The Soma as the Seat of Knowing
February 2021
Instinct, Intuition, and Interplay
I first encountered somatics, or the study of the soma, during my graduate work towards a Master of Arts in History and Culture from Union Institute and University. My thesis advisor introduced me to the work of Celeste Snowber, a leading scholar and advocate of embodied inquiry in arts-based research, and my exploration of Snowber’s work led me to other scholars using embodied inquiry and the concept of somatics in their work. I was drawn to somatics theory because of its emphasis on subjective experience and personal transformation, which I found to be the guiding principles of scholars with marginalized identities.
My exploration of somatics, along with arts-based research, embodied inquiry, Womanism, Black Feminism, and African Diasporic dance, culminated in the completion of my thesis on neo-traditional West African dance as a somatic movement practice for Black American women to uncover historical and cultural narratives held in, experienced through, and created by our living, moving bodies. I postulated that somatic awareness offers Black American women the interiority necessary to shift dominant narratives regarding dance, culture, and ways of being. In the same way, I believe somatic awareness in our lives offers interiority and access to internal guidance that shifts the framing through which we perceive ourselves, each other, and our environments.
From my understanding, the soma functions as the seat of our knowing, and somatic awareness brings our attention to that knowing by unraveling the complex interaction between instinct, embodied emotional and experiential data that prompts patterns of behavior designed to keep us safe; and intuition, internal guidance based on our processing of those patterns that prompts conscious decisions and expands the realm of imagined possibilities of behavioral choices.
It is necessary to distinguish between knowledge and knowing, that which is legitimized as a body of fact and that which is the process by which our knowledge becomes legitimized and integrated into our ways of our being. I cannot acquire knowledge, the thing, without knowing, the process of acquisition, although I can acquire while being unaware of the process of acquisition. A pattern I have noted in myself is my tendency to be silent even when it is to my benefit to use my voice and speak up. That silence is preferred is knowledge.
But what process of knowing led to my legitimation of that knowledge? Like most of our patterns, my pattern of silence is rooted in my childhood. As a child, I learned that my perceived safety rested in my silence. It’s in my nature to be observant, so I was often witness to “adult” conversations and happenings. When I spoke on my observations, I was reprimanded. The reprimands communicated that it was not safe for me to speak. This feeling became fact as I noted the pattern, and intuitive guidance based on that pattern led me to silence myself in order to preserve my safety. I learned to observe and then be silent about my observations. Instinct fostered the intuition, and intuition reinforced the instinct.
Thus, knowing is the interplay between instinct and intuition. This example offers a simple opening to the way that instinct and intuition are connected and informing one another, although, as I will discuss later, the process is not so linear, nor does the presence of intuition simply diminish behavioral patterns even when new choices become available.
Another way to look at the process of knowing is to consider the way that elemental energies are interacting with and balancing one another. In a Twitter thread from @anuomni, originally posted on October 26, 2019, but reposted sometime in March 2020, they described instinct as “behavioral” and “based on innate responses from the body to provide consistent protection,” while intuition is “based on processing patterns and matching them to previous/current/future experiences, thoughts, and sensations.” They associated instinct and intuition with the water and fire elements, respectively. As I considered the elemental associations articulated by @anuomni, I conjectured that they must extend to the other two of the four elements. Based on my understanding of the elements and their associations with yin and yang energies, I extended @anuomni’s intuition association to include air and the instinct association to include earth. Thus, fire and air are associated with intuition, while water and earth are associated with instinct.**
I later found confirmation of the extended associations through the work of sidereal astrologer Dayna Lynn Nuckolls, also known as The People’s Oracle, although there are ways in which Nuckolls’ theory with respect to the elements is distinct from @anuomni’s theory. In Nuckolls’ “Reading Your Sidereal Birth Chart” workshop, livestreamed on September 27, 2020, she discussed the elements in astrology as tools that have been rendered either effective or ineffective in our experience based on their presence and absence in our natal charts. Nuckolls described water as the body, encompassing bodily functions and relations, and earth as material and physical evidence, encompassing the tangible, quantifiable, and experiential. Fire, on the other hand, is associated with the will and consciousness, while air encompasses imagination, symbol-making, language, and conceiving concepts. In these descriptions, I read a clear connection between bodily and experiential data influencing our instincts, and cognitive and conceptual processes and awareness influencing our intuition.
