Glossary

Somatics Glossary - Key Terms in Plain Language

Somatics. Core Concepts. The field of study and practice concerned with the body as experienced from the inside. The word comes from the Greek soma meaning living body. Somatics includes any practice that develops body awareness as a path to health, healing, and change.

Embodiment. Core Concepts. The practice of being fully present in and aware of your body, rather than living primarily in your head. Embodiment means sensing your body from the inside and letting that awareness inform how you think, relate, and act.

Body Awareness. Core Concepts. The ability to notice and pay attention to physical sensations, posture, movement, and internal states. Body awareness is the foundation of most somatic practices and can be developed through exercises like body scanning, movement, and breathwork.

Interoception. Core Concepts. Your body's ability to sense its own internal state — heartbeat, breathing, temperature, gut feelings, hunger, and emotional signals felt in the body. Interoception is sometimes called the eighth sense and plays a central role in emotional regulation and self-awareness.

Proprioception. Core Concepts. The sense of where your body is in space — how your limbs are positioned, how you're balanced, and how you're moving, even with your eyes closed. Proprioception helps you feel grounded, coordinated, and present.

Felt Sense. Core Concepts. A concept developed by philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin referring to the vague but meaningful bodily sense of a situation, experience, or problem. It is more than a specific emotion — it is a holistic, often pre-verbal body knowledge that can offer insight when paid attention to.

Grounding. Core Concepts. Practices that help you feel settled, stable, and present in your body and in the moment. Grounding techniques help regulate the nervous system and reduce feelings of anxiety, overwhelm, or disconnection.

Resourcing. Core Concepts. The process of deliberately connecting to people, places, memories, sensations, or inner states that feel safe, calming, or strengthening. Resourcing helps build capacity before approaching difficult material.

Tracking. Core Concepts. The somatic practice of following sensations, impulses, and internal shifts in the body as they happen in real time. A practitioner tracks these signals to guide the session and stay attuned to what the body is communicating.

Co-regulation. Core Concepts. The natural process by which one person's nervous system is soothed and stabilized through connection with another calm, regulated person. Humans are wired for co-regulation from birth and it remains a key part of healing throughout life.

Discharge. Core Concepts. The release of stored tension, activation, or survival energy held in the nervous system and body. Discharge can happen through trembling, shaking, tears, deep sighs, heat, or spontaneous movement.

Pandiculation. Core Concepts. A natural movement pattern like a full-body yawn and stretch that resets muscle length and tone. Hanna Somatic Education uses conscious pandiculation to release chronic muscular tension.

Nervous System Regulation. Nervous System and Trauma. The body's ability to return to a balanced, calm state after being activated by stress or threat. Somatic practices build this capacity over time.

Dysregulation. Nervous System and Trauma. A state in which the nervous system is stuck in an overactivated or underactivated state and struggles to return to balance. Chronic dysregulation is common after trauma.

Polyvagal Theory. Nervous System and Trauma. A framework developed by Dr. Stephen Porges explaining how the autonomic nervous system responds to safety and threat through three states: social engagement, fight-or-flight, and shutdown. It forms the neurobiological basis for many modern somatic therapies.

Window of Tolerance. Nervous System and Trauma. The zone of nervous system activation in which a person can function effectively — not too overwhelmed and not too shut down. Somatic work often focuses on gradually widening this window.

Hyperarousal. Nervous System and Trauma. A state of nervous system overactivation characterized by anxiety, panic, hypervigilance, anger, or feeling overwhelmed. It sits above the Window of Tolerance.

Hypoarousal. Nervous System and Trauma. A state of nervous system underactivation characterized by numbness, shutdown, disconnection, exhaustion, or feeling frozen. It sits below the Window of Tolerance.

Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn. Nervous System and Trauma. The four primary survival responses of the nervous system when it perceives threat. Somatic work helps people recognize and move through these patterns.

Trauma. Nervous System and Trauma. The lasting impact on the body and nervous system from an overwhelming experience that exceeded a person's capacity to cope at the time. Trauma is not the event itself but the way the body gets stuck in response to it.

Developmental Trauma. Nervous System and Trauma. Trauma that occurs during childhood as a result of chronic stress, neglect, abuse, or disrupted attachment. It tends to affect self-regulation, relationships, and identity in deep and lasting ways.

