Embodied Practice Somatics
for Personal Agency at Work
Week One
FIELD
From the particle, to the cell, to the organism, to the system - human and planetary environments are an integrated creative process.
We are the field, we are of the field, we are immersed in the field. The field holds and permeates everything. It is our environment inside and out, it is our context and these are our conditions.
Here, you attend to your immersive conditions – you are surveying. The macro is in view. Soar through the field taking a birds-eye view of the whole. Things may seem disconnected and confusing at first but trust the process. Let yourself settle in the unknown. Later you will delve into the micro and make sense of things. Meet this work daily and its natural logic will become part of you.
Contexts and their conditions, inside and out, have a direct impact on wellbeing. As humans, our varying degrees of control over our conditions (physical, emotional, mental, imaginative, social, environmental, political etc.) directly impacts our resilience and sense of agency. However, in gathering information about where we are, how we are, and what we need, we bolster our the more agency and grow resilience we build…????
What is it to pay attention to ourselves being immersed in different contexts? Listen inside and out through the channels of your senses…
How does attuning to your ‘embodiment’ give you information about what you need in any given context?
Embodied Practice Somatics brings breath, movement and the kaleidoscope of all your senses to the fore while tapping the intelligence and creativity alive in your cells. It is an awareness-based approach that is about being present to yourself without judgement. Conscious embodiment is about tuning to the information coming to you from your senses and noticing how your experience is always influenced by your context. So, let’s consider your context, where you are right now and start at the beginning…your trillions of cells that are constantly communicating with their environments.
Spheres of Awareness -
Innerspeher
Skinesphere
Kinaesphere
Relasphere
What it is to consciously inhabit these spheres - to sense, feel, touch and imagine into..?
Being in the here and now can refresh your perspective, boost your energy and calm your nerves.
A quick and effective way to reduce & transform stress & anxiety is to pepper your day with short bursts of time spent actively engaging your physicaiity and embodied sensing. tuning to your senses. Taking regular moments to move and tune to your sensory field can provide a much needed circuit-breaker in your day. Just 5 minutes of moving, sounding, noticing light, sound, smell, temperature, & the feel of clothing your skin etc. can suspend exhausting habits of getting caught up in difficult ruminations. By actively tuning to your senses you can build capacity to take more control of how you are feeling so that you can shift anxiety and stress and patterns of lethargy, and get on with what you need to do.
How might you bring your sensing, moving body to be an active part of your professional (and personal) wellbeing?
How might you meaningfully adapt or translate what you discover into your various contexts and ways of working?
Week One Practice Menu
These are simple effective practices that can be engaged discretely at work or in the comfort of your own home. We invite you to play with them in small and big ways and in different environments.
CAN WE MAKE THIS A LITTLE MORE RELEVANT TO WHAT WE DID IN THE SESSION?
Soft Eyes: Rubbing hands together and cupping them over eyes.
Soft Brain: Rubbing hands together, sensing space between hands, one hand on forehead & one on hindbrain.
Nimble Awareness: Shifting awareness around between inner & outer worlds.
Shake: wriggle, jiggle, quake & shake all the different parts of you.
??MTS Mark Making: Draw the experience of your shake, become aware of the movement of your mark making, touch of the pen & sounds that emerge.
???Vocal Cascade: long sighs using vowel sounds.
Tune to Environments: notice gravity, heartbeat, breath, light, temperature, sounds, what’s moving inside & outside, and vibration through humming.
Concentric Awareness Meditation….?
Resonation: Resonating quietly in stillness
Practice Journal: capture your experience, what you notice, how you feel before & after a practice - use words, mark-making and/or drawing.