Ecosomatics

For as long as we can recall, humans have moved together in acknowledgment of life’s rhythms that animate our experience as and of the Earth. Ancient rock art in southern Africa, living practices of Australian Aboriginal corroborees, Gaelic Maypole dances celebrating Beltane, rain dance traditions among First Nations people of North America, and healing dances of the Jo/hoan San (Bushmen) all speak to the evolution and becoming of human culture inextricable from somatic practices such as dance, song and ceremony. Eco-somatics is an emergent field of research and practice that acknowledges this intimate dance between somatic practice and our ecological identity, and thus explores the potential of eco-embodiment in positively transforming contemporary human-nature relationships.

The field specifically merges somatics and deep ecology. Somatics recognises the body as a source of knowing, a source of wisdom or innate intelligence from which we can orient our lives. Whereas Deep Ecology is a study of philosophy that understands our interconnectedness with all of life, and that there is intrinsic value and consciousness or animacy that exists in the wider ecology. Eco-somatics thus acknowledges that the way in which we understand and practice our interconnectedness to the animate world is through our bodies.

At its heart, eco-somatics explores ways the individual body or soma provides a medium through which we relate to and interact with the expanded Earth body. Importantly, this pioneering research stipulates that the revaluation of the body and its role in ecological self-realisation is essential to human-nature reconnection and thus socio-ecological wellbeing.