Complex Trauma. Nervous System and Trauma. Trauma resulting from repeated, prolonged, or multiple traumatic experiences — often in close relationships or environments where escape is limited.

Racialized Trauma. Nervous System and Trauma. The physical and psychological harm caused by racism, white supremacy, and racial violence — both direct experiences and the cumulative intergenerational impact of living in a racialized society.

Intergenerational Trauma. Nervous System and Trauma. Trauma that is passed down through families and communities across generations — through epigenetics, parenting patterns, cultural practices, and the nervous system.

ACEs Adverse Childhood Experiences. Nervous System and Trauma. A term from landmark public health research referring to stressful or traumatic experiences during childhood. Research shows ACEs are written into the body and significantly affect long-term health.

Dissociation. Nervous System and Trauma. A disconnection from body, emotions, surroundings, or sense of self that often occurs as a protective response to overwhelming experience. Somatic practices work gently to restore connection and presence.

Neuroplasticity. Nervous System and Trauma. The brain's ability to change, grow, and reorganize itself throughout life in response to experience, learning, and practice. Somatic practices leverage neuroplasticity to reshape the nervous system over time.

Somatic Experiencing SE. Somatic Methods. A body-oriented approach to trauma healing developed by Peter Levine. SE focuses on releasing survival energy activated during trauma by gently tracking body sensations and impulses.

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. Somatic Methods. A therapeutic approach developed by Pat Ogden that integrates body-centered techniques with psychotherapy. It works directly with posture, gesture, movement, and sensation alongside thoughts and emotions.

Feldenkrais Method. Somatic Methods. A movement education method developed by Moshe Feldenkrais using gentle, exploratory movement to improve posture, coordination, and self-awareness through neuroplastic learning.

Alexander Technique. Somatic Methods. A method developed by F. Matthias Alexander that teaches conscious awareness and inhibition of habitual muscular patterns. Widely used by performers to address chronic tension and movement inefficiency.

Hanna Somatic Education. Somatic Methods. A method developed by Thomas Hanna based on the concept of Sensory Motor Amnesia — the way the brain loses conscious control of muscles due to habitual stress responses.

NeuroAffective Touch NAT. Somatic Methods. A somatic therapeutic approach developed by Dr. Aline LaPierre that uses intentional, attuned touch to address trauma and developmental wounds beyond the reach of words.

TRE Trauma Releasing Exercises. Somatic Methods. A series of exercises developed by David Berceli that activate the body's natural neurogenic tremoring mechanism to release deep muscular tension, stress, and trauma.

Body-Mind Centering BMC. Somatic Methods. A somatic practice developed by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen that explores movement, touch, and body systems as pathways to awareness and healing. Widely used in dance, therapy, and bodywork.

Titration. Somatic Methods. A somatic approach to trauma work in which difficult experiences are processed in very small, manageable doses rather than all at once. Titration allows the nervous system to process gradually without becoming overwhelmed.

Pendulation. Somatic Methods. A somatic technique that involves gently oscillating awareness between an area of discomfort and a resource or area of relative ease. This helps the nervous system regulate and builds capacity to stay with difficult sensations.

Generative Somatics. Social Justice Somatics. An approach co-founded by Staci K. Haines that integrates somatic practice with social justice organizing. It applies body-centered healing to collective liberation and addresses how oppression lives in the body.

Somatic Abolitionism. Social Justice Somatics. A framework developed by Resmaa Menakem that centers the body in the work of racial justice and healing. It holds that racism and white-body supremacy are embedded in our nervous systems.

Collective Trauma. Social Justice Somatics. Trauma experienced by a group, community, or society through war, genocide, systemic oppression, natural disaster, or pandemic. Like individual trauma, it lives in the body and is transmitted through culture and family systems.

Somatic Sex Education SSE. Somatic Sex Education. A professional field that uses body-centered and somatic approaches to support sexual healing, education, and growth. SSE practitioners work with sexuality through the body with a consent-centered, trauma-informed approach.

Wheel of Consent. Somatic Sex Education. A framework developed by Betty Martin that clarifies the dynamics of touch by distinguishing who is doing the action from who it is for. It maps four quadrants — giving, receiving, taking, allowing — and is widely used in consent education.

