The Somatic Primer Podcast

With Bryson Newell

The Somatic Primer Podcast is an ongoing series of cross discipline somatic dialogues.

The Somatic Primer Podcast hosts interdisciplinary dialogues for the purpose of sharing ideas and experiences within the larger somatic community. The series focuses on discovering and linking together principles from different disciplines in order to develop broader possibilities of somatic theory and practice not limited to one tradition or method.

“It’s this common pattern that must be brought out to help us to understand; accept and aid in what is taking place within ourselves.”

– Thomas Hanna, Bodies in Revolt

“The field of study dealing with somatic phenomena, i.e., the human being as experienced by the practitioner internally as process.” Therefore, the field of Somatics is any discipline or tradition that focues on the embodied perspective or the understanding that consciousness is an ongoing process of embodied awareness.

“It’s wonderful work  you’re doing. I think you are the next generation after Tom Hanna and myself to carry on this weaving together of all these amazing people. I wondered how it was going to get carried on what we were doing sixty years ago, and here you are.”

 – Don Hanlon Johnson

“Somatics” is a fiction constructed by Thomas Hanna in the early 1970s by adding that little “s” onto an adjective that had been variously used before to denote the physical dimension of the self. That tiny letter created an umbrella under which many separate schools of transformational approaches to embodiment—often in conflict—could gather and deepen a collaborative work, with the kinds of dialogue that promote more gounded knowledge and better training of practitioners. That little scrawl germinated what is now a worldwide collaboration of many practitioners, scholars, and scientists, with several graduate degree programs, research projects, a growing body of literature.”