What is life?

What is life?

In the abstract, this is an unanswerable question. However, in the concrete, it is answerable.

Life exists only in embodied form.

In other words, life exists only in living bodies.

How much life exists in your body? What makes you feel more or less alive?

So much of our modern lives are engineered to be performed with very little movement.

In his book, The Body of Life, Thomas Hanna describes:

If life means movement and death means non-movement, then it may be permissible to think that more movement means more life and that less movement means less life.

Thomas Hanna, Essential Somatics

How much do you move? And more specifically, how much ability do you have to sense movements in your own body and control them?

If you notice an ache or pain or loss of a movement you could do previously, do you think, that’s just a normal part of aging.

Is it possible that this is learned? And therefore, is it possible to learn to move and live better?

Yes!

As somas,, we perceive ourselves from within – from our first-person perspective.

What is a soma? Soma is the word for life’s body.

Somatic movement works because we learn to be self-aware, self-monitoring and able to self-correct, resulting in improved sensory motor functioning.

We learn that we have the volition to make ourselves free. We learn self-competence in our own internal skills and power, and engage our autonomy and independence.

How does that sound? Good, right?

A somatic movement practice opens up so many possibilities for increasing the life in our life.

We learn to get quiet, pay attention and notice what’s going on in our sensory-motor system.

Our sensory-motor system functions at the heart of our central nervous system.

And anything becomes possible when our nervous system is ok.