Consent. Somatic Sex Education. In somatic contexts, consent goes beyond a simple yes or no — it is an ongoing, embodied, and revocable agreement grounded in genuine choice. Somatic consent practices focus on developing awareness of authentic yes and no in the body.

Sexological Bodywork. Somatic Sex Education. A professional modality that uses somatic and body-centered methods — including touch, breathwork, and movement — to support sexual healing, education, and self-awareness.

Exteroception. Core Concepts. Your body's sense of what is happening at its outer surface and in the surrounding environment — through touch, temperature, pressure, sound, sight, and vibration. Exteroception tells you what is coming in from outside: a hand on your shoulder, the texture of a surface, warmth or cold. In somatic practice, developing this awareness helps you distinguish pleasure from discomfort, make clearer yes/no decisions, and understand how your body responds to contact with the world around it.

Breath and Rhythm. Core Concepts. The conscious use of breathing and rhythmic movement to change your physical and emotional state. In somatic practice, breath is both a signal — showing how activated or shut down your nervous system is — and a tool for shifting it. Slow, deep breathing calms the body; fuller breathing can restore energy and presence. Rhythm in movement, sound, or breath helps synchronize the body's systems and supports regulation. Breath is one of the most immediate somatic tools available.

Curiosity Without Judgment. Core Concepts. A foundational attitude in somatic practice of approaching your body's sensations, impulses, and reactions with open interest rather than criticism or urgency. Instead of labeling what you feel as good or bad — or rushing to fix it — you simply notice it. When you observe without judgment, the body has room to reveal more. This stance reduces shame, supports honest self-awareness, and opens the door to genuine change.

Feeling Safe in Your Body. Core Concepts. The physiological experience of your nervous system settling out of alert — a state in which the body can relax its defenses, open to connection, and engage with the world. Feeling safe in the body is distinct from simply thinking "I am safe." It is a felt, physical state built through breath, movement, touch, and relational presence.

Noticing and Changing Patterns. Core Concepts. The process of becoming aware of habitual ways the body holds, moves, braces, or responds — and gradually finding new options. The nervous system stores patterns of tension, posture, and reactivity that once served a purpose. Somatic work helps bring these patterns into awareness and expands the range of available choices.

Following Your Sensations. Core Concepts. The practice of paying close attention to body sensations as they arise, shift, peak, and fade rather than pushing past them. Learning to follow the next small change in what you feel builds body awareness, supports pacing, and deepens trust in your body's signals.

Your Body Decides. Core Concepts. The somatic principle that genuine choice — including limits, preferences, and yes or no decisions — is felt in the body rather than decided only in the mind. Somatic practices cultivate the ability to sense your body's authentic responses and develop a felt sense of your own yes and no.

Culture Lives in Your Body. Core Concepts. The understanding that cultural history, ancestry, and social experience — including belonging, tradition, and oppression — are carried in the body itself. Posture, movement, and nervous system responses can all reflect cultural conditioning and lived experience.

Integration. Core Concepts. The process by which a new insight, sensation, or somatic shift moves from a single session into lasting change in how you move, feel, and live. Integration often requires rest, stillness, or slow movement after somatic work — giving the body and nervous system time to absorb and settle what has shifted. Without this, somatic learning tends not to stick.

Autonomic Nervous System. Core Concepts. The part of the nervous system that regulates involuntary body functions — heart rate, digestion, breathing, and stress responses — without conscious effort. It is divided into the sympathetic (activation/fight-or-flight) and parasympathetic (rest and recovery) branches. The autonomic nervous system is the biological foundation that somatic practices work with to shift states of activation and rest.

Vagus Nerve. Core Concepts. The longest cranial nerve in the body, running from the brainstem down through the heart, lungs, and digestive organs. The vagus nerve plays a central role in the body’s stress and recovery responses and is a key pathway in Polyvagal Theory. Vagal tone — the health and responsiveness of this nerve — can be strengthened through breathwork, movement, humming, cold water, and social connection.