Nuckolls provided further clarification on the association of water and earth with bodily and experiential data, respectively, and how they connect to our instincts with her series of New and Full Moon readings as well as her series of Scorpio and Taurus Eclipse readings. In her New Moon in Taurus reading on May 22, 2020, she said that we know what a thing is through the earth element by our sense-based encounter with it, or in other words, our experience of it. The following Full Moon reading on June 5, 2020 was for the first in a series of Scorpio/Taurus eclipses, aptly titled “Decolonizing the Survival Instinct,” where Nuckolls described their impact as that of an encounter with our personal emotional realities that requires us to extract what our personal experiences are telling us about the external world.
In the subsequent New Moon in Gemini Solar Eclipse reading on June 21, 2020, Nuckolls’ breakdown of the four mutable signs included a description of water sign Pisces as instinct and intuition and earth sign Virgo as material knowledge, sensate knowing, and literal evidence. Nuckolls’ merging of instinct and intuition under a single water element sign contradicts @anuomni’s elemental demarcations and my own extension of @anuomni’s ideas. However, what aligns in Nuckolls’ work is an intimate relationship between the confluence of instinct and intuition and the process of knowing.
Much later in the year, during the New Moon in Virgo reading on September 17, 2020, Nuckolls again reiterated that earth signs are about our physical perceptions and experiences. In short, Nuckolls drew a clear line from water and earth to bodily and experiential data, respectively. What I gathered is that water and earth encompass sensory experience, and it is repetition of sensory experiences that prompt instinctual behaviors to emerge. Where they differ is in the degree of internal and external influence on that sensing. Where the water-based body, which I believe to be both the sensations of the actual physical body and the emotional body, is almost entirely internal, the earth-based body filters internal sensations through its perception of external environments. Water needs no external factors to make the internal experience immediately factual, whereas for earth, the sensory experience is perceived through data from the external environment.
I’ve considered this difference in terms of another one of my patterns, i.e., not trusting myself for lack of certainty. I have no planets in water in my chart, meaning that, according to my understanding of Nuckolls’ method of reading the sidereal birth chart, the physical sensations in my body and the internal emotions alone, while providing me with information, are inadequate for me to trust that I should follow what my internal compass directs. With an abundance of earth in my chart, I have sought out experiential data by relying on my encounters with external influences to confirm internal feelings. The result of this need for evidence that affirms and justifies my internal feelings has been repeated engagement with discomfort in order to confirm that my discomfort was real.
If instinct is a pattern of behavior designed to keep us safe, then my decision to engage in uncomfortable situations, my pattern of not trusting the actual physical and emotional reality and needing to test it in order to confirm that it was true, is an example of me acting in defiance of the information by body was giving me. It’s an example of the information having been right there in my body and in my experience, but there was obviously something else motivating me to go forth with choices that didn’t make sense. My need for repeated validation, however, prompted a pattern of sensed discomfort, which in turn fostered intuitive guidance to disengage. Although I didn’t immediately disengage, because of my need to gather more experiential data to confirm what I know, attention to and processing of the pattern of discomfort brought the possibility of disengagement into my consciousness and imagination.
It’s important to note here that in Western culture, we have “a complex and largely troubled relationship with the body” (Lawrence 10) and a tendency to ignore what the body knows. Thus, occupying a marginalized body under white supremacist patriarchal capitalism fosters a distrust of our bodies beyond what may be innately influenced by planetary position at birth. We often consider subjective, first-person experiences as invalid sources of information because they don’t uphold the “objectivity” prioritized in Western positivism. A skewed perception of our instincts translates to a skewed perception of our intuition, or inner guidance, since intuition is predicated on processing instinctual patterns. Intuition’s association with fire and air elements, with fire as will and consciousness and air as concept and imagination, suggests that what we act on, bring into consciousness, conceive, and imagine are informed by our instincts.
