Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics
Two important models for the early formation of the somatics community were Wilhelm Reich and Mohandas Gandhi. Intimations of the kind of work we are addressing in these chapters are found in the works of these two revolutionaries.
Don Hanlon Johnson • Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics
When someone tells me I have caused harm, I can feel defensive and make myself small and rigid in an attempt to protect myself from the pain of shame. It is difficult to let my body feel into the truth that I have the ability to hurt others and that I do hurt others. That just by being myself, I can hurt people. But that is the truth of being a per
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Sometimes I place my hand on the center, massaging it gently like you would a clenched muscle. The goal is to disperse the sensation so that my whole body can be used to digest and metabolize it, so it does not just become an acute burden for a small part of me to manage.
Don Hanlon Johnson • Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics
What makes their work possible in a world riven by conflict is that they are operating on the subconceptual, nonideological level, where the sensations of rhythm, movement, sound, and words felt in the throat and mouth take precedence over the ethereal philosophies and theologies that are used
Don Hanlon Johnson • Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics
Despite over 130 tribal nations already having language to describe gender and sexual orientation that falls outside Eurocentric heteronormative perspectives, berdache continues to be used
Don Hanlon Johnson • Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics
undoing my own poisonous feelings around fatness, I also need to undo toxic internalizations of all of the systemic oppression that is compounded into our culture’s body ideals. I need to be actively working to dismantle all of the systems of oppression that are wrapped up in how I have learned to relate to my body. In this writing, I am not attemp
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Reich argues that it is not possible to break this oppressed-oppressor cycle without getting at “the social incapacity for freedom rooted in the human organism.” Our repetitive good-willed efforts to create a just social order keep foundering on the shoals of closed-off bodies, with dulled senses and weakened capacities. 6.
Don Hanlon Johnson • Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics
Nearly fifty years ago, a handful of us joined in using the Greek-rooted term somatics as an umbrella designed to coax together a fragmented community of innovative and revolutionary teachers who had managed to craft methods of sensory awareness, touch, breathing, sounding, and moving to address the healing of old and widespread traumas, and to enh
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“Where shame makes us freeze and try to get really small and invisible, pleasure invites us to move, to open, to grow.”11 Since