Neuroception. Core Concepts. A term coined by Dr. Stephen Porges for the nervous system’s unconscious process of scanning the environment for safety and threat — below the level of conscious awareness. Neuroception happens automatically and continuously, influencing whether we feel safe enough to connect, mobilized to defend, or collapsed in shutdown. Somatic practices can help shift chronic threat-based neuroception toward greater felt safety.

Body Scan. Core Concepts. A foundational somatic and mindfulness practice in which you bring attention slowly and systematically to different parts of the body — noticing sensations, tension, warmth, movement, or absence of feeling without judgment. Body scans build interoceptive awareness and are widely used in somatic therapy, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), and trauma-informed yoga.

Breathwork. Core Concepts. The intentional use of breathing techniques to shift physical, emotional, and energetic states. Different breathwork practices — such as slow diaphragmatic breathing, holotropic breathwork, coherent breathing, and breath retention techniques — produce different effects, from calming the nervous system to releasing stored emotion. Breathwork is one of the most direct and accessible somatic tools available.

Attunement. Core Concepts. The relational capacity to sense and respond to another person’s internal state — their emotions, nervous system state, and subtle signals. In somatic work, attunement between practitioner and client creates the felt sense of being met and understood. It is a foundation of co-regulation and healing, particularly for developmental trauma rooted in early disruptions of attunement.

Affect Regulation. Core Concepts. The ability to manage the intensity and expression of emotional states — neither suppressing emotions entirely nor being overwhelmed by them. Affect regulation is often disrupted by trauma and is developed through somatic practices that build nervous system capacity, body awareness, and the ability to tolerate a widening range of emotional experience.

Sensory Motor Amnesia. Core Concepts. A term coined by Thomas Hanna for the condition in which the brain loses conscious awareness of and voluntary control over chronically contracted muscles. This happens in response to repetitive stress, injury, or habitual postures. Over time, the brain forgets how to release these muscles, creating chronic tension, pain, and restricted movement. Hanna Somatic Education addresses this through movement re-education.

Orienting Response. Nervous System and Trauma. The natural and instinctive bodily response to a new stimulus in the environment — turning the head, adjusting the eyes and ears, briefly pausing to assess whether the stimulus is safe, threatening, or interesting. In trauma healing, the orienting response may be blocked or hyperactivated. Restoring it through gentle, conscious movement supports the nervous system in returning to a settled, present state.

Completion Response. Nervous System and Trauma. The body’s natural tendency to complete a defensive or survival movement that was interrupted or suppressed during a threatening experience. In Somatic Experiencing, helping the body complete an action — such as pushing, running, or turning away — that was not possible during the original trauma can release stored survival energy and allow the nervous system to settle.

Dual Awareness. Nervous System and Trauma. The capacity to be simultaneously aware of both present-moment experience and a past traumatic memory — staying grounded in the here and now while gently touching difficult material. Dual awareness is a key safety mechanism in trauma-informed somatic work, ensuring that the person processing trauma does not become fully re-immersed in it.

Somatic Memory. Nervous System and Trauma. The way that experiences — especially traumatic or emotionally significant ones — are stored in the body as physical sensations, postures, movement patterns, and muscular tension rather than as explicit narrative memories. Somatic memory is often called body memory and can be activated by touch, movement, or sensation that resembles the original experience.

Stress Response. Nervous System and Trauma. The cascade of physiological changes the body initiates when it perceives a threat or challenge — including the release of adrenaline and cortisol, increased heart rate, tightened muscles, and redirected blood flow. When the stress response is chronic or cannot complete, it can lead to dysregulation, burnout, and trauma-related symptoms. Somatic practices work to regulate and restore balance to this system.

Hakomi. Somatic Methods. A somatic psychotherapy developed by Ron Kurtz in the 1970s that combines mindfulness, body awareness, and psychological inquiry. Hakomi works with how core beliefs and emotional patterns are held in the body — using gentle touch, movement, and mindful attention to bring unconscious material into awareness. The name comes from a Hopi word meaning how do you stand in relation to these many realms.

Rolfing Structural Integration. Somatic Methods. A hands-on bodywork method developed by Dr. Ida Rolf that works with the fascia — the connective tissue surrounding muscles — to reorganize the body’s structure in relationship to gravity. Rolfing addresses chronic pain, posture, and movement patterns by releasing fascial restrictions. Many practitioners find it has emotional as well as physical effects, as the fascia stores patterns related to trauma and lived experience.

