Somatic Movement Education & Therapy is a profession that invites people to re-experience their body in an easeful, releasing and imaginative way. This approach to movement values the anatomical, sensory, emotional, imaginative,  intuitive and intelligent moving life-energy in the human body. The Somatics movement grew over many decades in response to the dualistic and disembodied enculturation of bodies in Western culture. The map provided above, researched and published by Martha Eddy in her new book 'The evolution of the somatic Arts'  provides a useful historical overview of somatic movement pioneers. Practitioners in this field support clients in cultivating conscious awareness of their moving body; they facilitate gentle, mindful and easeful sensory-perceptual processes, and an imaginative range of empirical investigations rooted in experiential anatomy. This approach enhances self-reflection  and thus invites the possibility of change.
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Educators and therapists offer a unique form of re-education, often referred to as ‘kinaesthetic education’. Traditional education teaches people to know the world through the exteroceptive system - the visual and auditory.  Tom Myers notes, in traditional models of education, we learn about our world and what is ‘going on at some distance from our bodies’; in contrast, the kinaesthetic sense (what we feel in and through our body) is undervalued (Myers 1998: 102). Somatic Movement Education & Therapy is rooted in, to use Martha Eddy’s words, 'The lost senses to Western Science' – 'the sixth and seventh senses' – 'proprioception and kinaesthesia' (Eddy 2016). Practice is often slow-time. Slow-time supports clients contacting a subjective  sensory experience of anatomy and kinaesthetic awareness.