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. 

Your contexts and their conditions, inside and out, have a direct impact on your wellbeing. The varying degrees of control you have over your conditions (physical, emotional, mental, imaginative, social, environmental, political etc.) directly impacts your resilience and sense of agency.

By gathering ‘warm data’ (sensory information) about where you are, how you are, and what you need, you can grow your somatic range, develop supportive individualised practices and thus grow resilience and bolster personal agency.

So, let’s consider your context. In any place, at any time, your trillions of cells are constantly communicating with their environments and do so within spheres of awareness. At Live Particle we have names these spheres of awareness as part of our practice by drawing upon the work of others and synthesizing our own embodied research. We share them here in the hope that they may be useful to you.

Innersphere: What you sense and feel on the inside. Your interoception, the sense that allows you to notice, interpret, and regulate signals originating from within your body.

Skinasphere: What you sense and feel at the interface of the inside and the outside through touch. To get a bit technical it is the site where interception and exteroception (sensing what comes from your enviroment) operate in reciprocity. It references skin as the largest sensory organ but is really a catch-all phrase for the bodily point of contact where you meet the world and the world meets you. It includes where sound waves touch and are collected by the outer ear, light waves touch the photoreceptors in the retina of the eyes, smell enters the nostrils and merges with olfactory receptors and so forth. 

Kinaesphere: What you experience as the personal, spherical space surrounding your body, defined by the the area reachable by limbs without taking a step (developed by dancer-choreographer Rudolf Laban in the 1920s)

Relasphere: What you experience in the field between you and other beings and things in your world.

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

Here’s a compilation of 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.

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.

Tune to Environments: notice gravity, heartbeat, breath, light, temperature, sounds, what’s moving inside & outside, and vibration through humming.

Practice Journal: capture your experience, what you notice, how you feel before & after a practice - use words, mark-making and/or drawing.