What Is Somatics, and Why It’s at the Heart of Robbie’s Teaching
I spent a longtime practicing yoga without really feeling it; without really sensing into it. That sounds like a strange thing to admit as a teacher, but I suspect it’s more common than we say out loud. I could hold the shapes. I knew the names, the alignment cues, the breath counts. I’d studied in the traditions that prize precision, and I’m extremely grateful for them. But somewhere in all that refinement, another question crept up: what is actually happening in here? Not in the pose. In me.
Somatics is the word I eventually found for that question, and also the practice that began to answer it. It changed the direction of my path, and it sits at the centre of everything I teach now. So let me try to explain what it is, in plain language, and why I keep coming back to it.
The Word Itself
“Somatics” comes from the Greek soma, meaning the living body, but not the body as an object you look at in a mirror or measure on a chart. Soma is the body as it’s experienced from the inside: the felt sense of your own weight, breath, tension, warmth, and movement. It’s the difference between knowing that your shoulder is raised and feeling that you’ve been holding it there for three days.
The term was popularised in the twentieth century by the philosopher and movement theorist Thomas Hanna, who used it to describe the body perceived from within, as opposed to the body observed from outside. That distinction is simple and yet it turns out to be enormous. Most of us live almost entirely in the outside view. We ‘think about’ our bodies. We judge them, manage them, push them, and feed them. We rarely listen to them. One of the most poignant and amusing ways I heard it described was that the body is like a ‘taxi for the mind’.
Somatic practice reverses that direction. Instead of asking the body to perform for the mind, it asks the mind to give attention to the body., to re-orient itself through the filter of the body as it were. And when that attention is gentle, patient and sustained, things begin to surface that no amount of thinking would have found.
What Somatics Is Not
It helps to say what it isn’t, because the word gets stretched in many directions.
Somatics isn’t a technique to perfect, and there’s no correct version of it to get right or wrong. It can involve movement, but it isn’t exercise. It can also be a way of framing both imagination and visualization to bring one deeper into a sensory experience of what a particular body part feels like or how to feels to perceive life through a particular lens. Relaxation often follows, but that’s not really the aim either. And while many people find it a valuable companion to medical or psychological care, it was never meant to replace either one.
What it is, at its simplest, is a way of developing awareness of your own inner experience through the body, and then allowing that awareness to change how you hold, move and respond. It prioritises sensation over performance, curiosity over correction, and listening over instruction.
Where It Entered My Life
I came to this work gradually. Yoga first became a steadying force for me during a period of real difficulty, and I’m still grateful for how it held me. I went on to live and study in London, India, Spain and Portugal, drawing on a range of styles and traditions along the way. Iyengar and Sivananda both shaped me. The first taught me to look closely at form and refinement; the second, to see yoga as a whole way of living and not just a physical practice.
It was during my time in Portugal that I was introduced to somatics, and that was the moment my path changed. What struck me wasn’t a particular exercise. It was the shift in emphasis. Instead of getting the pose right, the invitation was to notice what the pose was stirring up and then moving from that place. In other words, instead of trying to push through a sensation or even fabricate a particular outcome, the invitation became to stay with it and see what is revealed in the process. For example, instead of treating tension as a problem to be eliminated, to treat it as information.
I realised I’d been working on the outside of the practice for years. Somatics took me inward, to what I think of as the deeply embedded memory that the body holds. Not memory in the sense of stories we can retell, but the older kind, laid down in muscle, breath and posture, shaping how we move through the world long after we’ve forgotten why.
The Body Keeps Its Own Kind of Memory
This is the idea at the heart of the work, so it’s worth sitting with for a moment.
Think about how you stand when you’re afraid. Or how your chest changes when someone you love walks into the room. These responses aren’t decisions. They’re patterns, built up over a lifetime, often in moments when we needed to protect ourselves, adapt, or simply get through. The nervous system learns quickly and forgets slowly. A bracing that began as a sensible response to a hard period can quietly remain long after the period has ended.
Over time these patterns become so familiar that we stop noticing them. They simply feel like me. The tight jaw, the held breath, the way the shoulders curl forward, the readiness to flinch. We assume they’re personality, when often they’re history (which also perfectly correlates to Yogic concepts such as Samskaras, Karma and Vasana).
Somatic practice offers a way to meet them, gently rather than by force, since forcing a pattern open tends to make the body tighten further. The alternative is slower: noticing the pattern, staying with it, and letting the system learn through direct experience that something has changed. The body can’t be argued out of a pattern. It can be shown, slowly and safely, that a different response is available.
Why Understanding Isn’t Enough
I often meet people who have done a great deal of thinking about themselves. They’re articulate, self-aware, and thoughtful about where their patterns come from. And they’re still stuck. They’ll say something like, I know why I do this, I just can’t seem to stop.
I understand that completely. Insight is valuable, but it lives in one part of us, and habit lives in another. You can understand with total clarity that a fear no longer serves you and still feel your breath shorten the moment it’s triggered. The two simply don’t speak the same language.
This is where the body becomes essential. Change that lasts has to be felt, not just understood. It has to be rehearsed in the nervous system, through sensation, breath and movement, until it becomes more familiar than the old response. That kind of learning is slower than a good conversation, and it can’t be rushed. But in my experience it goes deeper, and it tends to hold.
This is also why I frame the work around integration rather than breakthrough. A single moment of clarity can be wonderful, but what changes a life is the quieter process of letting that clarity settle into how you actually move, breathe and respond. Clarity and integration, in other words, belong together.