Going back to the example of learning to be silent during childhood, the pattern of feelings and experiences that came with speaking were then processed so as to foster an intuitive guidance that said my action was to be silent for the sake of safety, and I could only imagine my silence as the safest alternative. However, as is illustrated by my repeated engagement with uncomfortable, even dangerous, situations, existing under an oppressive system doesn’t always foster the safe route of action or imagination. Under the oppression of white supremacist patriarchal capitalism, a skewed perception of my instincts, the urge to push them down and not follow right away because my marginalized body and experiences were not to be trusted, fostered action and imagination that were not aligned with what would keep me safe. My intuitive guidance was impacted, then, not by following my instincts, but my going against them. Still, the possibility of disengagement was there.
What this reveals to me is a complex interplay between instinct and intuition that begins in the body, the soma, to be exact. For this reason, the soma must be considered as our seat of knowing, the process by which we gain knowledge. Somatic awareness, then, is necessary for unraveling how that knowing emerges, and this unraveling begins with a connection to our first-person perception.
Somatic Awareness to Identify Patterns
The validity of our emotional and experiential realities is a guiding principle of somatic awareness. However, their accepted validity doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be interrogated. I believe that the accepted validity, working in tandem with the interrogation of those realities, makes it possible for somatic awareness to illuminate both the inner Current and an external oppressive framing working at odds in our lives and manifesting not only in sensation, but also in our behavior and imagination.
Somatics scholar Sondra Fraleigh posits that the goal of somatic practice is personal transformation (9), which suggests that engaging with our emotional and experiential realities, however uncomfortable, is key to opening up space for necessary changes to take shape. We often have an aversion to engaging our discomfort and asking it why it is there. This aversion, along with the general distrust of sensorial bodily information prompts us to push this discomfort down and try to ignore it. Thus, our negative patterns continue playing out, but the discomfort is persistent and tries over and over again to get some attention so that it can be worked out. Somatic awareness, then, becomes pivotal in identifying our patterns and how they manifest in our consciousness and imaginations. This is the first step in the unraveling that leads to the transformation.
There is an important distinction between consciousness and awareness. Consciousness is a learned function, a repertoire of skills, while awareness is the lens that allows us to recognize and control that repertoire of skills (Hanna 33). Awareness also allows for the expansion of consciousness. It makes the unknown become known and the never-before-done become doable (Hanna 33). Somatic awareness is necessary for parsing our knowing and knowledge because it illuminates what skills are within a person’s repertoire and what skills needed to be added. It prompts us to ask ourselves, what is consciously available? What can be imagined? What skills do I need to cultivate in order for my consciousness and imagination to expand, particularly so that my knowing can be affirmed rather than challenged?
Identifying and owning our patterns is not an easy or comfortable thing to do. It requires us to hold ourselves accountable for behaviors that we have cultivated and reinforced that are no longer for our highest good. When holding ourselves accountable, we run the risk of devolving into shame- and guilt-ridden spaces that magnify our perceived capacity for monstrosity and a very real capacity for imposing harm, both on ourselves and others.
However, somatic awareness helps us to not only own our complexity and constant energetic shifts, but also to open up space for transformation to happen. By tuning into and interrogating my first-person experience of distress, recognizing my patterns of silence and testing my guidance in the direction against it, I have now opened space to expand my consciousness, the repertoire of skills available to me and what I imagine to be possible. Furthermore, I have recognized that the instinctual behaviors that may have once served me may no longer be useful in the present.
