‘Soma’ is the Greek word for body. The term somatics was coined by Thomas Hanna in 1967 to describe an emerging field of movement studies, movement education, and bodywork that emphasized inner perception and experience over how movement looks from the outside.

The roots of this approach to the body arguably date back to the early twentieth century. I propose that the field of somatics arose in response to the model that has dominated all aspects of western culture since the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century:  the assertion that anything can best be understood by breaking it down into its constituent parts.

Moved to fill in some of the large and problematic gaps in that pervasive way of thinking, alternative schools of study and praxis sprouted, somatics among them, embracing a more traditionally eastern, and pre-Scientific Revolution notion: the idea that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.