How Bodywork and Mobility Fit In
Alongside yoga and somatics, I work as a massage therapist and bodyworker, and I use the FRC system for mobility and training. People sometimes wonder how these fit together, since they can look like very different disciplines.
To me they’re all conversations with the same living body. Bodywork lets me feel where tension and holding are located, and offers the tissues a chance to soften. Mobility training builds usable, confident range of movement, so that the body feels capable rather than fragile. Somatic practice brings attention to what’s happening inside all of it. Together they form a kind of loop: awareness informs movement, movement reshapes sensation, and sensation deepens awareness.
I don’t think of the physical and the inner as separate projects. Refining the body’s capacity supports an expansion of how we experience ourselves, and attending to our inner life changes how the body moves. They feed each other.
What a Somatic Practice Feels Like
If you’ve never tried this kind of work, it may help to know what to expect, because it can be gentler and stranger than people anticipate.
It often begins very simply. You might lie down and notice where your body meets the floor. You might follow the movement of your breath without trying to change it. You might move slowly, with attention on how a movement begins rather than where it ends. There’s rarely an ambition to look impressive, and often nothing to see from outside.
What happens internally can be subtle: a softening you didn’t plan, a sudden wave of tiredness, an unexpected sense of warmth or sadness, a long exhale that arrives on its own. Sometimes nothing dramatic occurs and the benefit only shows up later, in a better night’s sleep or a little more patience at an awkward moment.
None of it needs to be forced. The principle I return to constantly is that the body shows you what’s ready. Your job is to be present and kind enough for it to do so.
Somatics on Retreat
There’s a reason this work often lands more deeply on retreat than in a weekly class. A class, however good, is a visit. You arrive, you practise, and you return to the same environment, with the same cues and the same pace, within the hour.
A week or a few days away changes the conditions. Days of unhurried practice, without the usual noise, give the nervous system enough consecutive time to settle into a new baseline instead of briefly touching one. That’s the heart of the Somatics Retreat, where the time is organised around learning to feel and listen, with room to rest and integrate between sessions.
Somatic awareness also runs quietly through the other retreats. On the Re-enchantment retreat, it sits alongside daily yoga, meditation, time in nature and a gentle digital detox. For people who want to go further into practice itself, the yoga immersion retreat explores the subtler layers beneath technique. And all of it takes place on the island where I live with my partner Vanessa, so a yoga retreat in Fuerteventura or Ireland for that matter, is, for me, less a programme than an invitation into the place I call home.
Somatics in Coaching and Mentorship
I’m also a registered member of the Association for Coaching, and the same somatic thread runs through how I work one to one. When someone is moving through a big change, such as a relationship ending, a career shifting or an identity being outgrown, the body is usually carrying more of it than they realise. Transitional coaching brings attention to that, so the shift isn’t only thought through but felt and integrated.
I don’t see coaching as fixing someone or optimising them. It’s closer to remembering: helping a person find steadiness, regain some clarity, and move with a clearer sense of direction. And because lasting change rarely completes in a single week, Community Mentorship offers ongoing support, so that what begins on retreat has somewhere to keep growing. It’s a way of walking the path together rather than alone.
Why It Stays at the Centre
People sometimes ask why I keep returning to somatics when I could teach in a more conventional way. The honest answer is that it’s the thing that has actually changed my life, and the thing I’ve seen change other people’s.
Technique matters, and I continue to value it. But precision alone can slide into performance, and performance is exhausting. Somatics asks for something more honest: to arrive as you are, feel what’s here, and let that be the starting point. There’s a relief in that and my experience tells me that it leads us to a place outside of ourselves in which we feel the mystery of it all again. Many people discover that they’ve spent years trying to get their bodies to behave, when what they needed was to start listening to them.
I think of this work as a kind of anchor. In a world that keeps accelerating, the body is the one place we can reliably return to. Its sensations are always present, always giving us information, always available as a way home. Somatic practice simply teaches us how to hear it.
If any of this resonates, you’re welcome to read more about my background and approach or reach out directly. I’m always glad to talk through whether this work might suit where you are right now.
FAQs
What does “somatics” actually mean?
It comes from the Greek soma, referring to the living body as experienced from the inside. Somatic practice focuses on awareness of internal sensation, breath and movement, rather than on how the body looks or performs.
Is somatics the same as yoga?
They overlap, but they aren’t identical. Yoga includes postures, breath and meditation, and can be practised with a strong focus on form. Somatics places its emphasis on felt experience and attention, often through slow, exploratory movement. In my teaching, the two inform each other.
Do I need to be flexible or experienced to try a somatic practice?
No. There’s no performance involved and no ideal shape to achieve. Beginners and experienced practitioners both work from the same starting point: noticing what’s present, at their own pace.
How is somatic work different from talk therapy?
Talk therapy works primarily through conversation, narrative and understanding. Somatic work approaches change through the body, sensation and direct experience. Many people find the two complement each other, and somatic coaching isn’t a substitute for therapy or medical care.
What can I expect on the Somatics Retreat?
The week is built around learning to feel and listen, with unhurried practice, time in nature, and space to rest and integrate. It’s designed for depth rather than intensity, and you’re welcome to reach out to talk through whether it suits you. In all, the practices are very expansive, experimental and intuitive and are perfect for those who need fresh inspiration on their journey.
Will somatic work help with stress and tension?
Many people find that paying careful attention to the body helps them recognise and soften long-held tension, and that this supports a calmer, steadier state. Experiences vary, and if you’re dealing with significant physical or emotional difficulty, it’s wise to involve a qualified professional too.