Shifts in the futility of instinctual patterns based on intuitive processing suggests that our knowing is always in flux, and not only must we pay attention to these changes, but we must move along with them. This is the inner Current working in our lives. This is the Current that is within us. However, it is often being challenged by external influences, namely oppressive systems and frameworks, that do not regard change and complexity as constant and necessary factors in our lives.
Although I sometimes continue consciously acting against my own intuition, my awareness of the pattern and the shift in intuition and knowing still expand my consciousness. Disrupting the patterns becomes a possibility on which I can imagine and act if I chose to. It is through somatic awareness, particularly its requirement that I sit with, engage, and interrogate my discomfort and accept it as valid– allowing myself to identify instinctual patterns, shifts in intuition, and the flux of knowing– and accept somatic information as an accurate indicator of my encounter with an external reality, that I begin to access my inner Current and find that there are governing, external frameworks in resistance to it that also sometimes place me in resistance to it, which is really to say, in resistance to myself.
Somatic Awareness as a Method for Shadow Work
An inability to accept our whole selves, even the perceived undesirable parts of ourselves, contributes to our being in a constant state of resistance against ourselves. Shadow work asks of us that we make the unconscious conscious. Furthermore, it asks that once we make the unconscious conscious, we integrate it into our beings so that we can exist as our whole selves rather than in resistance to ourselves. As I noted earlier, awareness, or pointed focus, is how we come to know what was previously unknown and how we expand the realm of consciousness, or skills available to us to be acted on and deliberately chosen when needed. Therefore, somatic awareness can also function as a method for shadow work. I have found that somatic awareness not only helps me unravel my process of knowing but also illuminates my shadows and allows me to integrate them into my ways of being so that they become conscious skills that I can direct rather than unconscious elements that are directing me.
Unraveling the interplay between instinctual behaviors and intuitive processing illuminates parts of myself that are unconscious. In my initial unraveling, I thought that my problem was simply not trusting my knowing for not trusting my body and emotions. However, a therapist helped me to go deeper in this unraveling and recognize that it was not simply a lack of trust in my knowing, but rather testing my knowing that was a persistent pattern. Furthermore, not only was I testing my knowing, but I was testing in the direction against it, testing against my inner Current. As a result, I got dragged back into the inner Current every time instead of going willingly and gracefully. At the root of my detrimental behavior are two of my biggest shadows: insecurity, and depending on how I’m looking at it, the need for experimentation.
My insecurity runs deep. At this point in my life, its presence is undeniable, because I have run into it too many times in my late teenage and adult life to pretend that it’s not there. What’s more is that trying to push it down instead of bringing it into my awareness has made it so resistant that it pops up, governing my behaviors and thought patterns at my most vulnerable moments. This insecurity tends to make itself known in relationship with other people.
A glaring example is the impact that my insecurity has always had on my perception of my friendships. In short, my belief regarding my friendships has been that they’re all running jokes, that there’s no way any of the people who, for any length of time, have been my friends could actually like me, love me, or want to be around me. A persistent thought has been that they keep me around because there needs to be a joke in the friend group, and I have believed myself to be that joke. While a detailed explanation of anxiety and the way it manifests in our personal relationships is outside the scope of this project, and while I have neither the psychological study nor licensure to explain it in detail, I feel it worth mentioning in this discussion because noticing the way that anxiety shows up in my body is a form of somatic awareness.
A white supremacist patriarchal capitalist world does not validate who I am at my core, nor does it offer space for me to accept and integrate all parts of myself in all of my complexity. White supremacist patriarchal capitalism has cultivated my insecurity by fostering instinctual patterns that until now had not been interrogated. Repeatedly feeling that I must not be worthy of love or deserving of genuine friendship, I have often chosen to not hang out with my friends, especially when there are unfamiliar people involved in the social situation, or I have resorted to massive amounts of alcohol to make the social situation more bearable. Unfortunately, both of these options reinforce the pattern of feeling unloved and unworthy because, one, if I decide to disengage, no one is begging me to show up because my people know who and how I am; and two, if I’m inebriated, the anxious feelings are still going to play out because they don’t simply disappear. Rather, they make me act in ways beside myself that will ultimately fill me with shame and regret.
