There’s a world of difference between the body we see and the body we feel.

When you look in the mirror, you see a body. Limbs, posture, skin. You see what others see – the external form, the structure.

But when you turn your attention inwards, something else reveals itself. Not just what you look like, but what you're experiencing: sensation, emotion, tension, ease, the quiet hum of aliveness or the heaviness of exhaustion.

This is what the field of somatics explores – not just the body as a physical object, but what Thomas Hanna called the soma: the body as experienced from within.

Science, medicine and psychology often take what we might call the third-person view of bodies – observing, analysing and measuring from the outside. This view has brought incredible understanding: how muscles contract, how brains process information, how organs function. It's the view of the microscope and the measuring tape, and it's given us remarkable knowledge.

But there's another way of knowing – the first-person view, the world of felt experience. From this inner perspective, you're not a collection of parts to be analysed. You're a unified, living process – always sensing, integrating, responding, regulating.

In the external view, we can see a heartbeat, chart its rhythm, analyse its chemistry. But from within, we can feel that same heartbeat – the change in pace, the flutter when we're anxious, the steadiness when we're at ease.

Science calls it data. Somatics calls it aliveness.

Both views are valid. Both offer truth. The trouble comes when we treat one as more important than the other – when we forget that the felt sense of being alive matters just as much as what can be measured.

This is why somatic awareness matters. It's an invitation to return to the direct experience of being you – not through tests or diagnoses, but through your body's own language.

The self that senses and moves

Thomas Hanna, often called the godfather of somatics, spent his life exploring movement education and self-awareness. He taught that the soma isn't just self-aware – it's self-regulating. Your body doesn't just observe itself, it's constantly adjusting, responding, reorganising.

A rock or a machine doesn't change from being observed. But you do.

Bring awareness to your breath, and your breath changes. Notice tension in your right shoulder, and it subtly shifts. Awareness isn't passive – it does something.

This is the wonder of what's called the sensory-motor system – the feedback loop that allows you to sense what you're doing and, simultaneously, adjust how you're doing it. You cannot move without sensing, and you cannot sense without, in some way, moving.

To feel your body is to participate in shaping it.

Function shapes structure

Before I became a somatic practitioner, I spent over a decade in the design world, where one of the most upheld principles was that form follows function. The shape of something should be informed by its purpose: What's it for? How then, should it look?

The same is true from a somatic perspective: it's not your structure that determines your function – it's your function that shapes your structure.

The way you move, breathe and respond to life continually sculpts your form – your body. Over time, patterns of holding or collapse become written into your muscles, shaping your posture, your points of tension, even your sense of self.

Maybe you've noticed this in your own life: years of hunching over a computer creates rounded shoulders. Chronic stress creates a perpetually braced belly. Being conditioned to hold back your tears tightens your throat.

When we become aware of our patterns – physical, emotional, behavioural – we begin to open space for choice. We can't force change, but by becoming aware, we cultivate the conditions for it to unfold naturally.

This is the quiet power of somatic work: to bring presence to the places we've gone numb or automatic, and in doing so, invite the body to reorganise itself toward ease, integrity and aliveness.

Being yourself, literally

Hanna once playfully revised Descartes' famous line ‘I think, therefore I am’ – he suggested a more accurate version might be: I sense and move, therefore I am myself.

To be human is to be a sensing, moving being – not a brain carried about by a body, but a unified process of living. We are not simply bodies that have experiences; we are experiences expressing as bodies.

So when we speak of ‘coming home to the body’ we're really speaking of coming home to the soma – the body that knows itself from within. To your felt sense of being alive.