what even is somatic wisdom?

SOMATIC is a huge buzzword in the yoga and movement space, but what is everyone really talking about? Let’s break it down:

Our body holds so much information, intelligence, wisdom and energy. Every cell in our body is inherently intelligent. It may not be conscious, but it’s intelligent.

Example: I was surfing in Padang Padang Bali recently, with its turquoise water and gentle reef break (on small days) and got hit on the elbow by my board. The force was pretty strong and it broke the skin. Without me having to think or do anything, my body responded. Platelets plugged the broken blood vessels to stop it bleeding, white blood cells cleaned and removed any dirt or pathogens and fibroblasts made collagen to rebuild the broken skin and tissue. Each of those cells and particles within my body have a role, they hold intelligence. The intelligence of knowing how to respond.

Two: The cardiac muscle in our heart holds the intelligence to keep our heart beating. Our heart doesn’t rely on our brain telling our heart to beat. No thinking required.

Three: I got pushed under the water when surfing (why does everything happen when I’m surfing) and got dragged down deeper underwater to the reef. The instinct from my body to push my feet off the reef to move upward to the surface when pushed underwater is a survival response. The response is driven by somatic intelligence. The intelligence held within the body. My body took full control before my conscious mind could process the danger or think about what to do.

These examples are easy to understand and believe because they’ve been studied and proven with science. But what about the more subtle, energetic intelligence of our bodies that is of no interest or not within the capacity of the scientific world?

We all know our bodies are incredible, even if the vastness and complexity slips our minds day-to-day.

Somatic intelligence is information arriving through sensation in the body before our mind can necessarily interpret it or explain it.

I’ve seen women arrive in my yoga classes frazzled and frantic and by savasana they are allowing their emotions and sacred intelligence to flow through them.

Emotion is energy in motion.

That is a method of becoming connected to our body via somatic sensation, remembering our truth and giving us enough presence and space to really feel into what’s happening in our internal world and physicality and allow things to shift and be processed. Emotion is energy in motion.

Have you ever checked in with your breath and noticed it’s high up in your chest? That’s a signal that you’re holding stress.

Ever noticed before you’re about to sleep your breaths slow down and drop deep into the base of the lungs and diaphragm (and can feel like you’re breathing into your belly)? That’s your body down-regulating to prepare you for sleep.

And what about butterflies in your stomach? This all-too-common sensation is a signal from your body to your mind to prepare for what’s coming next.

When we’re grieving, around the wrong people or in the wrong job, our bodies can react in a multitude of ways to tell us something’s up. One example is physically tightening and constricting. We may not be able to intellectualise it, but we need to stop overriding this and listen to it.

Not every problem can be thought its way out of.

When I speak to friends or women on my retreats, most of the time we can remember a time that our bodies could detect something, we can call it intuition or a gut feeling, about a person or a situation that didn’t feel right in our bodies. If we overrode that feeling and the situation turned out badly, we can look back and realise that we knew it all along.

There doesn’t have to be intellectualised, logical, concrete information for you to know something.

Tantra teaches us that the body is not separate from consciousness - it is consciousness. Our body isn’t a useless shell.

THE PRACTICE: Learn to use sensation as information, not something to fear or ignore. Not everything has to be intellectualised. Seek more moments of real presence with your body to give it enough space to tell you what needs to be heard.

If you want to explore somatics further, we have a surf & yoga retreat in Sri Lanka from 6-12 Feb 2027 with spaces remaining.