Having to sit with those feelings of shame, regret, and self-loathing illuminated the insecurity at the root. This was the moment where somatic awareness shined light on an instinctual behavior and shadow– questioning the validity of my friendships and the underlying insecurity that prompted the behavior– and fostered intuitive guidance based on my processing of that pattern. First, there was feeling my shame and regret and accepting them as a valid, accurate indicator of my encounter with an external reality. Next, there was asking the shame and regret why it was there and listening intently to the response.
The actual reality is that despite, or perhaps more accurately because of who I am, my friendship with the people in a particular case that comes to mind has lasted for over ten years. While it’s true that we have all evolved in different ways and shifted apart at different times, there’s still love and care when we do come back together. Thus, the persistent feeling that they do not truly like or accept me is an illusion, partly of my own making, partly manufactured by white supremacist patriarchal capitalism.
Processing this pattern shifted my intuition and overall knowing, thus bringing new possible actions and imaginings into my consciousness. But I couldn’t get to the expanded consciousness without pointed awareness of the problem, which rested in me and not in any of the ways that my friends have treated me. In my anxious and drunken oblivions, separate but connected oblivions, the shadow controlled me and presented me with very limited options. Now, in a state of awareness, I am able to gain control of the shadow through recognizing that it is a part of me and that there are other options available.
In a moment when I am questioning the validity of my friendships, I can now say to myself, “Miya, this is your insecurity and anxiety speaking and attempting to control your behavior. What evidence do you have to support the notion that your friends do not like you or that you’re unworthy of their love and care?” Questioning a behavior pattern as it is happening is calling on my intuition to show me available options. In this case, my available options would be to act on the insecurity and reinforce the instinctual pattern or break out of the pattern by acting from a space of awareness, that awareness being that my insecurity and anxiety are coloring my present perception of my friendships although there is no past evidence to support that perception.
But anxiety sometimes still persists, as awareness does not simply diminish it. In an anxious state, I might still find that I’m uncertain about the next possible action and that my knowing, which I essentially consider hypotheses because of my rampant and persistent uncertainty, needs to be tested. As I stated earlier, my need for experimentation is one of my shadows that until recently hadn’t been illuminated. Until now, my need for experimentation has been an unconscious pattern of mine that, because of my lack of awareness, was controlling my behavior.
What’s more is that white supremacist patriarchal capitalism doesn’t support this part of me. Systems of oppression perpetuate themselves by making us believe that the status quo is the only way things can be, and there are often negative consequences, threats to our safety and wellness, when we go about life experimenting and exploring other options than the ones the status quo gives us. Of course, I have pushed the experimenting part of myself down and communicated that it’s wrong and unlovable. Yet, the experimenting part of myself is me, so it has inevitably played out in my subconscious and dictated my conscious behavior.
By processing the behavioral patterns that my need for experimentation has produced, by engaging the resultant distress that those patterns produce, it is possible to acknowledge that my experiments are simply an attempt to affirm the validity of my intuitive guidance and the accuracy of my knowing. However, because the experimentation has historically played out unconsciously, it could only go in one direction, and that was in the direction against myself. Bringing light to this shadow, i.e., pointing my awareness at the negative feelings produced by experimentation, has brought the experimentation into my consciousness and offered other, more constructive ways to act on it.
Operating in this space of awareness and expanded consciousness, I would then be able to use my experimentation to test my hypothesis in the direction that it goes. That is, after processing the behavioral patterns produced by my insecurity and anxiety, and finding that my intuition says those patterns are not useful, I would then test my knowing by shifting my behavior to align with what my intuition says is useful. I would treat my friendships as if they are valid and genuine and as if, my friends do accept me as exactly who I am. I would treat myself as if I am worthy of friendship, love, and care. What I might find is confirmation of my intuition and knowing without all the distress that comes from testing against it.