Contact Improvisation. Somatic Methods. A somatic dance and movement practice developed by Steve Paxton in the 1970s that involves two or more people moving together following the point of physical contact between them. Listening through the body to another’s weight, momentum, and direction, Contact Improvisation builds physical presence, responsiveness, and non-verbal communication.

5Rhythms. Somatic Methods. A movement practice developed by Gabrielle Roth based on five rhythms — Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, and Stillness — that together form a wave. Participants move freely through these rhythms in a group setting, without steps to learn or technique to master. 5Rhythms uses movement as a somatic pathway to emotional release, self-discovery, and presence.

Continuum Movement. Somatic Methods. A somatic movement practice developed by Emilie Conrad that explores the fluid, wave-like qualities of the living body. Using breath, sound, and micro-movements, Continuum works with the body’s fundamental biological rhythms to restore ease, vitality, and self-healing capacity. It has been used in healing from chronic illness, injury, and trauma.

Authentic Movement. Somatic Methods. A somatic movement practice developed by Mary Starks Whitehouse in which a mover follows inner impulses — with eyes closed, moving only what wants to move — while a witness holds the space with caring, non-judgmental attention. The practice develops self-awareness, creative expression, and the relationship between the mover and their own inner life.

Somatic Coaching. Somatic Methods. A coaching approach that integrates body-based awareness and somatic tools — such as noticing posture, breath, and sensation — to support change, leadership development, and personal growth. Rather than working only with thoughts and goals, somatic coaching recognizes that patterns of tension, movement, and presence reveal how a person meets challenges, and that lasting change requires working with the whole self.

Healing Justice. Social Justice Somatics. A framework developed within social justice movements — particularly by Mia Mingus, Cara Page, and the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective — that centers healing, care, and the body in liberation work. Healing Justice holds that systemic oppression causes bodily harm and that movement for justice must include practices of collective restoration, grief, and somatic healing.

White Body Supremacy. Social Justice Somatics. A term used by Resmaa Menakem to describe how white bodies have been historically and institutionally positioned as the standard against which all other bodies are measured — and how this positioning is internalized in the nervous systems and bodies of both white and non-white people. Understanding and healing white body supremacy requires body-based as well as cognitive work.

Body Sovereignty. Social Justice Somatics. The right of each person to have full authority over their own body — including how it is touched, how it moves, what it does, and what is done to it. Body sovereignty is a foundational principle in somatic and consent-based practices, particularly for people whose bodies have been subjected to systemic control, medical abuse, or sexual violence.

Ancestral Healing. Social Justice Somatics. The practice of attending to the inherited wounds, strengths, and patterns carried in the body from previous generations — through epigenetic transmission, family systems, and cultural memory. Ancestral healing work recognizes that unprocessed grief, survival patterns, and trauma can be passed through family lines, and that somatic healing can address these deeper roots.

Erotic Embodiment. Somatic Sex Education. The practice of being fully present in and aware of one’s own body in the context of sexuality and pleasure. Erotic embodiment involves cultivating a conscious relationship with arousal, desire, and sensory experience — moving away from performance or dissociation toward genuine, felt presence. It is a central focus in somatic sex education and related practices.

Somatic Sexology. Somatic Sex Education. A field that applies somatic methods and body-based awareness to the study and support of human sexuality and sexual health. Somatic sexology draws on sexology, somatic therapy, and trauma-informed care to address sexual blocks, healing from sexual trauma, and developing greater embodied awareness around desire and pleasure.

Felt Consent. Somatic Sex Education. A somatic approach to consent in which agreement is sensed and communicated from the body rather than only from the thinking mind. Felt consent recognizes that a verbal yes can mask a body that is uncertain, afraid, or shut down — and that genuine consent emerges when a person has enough body awareness to sense and communicate their authentic response in the moment.

Somatica Method. Somatic Sex Education. A sex and relationship coaching approach developed by Danielle Harel and Celeste Hirschman that uses experiential, body-based methods to support clients in developing intimacy, navigating erotic connection, and healing sexual and relational difficulties. The Somatica Method integrates somatic awareness, attachment theory, and coaching to address issues that talk therapy alone often does not reach.