What is Ecosomatics

What is Somatics?

Somatics is a modern Euro-American term. It refers broadly to body-engaged philosophies and practices. Although it's become popular in recent years, somatics is nothing new. Connecting, feeling, and knowing through our bodies has been woven into daily life, healing practices and spiritual traditions around the world and throughout time. Much of somatics owes itself to cultures of the global majority, whose influence on this field is not always recognized.

At its core, somatics is about experiencing yourself from within, as a unique expression of the Earth and cosmic consciousness; as a creative force. It's about being a participant in your own becoming — as a member of a community, an ancestral lineage, and part of the ecologies that hold you.

I understand the soma to be the body-mind-spirit in its wholeness: our memories, habits, and desires; our stories and our actions. Our soma is always entangled with context — culture, community, land, history. These forces shape how we live, love, and connect. In dominant Euro-American cultures we are only beginning to remember the implications and possibilities of this way of knowing and being.

In sessions, we start with the language of the body — sensations and impulses that move us towards Life. From here, we can access the deepest and oldest parts of our nervous systems, as well as our unconscious and pre-conscious material. We start here because this forms a foundation for our emotions, thoughts, actions, and relationships.

Trauma and stress disconnect us from our inner essence and lock our neurophysiology into survival states. Stories and strategies become embedded in our tissues — passed through lineage generations and held in our bodies throughout our lifetimes. These survival strategies and conditioned tendencies can show up as energetic blocks, tension, or chronic symptoms that shape how we move through the world.

By working with and through the body, we tap into an innate capacity to reorganize, repair, and act with greater alignment. Our bodies know the path back to aliveness, coherence, and rhythms that are innate in all living systems. Somatics supports us to gently open and shift stuck patterns into more flow, vitality, and choice — so we can show up more fully for ourselves and the collective work of building worlds where Life can thrive.

What does “Eco” mean?

The "eco" in ecosomatics speaks to a simple and profound truth: we are not separate from the natural world. We co-arise with and depend on the more-than-human world. The earth is not a backdrop to our lives, not a tool for our development — it is the living system we are part of.

I take a relational approach that honors more-than-human beings as teacher, guide, and kin. Grounded in an animist perspective — which recognizes spirit and consciousness as inherent to all matter — this work invites us to listen to and collaborate with the land, our ancestors, the elemental forces and other-than-human beings.

This kind of relational repair is especially important for settlers of European ancestry, like myself, who carry centuries — even millennia — of severance from place-based, ancestral ways. The harm we perpetuate through white modernity stems from this original wound.

Ecosomatic work is about shifting our embodied perception from separation to belonging — not as an idea, but as a lived experience. This changes how we live and what we value. We begin to act with more response-ability, reciprocity, and care toward all life, including our own.

In sessions, this work may be held outdoors — but it can also unfold indoors through sensory, spiritual, and imagined pathways of connection. We may work with your place of living and bioregion, with ancestors, landforms, elements, and other-than-human beings who are already woven into your journey.