The True Origins of Somatics: Reclaiming a Sacred, Decolonial Practice

By Sah D’Simone – Founder of the Somatic Dance Institute & Creator of the Somatic Activated Healing™ Method

I didn’t enter somatics through academia, I entered through devotion.
Through months of silence in a monastery in Nepal, where my body became the text and my breath the teacher. Through nights in Bali where movement was my prayer, my grief, my liberation.

And through years of showing up where suffering lived most vividly:
in an orphan center in Indonesia, learning the resilience of children who had lost everything;
in a rehab facility in Nepal, holding space for bodies trembling through withdrawal;
in homeless shelters in Los Angeles, where survival leaves its imprint on every gesture;
in a hospital in California, sitting with the sick and dying as breath gave way to silence;
and in villages in India with survivors of bonded slavery, bringing joy back into bodies that had been owned.

These were not classrooms. They were training grounds of blood, sweat, and tears. I wasn’t studying trauma in a book; I was holding its weight in real time, face-to-face, body-to-body. I didn’t run toward comfort—I walked straight into pain, and that is where somatics revealed itself to me: not as theory, but as touch, presence, and raw human connection.

This is not a memoir. It’s a remembering. A reclaiming. A call to strip away what’s been branded, sanitized, and sold as “somatics”—and return to what it has always been: ritual, resistance, reverence.

Somatics: An Inner Science of Liberation

At its heart, somatics is the practice of paying radical attention to the body. Yogis have known this for thousands of years: asana was never about perfect shapes, but about watching the breath, observing sensations, and letting movement arise from the inside out. The release of tension and emotion was not incidental—it was central to the path of liberation.

The Buddha became enlightened not by escaping the body but by entering it fully, with microscopic awareness. Sitting beneath the Bodhi tree, he observed sensations and feelings arising and dissolving, seeing impermanence so clearly that the mysteries of suffering and freedom were revealed. This was somatic practice in its most profound form: freedom through embodied awareness.

And across the world, similar practices have always existed:

• In Africa: trance dance, drumming, and shaking to invoke ancestors.
  
• In Indigenous America: grief rituals, sweat lodges, and embodied prayers of survival.
  
• In Oceania: dances like hula carrying cosmology through the body.
  
• In Europe: witches and mystics shook their bodies, laid hands in healing and ritual, and danced to commune with the unseen.

Somatics has always been the body as sacred archive: of memory, resilience, and liberation.

What Somatics Has Become

In today’s wellness industry, somatics is too often flattened into techniques:
“nervous system regulation,” “posture correction,” “stress relief.”

It is packaged as the softer cousin of yoga, the newest productivity hack, or the gentler fitness trend. But this diluted version forgets. It forgets the ancestors. It forgets the sacred. It forgets that somatic healing was never about optimization—it has always been about liberation.

Somatics as Decolonial Practice

True somatic work cannot be separated from justice.
To reclaim somatics is to remember that trauma doesn’t just live in the body. It lives in the land. In systems. In bloodlines. And healing it isn’t about personal enlightenment—it’s about collective liberation.

Somatics is about right relationship:

• With the earth.
  
• With our ancestors.
  
• With truth.
  
• With each other.
  

It’s not a technique. It’s a remembering.

And this remembering requires honesty: Somatics did not begin in 1970s America. It did not originate with Hanna, Feldenkrais, or Alexander. Their methods offered important contributions, but they did not create somatics.

When somatics was formalized in universities and clinical settings, it was often reduced to nervous system science and body mechanics. Helpful, yes—but something vital was stripped away. Spirit was scrubbed out. Culture was left behind. Ritual was dismissed. The sacred body became a machine to be optimized rather than an ancestral archive of memory and liberation.

Meanwhile, the wellness industry has stretched the word “somatic” so far it now covers anything remotely embodied. Programs, trainings, Instagram captions—everything is suddenly “somatic.” But reading about the mind-body in books, or slapping the word onto a brand, is not somatic practice. Somatics is lived. It is embodied. It is hard-earned in sweat, tears, and devotion.

The true origins of somatics live in ritual, resistance, and reverence—across continents, lineages, and generations. This work is a reclamation. Because somatics was never just about the body. It was about the soul’s memory. About collective liberation. About returning to what was always ours.

What Somatic Dance Is

This is where my life’s work comes in. Through the Somatic Dance Institute and the Somatic Activated Healing™ Method, I teach that:

• Somatic dance is the remembering of the body as holy.
  
• Somatic dance is movement as protest and prayer.
  
• Somatic dance is how grief transforms into love in motion.
  
• Somatic dance is how trauma is healed through movement, not bypassed by the mind.
• Somatic dance is when the sense of “I” softens, and what’s left is presence, awareness, and the body moving as the universe itself.

Somatic dance is not choreography. It is not performance. It is the movement that arises when you stop controlling yourself and start listening to yourself. It is embodied healing—the body becoming its own medicine.

For some, somatic dance is the doorway to trauma healing through movement. For others, it is a practice of emotional release, where the body finally shakes off what the mind cannot let go of. For many, it is the most profound form of grief work—a way to move sorrow through the body until it dissolves back into love. 

For some, it becomes a form of trance dance, where movement carries them beyond the sense of “I” into the direct experience of no-self — the body moving as pure awareness, free and unbound. And for those who feel called to teach, it becomes a somatic dance training and certification, a path to guide others into their own liberation.

In my work, I’ve witnessed thousands of people across the world transform through somatic dance. I’ve seen bodies once locked in trauma begin to move again, releasing pain that no amount of talking could touch. I’ve seen grief danced into devotion—sorrow moving through the body until it softened back into love. I’ve witnessed deep emotional release, where shame, fear, and rage shake loose, making space for tenderness and joy. And I’ve watched people enter states of no-self through trance dance, where the “I” dissolves and only awareness, freedom, and aliveness remain.

This is the heart of the Somatic Activated Healing™ Method: not theory, not performance, but lived practice. In these moments, healing is not an idea—it is an experience. People remember what the world has taught them to forget: their bodies are not broken. They are sacred, intelligent, and capable of carrying them home to wholeness.

The Somatic Activated Healing™ Method is my contribution to this field: a structured yet devotional practice that blends Buddhist wisdom, modern psychology, trauma science, restorative justice, social justice, and sacred dance. It is a path for anyone seeking somatic practices for grief and loss, spiritual practices for trauma healing, or embodied freedom that no book can teach.

Somatic dance is not the latest trend. It is the oldest truth: movement as medicine, the body as temple, liberation as birthright.

Where Do We Go From Here?

If we keep using the word somatics, we must use it with integrity.

Name the lineages. Credit the ancestors. Stop selling the sacred as a product and start living it as practice.
Because the body isn’t a trend. It’s a temple.

A Prayer for the Remembering

May we remember the body as holy.
May we let movement be prayer, protest, portal.
May we let grief move us toward love.
May we stop stripping the sacred from somatics.
May we tell the truth.
May we come home. 

Ready to take this deeper?

Join the waitlist for the next Somatic Dance Teacher Training and begin your journey today with my free resource: Dance for Change: 3-Day Dance Challenge