Senses Wide Open
A Body-Based Approach to Self-Investigation
Johanna Putnoi
HomeSenses Wide Open
A Body-Based Approach to Self-Investigation
Johanna Putnoi
Somatic work is a systematic study of the life of the human body in present time, from the inside. It focuses on the connection between sensation, emotion and thought and the sensate differences between balance and imbalance in all three. It is formulated to restore natural instinctive responsiveness through movement practices that build awareness of sensation, the body's wordless language.
Lomi Somatics integrates particular Western psychological and bodywork perspectives with Eastern spiritual disciplines. The essential tools of this integration are presence, perception, contact and technique. The disciplines used to stimulate embodied awareness are meditation, movement awareness, bodywork, Reichian breathwork, and Gestalt.
The Lomi approach to body-oriented therapy stresses the importance of cultivating a personal meditation practice as well as a body discipline. Clear attention combined with conscious intention facilitate the essential qualities of awareness and compassion that drive the Lomi Somatic practice. The ability to remain centered provides the essential ingredient for real contact, intimacy and healing.
"The intention of Lomi Work," writes co-founder Richard Strozzi Heckler,
"is to assist clients in their re-education and healing, not to make them dependent on our skills. Lomi Work proposes a unified experience where the principles of therapy, education and awareness become one. The interplay and connection between physicality, emotionality, feeling, intuition and energetic states are used in this process. To facilitate this, emphasis on student participation is focal. Lomi Work is not something that is done to you, but rather with you. Emphasis is on awareness rather than cure or goal. There is no "right" way of being, only a vitality to contact, a process or flow to become aware of and to trust."
For Example: Why do Adam and Eve, in this detail from Michaelangelo's Sistine Ceiling, tell the story of the somatic approach, but in reverse?
What is Lomi Somatics?
When allowed to live in harmony with nature and with ourselves the body is filled with natural energy and curiosity. Eyes and chest are open and present to the moment. Body, heart and mind work in harmony. But when the angel castigates Adam and Eve, their beautiful bodies reflect their shame and fear. This is not the posture of natural design. It is the posture of a civilizing process that demonizes instinct, separating us from natural instinctive responsiveness in favor of mind over matter thinking. Somatics teaches a return to the garden, showing us how to embrace the natural intelligence of the body as we navigate our way along the road to becoming fully human.
Some mysterious keeper of the lens
has polished away
the dust from my windows
and I am seeing you.
- Robert K. Hall,
Co-Founder Lomi School
