Life as Somatic Practice

Somatics refers to a broad field of ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies that bring attention to the first-person subjective, sensorial experience of life through the practice of directing non-judgmental, open attention to one's body and listening to its messages (Eddy, 2016, p. 12). This research expands somatics, offering bridges between practice and life, by highlighting subtle separating tendencies such as mind versus body, internal versus external experience and expertise, and prescribed environmental conditions. By asking What if the awareness of the experience and movement in our bodies was regarded as not only important, but foundational in our lives, and something we had access to all the time?, this research offers a novel somatic practice-as-research approach via an emergent, mixed-method, arts-informed, reflective, and evocative method. Specifically, it uses movement scores intentionally limiting the frame to explore possibilities to provide a somatically grounded methodology that considers research, writing and reading as somatic practice. Working within a life-as-movement ontology (LaMothe 2015), which recognises the inherent movement in life, this research conceives of language, research and writing as movement scores and as possibilities for somatic practice. The research was both autoethnographic and participatory with a ten-week exploration with 20 participants. The participant exploration consisted of a semi-structured interview, video and written invitations via email to explore somatic practice in daily life, written and oral participant feedback, and an unstructured final interview. The research findings are presented through a variety of evocative and somatically-grounded writing scores. The plurality of writing scores crystallises the research, presenting multiple subjectivities and invites the reader to become somatically aware of their beliefs and experience. The research effectively demonstrates how somatics can transcend some of its limitations by empowering inner knowing and bringing praxes into all aspects of life, including research and language. This research shows how score as method contributes a transformational and somatic approach and an alternative to critical methods. As opposed to focusing on issues, problems and constraints, the method of score starts from what is working to grow and increase somatic awareness through our lives, effectively building on and expanding the reach and applicability of somatics.