Thus, two unconscious shadows, insecurity and experimentation, become conscious tools through my acceptance, which then makes them useful in their provision of new options for directing my action. I could only bring these tools into my consciousness through somatic awareness , by engaging and interrogating the discomfort they produced, by recognizing how they played out and were reinforced by my instinctual patterns, and by processing those patterns to see that my intuition calls for a shift in my behavior. Somatic awareness allows me to parse my process of knowing and brings unconscious parts of myself into the conscious realm so that I can use them to expand what actions and imagined possibilities are available to me and to go in the direction that will most likely produce the least harmful results.
Emotional and Experiential Engagement – Does It Always Have to Be Discomfort?
In my discussion and examples, I’ve only talked about somatic awareness in terms of engaging discomfort. In part, this is due to the fact that somatic practice is about transformation, and what needs to be transformed is most often that which causes distress and discomfort. That’s not to suggest that we shouldn’t or don’t ever engage feelings of pleasure and joy, too. However, under white supremacist patriarchal capitalism, merely getting to pleasure and joy requires wading through the murky waters of our distress and discomfort that, once we start parsing our knowing, we realize are largely products of interacting oppressive systems. Furthermore, once we do access our joy and pleasure, the external force of white supremacist patriarchal capitalism, as well as all that we have internalized of it, constantly threatens and comes up against that joy and pleasure.
In the next part of this series, I discuss how white supremacist patriarchal capitalism exists as an external framing that discourages somatic awareness and access to the inner Current. This external framing creates a feedback loop that keeps us in a perpetual state of resistance to ourselves because it goes against the inner Current. Nonetheless, because the inner Current is within us and essentially is us, we still have access to it by way of somatic awareness and can use it to break out of the feedback loop of white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. Our access to the inner Current suggests that there are ways to externalize the inner Current to put pressure on white supremacist patriarchal capitalism from within and to find evidence of a universal Current also putting pressure on the frame from without. By accessing the inner Current and aligning with the universal Current, we collapse the system without collapsing with it.
Works Cited
@anuomni. [tweets unavailable]. Twitter, 26 October 2019, [url unavailable].**
Fraleigh, Sondra. "Somatic Movement Arts." Moving Consciously: Somatic Transformations Through Dance, Yoga, and Touch, edited by Sondra Fraleigh, University of Illinois Press, 2015, pp. 24-49.
Hanna, Thomas. “What is Somatics?” Journal of Behavioral Optometry, vol. 2, no. 2, 1991, pp. 31-35, https://www.oepf.org/journal/pdf/jbo-volume-2-issue-2-what-somatics.
Lawrence, Randee Lipson. “Intuitive Knowing and Embodied Consciousness.” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, no. 134, 2012, pp. 5-13. https://doi.org/10.1002/ace.20011.
Nuckolls, Dayna Lynn. “Let Love Perfect You: New Moon Reading — May 22, 2020.” Youtube, uploaded by The People’s Oracle, 22 May 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEpDZv8k5w0&t=2417s.
—-. “NOT PEACE, BUT A SWORD! — Full Moon Lunar Eclipse Reading — June 5, 2020. Youtube, uploaded by The People’s Oracle, 5 June 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3dKRMUWHW0.
—-. “Reading Your Sidereal Birth Chart Workshop — September 27, 2020.” The People’s Oracle, 25 August 2020, https://thepeoplesoracle.com/page/2/.
—-. “SPEAK UP & LISTEN CLOSELY — New Moon Solar Eclipse Reading.” Youtube, uploaded by The People’s Oracle, 21 June 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVYrDAMBx78.
—-. “The Facts of Life — New Moon Reading — September 17, 2020.” Youtube, uploaded by The People’s Oracle, 17 September 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3ca2uEziEU&t=2422s.
**I am unable to properly cite @anuomni’s tweets in the text and “Works Cited” as their Twitter page is no longer available. The only documentation I have to show the tweets/Twitter page ever existed are in my personal journals.