks and even medical folks, I want to suggest that our maps are limited and becoming brittle. I invite you into the task of drawing better, and more flexible ones. If you are interested in this task, let me know. Bringing old maps together in new ways, we sometimes discover new worlds. And we may even, by chance, find tools for uniting the zillion unnecessary splits we have created in our consciousness and our world.
