The History of Somatics: Honouring Indigenous Wisdom

I want to start with something I think is worth saying upfront: I am a white woman practising within Western somatic frameworks, trained in modalities that may not fully acknowledge the traditions they draw from. I benefit from systems that were built, in part, on the erasure of Indigenous knowledge.

There's a version of the history of somatics that starts in the 20th century; Thomas Hanna coins a term, Ida Rolf develops a method, Peter Levine studies the stress responses of animals. Western practitioners begin to formalise what they're discovering: that the body holds experience, that healing happens through sensation and movement, that the nervous system is not separate from the mind.

All of this is true, and it's less than a third of the story.

Indigenous cultures around the world have held this knowledge for thousands of years – not as a precursor to modern somatic therapy, but as sophisticated, time-tested practices complete in themselves. What we in Western frameworks are ‘discovering’ is, in many cases, a remembering of what colonisation worked very hard to make us forget.

Where the word comes from – and where the practice doesn't

Thomas Hanna coined the term somatics in the 1970s to describe practices that work with the body from the inside out – the living, sensing, self-regulating body he called the’ som’a. It's a useful word. It gave a name to a cluster of approaches that share something important: they treat the felt experience of being in a body as a legitimate source of knowledge, not just a symptom to be managed.

But the practices themselves stretch back far further, and across many more cultures, than the Western lineage usually acknowledges.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples – on whose Country I practice – have held embodied practices of healing, regulation and connection for over 60,000 years. Dance, song, ceremony, and relationship with Country are not cultural performances, they are sophisticated technologies for maintaining nervous system health, transmitting knowledge across generations, and sustaining deep connection to land, community and self. I write this from Whadjuk Noongar Country, and I want that to be more than a footnote.

Across the Pacific, in the Americas, Indigenous healing traditions have long woven together breathwork, movement, plant medicine and ritual ceremony – understanding, as Western science is only recently articulating, that healing must address the whole system: body, mind, spirit, community and land.

In Africa, rhythm and drumming have been used across countless distinct traditions to restore balance, release held stress and strengthen communal bonds. The body is understood as something inseparable from spirit and relationship.

Traditional Chinese Medicine has mapped the body's energetic systems for thousands of years, understanding that physical symptoms reflect patterns in the whole person – patterns that require care at the level of the whole person to shift.

These aren't incomplete drafts of what eventually became somatic therapy. They are the source material.

What colonisation actually took

Colonisation didn't just take land, it took embodied knowledge.

The systematic dismantling of Indigenous ways of knowing – which centre relationship, reciprocity, the wisdom of the body and the intelligence of the land – was not incidental to colonisation. It was part of its logic. If the body holds knowledge, and Indigenous bodies hold knowledge that challenges colonial power, then severing people from that knowledge is useful. Framing embodied, relational, land-based healing as primitive or superstitious is a political act.

The result, for many of us, is that we've inherited a profound disconnection from somatic wisdom – our own and the traditions that might have sustained it. We've learned to treat the body as a productivity machine with occasional maintenance requirements. We've been taught that the intellect is where authority lives. We've absorbed the idea that healing happens in the head, through meaning-making, analysis and insight.

And then we're surprised when understanding isn't enough. When insight doesn't stick. When we know our patterns perfectly and still can't find our way out of them.

This is part of what somatic work is trying to repair – not just individually, but at the level of what we've collectively been taught to forget.

The responsibility this creates

Much of what we now call somatic therapy, body-based healing or nervous system regulation in Western contexts has been developed by drawing from Indigenous practices – often without acknowledgment, credit or compensation to the communities who have held this knowledge for generations.

We see this when we practise yoga without naming its roots in Hindu and Buddhist traditions; when we teach breathwork that derives from ceremonial practice without tracing that lineage; when we benefit, professionally and personally, from practices that were violently suppressed in the communities they came from – we're participating in a continuation of harm, even when we don't intend to.

I don't say this to make the work feel compromised or impossible. I say it because how we practise matters, and awareness of lineage changes something in how we hold these tools.

For me, practically, that means acknowledging where practices come from when I teach them. It means actively seeking out and engaging with diverse somatic practitioners and teachers rather than just drawing from their traditions at arm's length. It means recognising that my ability to offer this work professionally is shaped by access and privilege that hasn't been equally distributed.

It's an ongoing practice rather than a box to tick. I'm still learning what it requires.

Why this matters to you

You might be reading this because you're curious about somatic work, or already doing it, and wondering whether any of this changes how you should understand what you're engaged in.

I think it does, a little.

If we approach somatic practice as purely personal – a tool for optimising our own nervous systems, a more sophisticated form of self-improvement – we miss something essential about what this work is and where it comes from. We participate in exactly the same extractive logic that caused the disconnection in the first place.

But if we understand it as part of a longer story – of knowledge that has been suppressed and is being reclaimed, of bodies that have always held wisdom that the dominant culture has worked hard to devalue – then the work becomes something larger than self-care. Coming home to your body isn't just personally useful. It's a small act of resistance against systems that profit from your disconnection.

You can read more about what somatic awareness actually means – the distinction between the body as observed and the body as felt from within – in What is Somatic Awareness?. And if you're curious about the different ways we can access embodied knowledge, the four pathways article is a place to start practically.