Session 8: Bringing Soma to Life

Much of our work so far in the Series has been focused on differentiation—freeing up layers to allow the space needed to create new patterns. Hopefully you’ve noticed by now some of the shifting made possible through our work together. With Session 8, we turn our attention towards integration.

What exactly are we integrating? This can be interpreted literally as the renewed coordination of neurons, muscles, and fascial structures, bringing about greater ease in your physical body. The journey of integration can also involve all the interwoven components that make up the wholeness of your being. What makes you who you are? Not just the cells and microscopic beings that make up your blood and guts and bones, but all the experiences you have had, the skills you’ve cultivated, your values and beliefs, your thoughts and actions, your relationships with the world. What would it look like for all these parts of you to exist harmoniously?

My Symphony

by William Henry Channing

To live content with small means.

To seek elegance rather than luxury,

and refinement rather than fashion.

To be worthy not respectable,

and wealthy not rich.

To study hard, think quietly, talk gently,

act frankly, to listen to stars, birds, babes,

and sages with open heart, to bear all cheerfully,

do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never.

In a word, to let the spiritual,

unbidden and unconscious,

grow up through the common.

This is to be my symphony. 

What is your symphony made of? What brings you joy? What gives a sense of meaning to your life? And, how does your physical body relate to this?

The Power to Choose

Your body, mind, and spirit are not separate entities, though we sometimes behave as if they are. While we can explore their interrelationships from several angles, I’d like to specifically illuminate how our inhabitance of our physical body shapes our experience of life.

Every minute of every day, our bodies are adapting based on what we are doing—our cells learn from us. Of course, our DNA, handed down from our parents, prescribes certain options. For example, if you were a cedar tree, your DNA would determine that you have cedar bark and cedar leaves rather than bamboo bark and leaves. The actual shape of a tree, however, how many branches it has and where they grow, is determined by the tree’s life experiences—factors like sun, wind, slope, and how many neighbors it has. You are shaped by your life experiences, too. Some of them, you had no control over, but there are so many experiences you have agency to choose. A big part of Soma is to help you realize all the personal responsibility that is in your power.

When a tree lives in a place that snows often, the tree experiences the weight of snow on its branches from a young age. After a night of heavy snowfall, its branches are laden with heavy snow. The cells in the tree feel this weight and adapt—they use the energy the tree has available to strengthen its branches in order to sustain this extra burden again next year. If the very same tree had grown up in a greenhouse where it never snowed, only to be moved outside one year, this same tree will experience the heavy snow completely differently. Its branches might break rather than bend because they were never stimulated to grow stronger than they needed to in the greenhouse environment. Having evolved in a world of limited energy, all of us live in bodies that prioritize the use of energy to that which is deemed important. How do our cells know it’s important? If we use them that way.

Many common injuries and diseases that we deal with today are like this—our branches are breaking rather than bending under the heavy snow because we’ve been living inside a greenhouse. And because all our friends live in a greenhouse, too, we’ve started to think it’s normal for branches to break under heavy snow. Many of the health issues we struggle with are the product of how we’ve been using (or not using) our bodies for years. Picture your body—a population of 30 trillion cells (or twice that if you include microbes). Each of your cells is alive to its environment. If you apply any kind of force to a cell—any push or pull—the cell will respond. If you hold a tool in your hand over and over, your hand’s skin cells will respond to this push and pull by growing denser skin right where the tool rubs you. If you hold your head in front of your spine over and over, the muscle and fascial cells of your upper back will respond to the constant pull by growing tougher, denser fibers so you can hunch forward all the time.

Osteoporosis is one example of our branches breaking under the heavy snow. Bones grow more bone cells, increasing density, when they feel forces pushing or pulling on them, such as the push of gravity, the tug of nearby muscles, or pressures from the environment like the floor, a seat, or backpack straps. Some portions of bones may experience a greenhouse environment when repetitive movement patterns cause them to miss out, year after year, on feeling the push or pull of life. Perhaps you worked a job that used much heavier mental effort than physical effort. Perhaps all the weight of gravity was felt by some segments of your spine and not by others. We all adopt habits of posture that result in imbalance in some way or another. When that imbalance results in bone cells that never feel strained, those tissues grow less bone cells, developing weaker bones over time. Your body saves that valuable energy for something more important.

All your cells are adapting all the time. Bone cells, blood vessel cells, muscle and fascia cells. And brain cells. Your habitual ways of moving strengthen certain pathways in the body, and your habits of thought strengthen particular pathways of connection in your brain. It’s up to you which habits you lean into and which you strive to mold anew. You have the power to choose how you inhabit your body.

 

What are you communicating to your trillions of cells right now?

Do you want to change some of the messages you’ve been sending them? The strongest messages are the ones happening most often. Think about the things you do in a typical day or over the course of a typical week. What are the acts that make up your life? Although big events stand out more in our minds, it is the little daily acts that make up the bulk of our living. Think about how you spend your time. From grooming yourself in the morning, preparing food, and walking the dog, to what you do at work, how you take breaks, and how you transport yourself home. What body shapes are you in the most often? Where do you most often direct your attention?

Get a piece of paper and something to write with. On the left side of the paper, make a list of the activities that take up your time during the course of a day or a week. For example: brushing teeth, eating, biking to work, making phone calls, checking emails, taking kids to soccer practice, walking the dog, folding laundry, exercising, reading a book, meeting a friend for a drink.

On the right side of each of the activities you’ve listed, describe a bit of the experience from your body’s perspective. How are you moving and feeling as you do each activity?

Consider that every thought and action are feeding your body, mind, and spirit in some way. How do you want to be feeding yourself? Just like any diet, you don’t need a complete balance of nutrients in every meal. You can, however, ensure that over the course of your entire diet, you tend to all the parts of you. Look over the list of activities you’ve made. Over the course of a day or week, what parts of you are well nourished? Are there big chunks of sedentary time? Are there periods of intense repetition? Does the shape of your body look the same from one activity to another? For example, typing on a computer, crocheting, and playing a boardgame all share similar positions for the upper body.  

Once you start to identify patterns in your daily life, you might recognize ways you can balance your overall movement diet. If you spend a lot of time sitting or being still, how can you add movement to this time? Can you break up bouts of repetitive physical work in such a way that it’s more sustainable? Can you vary the shapes you are in? Sometimes we need a change in movement to allow more stimulation, such as getting out of the office chair and onto an exercise ball instead. And sometimes we need movement to allow more relaxation, such as taking a ten-minute walk outside instead of playing a game on your phone.

Aligning Your Actions with Who You Are

Building awareness of how we move through each day gives us options—to stay in a greenhouse environment, or slowly expose ourselves to the wild. To ask the question: do you move your cells in a way that prepares them for the life you want to be living? Does the way you spend your time reflect what is important to you?

Can you live in such a way that all the parts of who you are, every piece of your symphony, is nurtured and allowed to flourish?

If you are interested in learning more, I’d recommend reading:

Move Your DNA, by Katy Bowman, for a more detailed explanation on how your movement shapes your physical body.

Movement Matters, by Katy Bowman, for essays about how your movement impacts the world.

Use of the poem, My Symphony, in reference to Soma structural integration attributed to Kelsi Giswold, Advanced Soma practitioner.