Your body remembers what your mind may have forgotten: that you belong here. That you are part of an ancient lineage of humans who have always known how to heal through sensation, movement, breath and presence.

If you've found your way to somatic practices, you might think this is something new. A contemporary approach to healing, perhaps born from psychology or neuroscience in recent decades.

But the body has always known how to heal itself. And Indigenous cultures around the world have held this knowledge for thousands of years.

Where somatics comes from

The term somatics was coined in the 20th century by movement educator Thomas Hanna, who used it to describe practices that work with the body from the inside out – the living, sensing self he called the soma.

But while the Western term is relatively new, the practices themselves stretch back millennia.

What we now call somatic therapy, body-based healing, or nervous system regulation has been practiced by Indigenous peoples since long before colonisation attempted to sever the connection between body, land and spirit.

Aboriginal Australians have used dance, song and ceremony to maintain connection to Country and community for over 60,000 years. These aren't performances – they're embodied practices that regulate nervous systems, transmit cultural knowledge and maintain relationship with the living land.

Traditional Chinese Medicine has worked with qi – the life force that flows through the body – for thousands of years, understanding that physical symptoms reflect energetic imbalances and that healing must address the whole system.

African healing traditions across the continent have long used rhythm, drumming, movement and ritual to restore balance, release trauma and strengthen community bonds. The body is understood as inseparable from spirit and community.

Indigenous practices across the Americas weave together breathwork, plant medicine, ceremony and embodied ritual for healing trauma, maintaining wellness and connecting to the web of life that sustains us all.

These aren't primitive precursors to modern therapy. They are sophisticated, time-tested technologies of transformation that understand what Western psychology is only now beginning to remember: healing happens in and through the body.

What colonisation severed

Colonisation didn't just take land. It took embodied knowledge.

Indigenous ways of knowing – which centre relationship, reciprocity and the wisdom of the body – were systematically erased, dismissed as superstition or savagery. Western frameworks prioritised the mind over the body, reason over feeling, individual achievement over collective care.

The result is that we’ve become disconnected from our own somatic wisdom. Bodies treated as machines to be optimised rather than sacred vessels of intelligence. Nervous systems chronically dysregulated by the pace and pressure of systems built on extraction.

What’s particularly painful is that much of what we now call ‘somatic therapy’ or ‘body-based healing’ in Western contexts has been repackaged from Indigenous practices – often without acknowledgment, credit or compensation to the cultures that have stewarded this knowledge for millennia.

When we practise yoga without honouring its roots in Hindu and Buddhist traditions. When we use breathwork techniques that come from Indigenous ceremony without naming their origin. When we benefit from practices that were violently suppressed in the communities they came from – we're participating in a continuation of colonial harm, even unintentionally.

The responsibility we carry

I say this as someone who practises within Western somatic frameworks, who has been trained in modalities that may not fully acknowledge their Indigenous roots, and who benefits from systems that were built on the erasure of Indigenous knowledge.

As I've deepened into this work, I've become increasingly aware of the responsibility to honour these roots and to acknowledge cultural context that often erases Indigenous wisdom.

This doesn't mean I can't practise somatic work. It means I need to do so with awareness of lineage, with gratitude for the wisdom keepers who've maintained these practices against enormous odds, and with a commitment to supporting Indigenous communities and practitioners when possible.

It also means recognising that my access to these practices – and my ability to offer them professionally – is shaped by privilege.

Why this matters to you

You might be wondering why this history matters when you’re just trying to manage stress, regulate your nervous system, or find your way back to some sense of ease in your body.

It matters because how we understand healing shapes how we practise it.

If we think somatic work is just about individual self-improvement – fixing our personal nervous systems so we can be more productive – we miss the deeper truth. We are relational beings, living in relational bodies, embedded in systems that shape our capacity to feel, heal and belong.

When you reclaim your body's wisdom, you're not just helping yourself cope better. You're participating in a much larger reclamation – of Indigenous knowledge that colonisation tried to destroy, of ways of being that prioritise connection over extraction, and of the understanding that your body is not separate from the earth, and the web of life.

This is why coming home to your body is both personal healing and political resistance.

In a world that profits from your disconnection – that needs you numb, productive and compliant – feeling what you feel, trusting your soma, and moving at a pace your nervous system can actually sustain … that's radical.

An invitation to honour

If somatic practices have helped you, I invite you to pause and acknowledge where this wisdom comes from: thousands of years of Indigenous knowledge, held and passed down despite enormous pressure to abandon it.

You don't need to become an expert in every tradition. But you can:

• Acknowledge roots and lineage when you share about somatic work

• Seek out and amplify Indigenous practitioners and teachers

• Support Indigenous communities and land rights movements

• Question frameworks that centre Western perspectives as universal

• Practice with humility, recognising your body's wisdom is part of a much larger web

And perhaps most importantly: let your somatic practice be relational, not extractive. Don't just use these practices to optimise yourself. Let them connect you more deeply to others, to the earth, to the responsibility we all carry for collective healing.

We begin in our own body, but the ripple reaches everything.