Adv Topics in Mind and Body: Survey of Somatic Psychology

This survey of Somatic Psychology will provide both a superficial glance at the many streams creating the "syncretic momentum" for the field and an in depth investigation of some of the core assumptions, conversations, key theoretical notions, key players (historical and present), and the many developing branches that diversely express this rapidly emerging field. The five developing branches we will be discussing are "Bodymind Therapies", "The Movement Arts", "Bodywork Traditions", "Somatic Education Theories", and "The Philosophical and Academic Sources." This course will map the historical emergence of the field and track the core questions and assumptions that define the field. We will look generally at the branches of Somatic Psychology and specifically into them each as a learning community. We will also critically assess the current and future challenges of the field, centering on some of the deepest and most passionate questions of academic inquiry. Are the mind and body separate? How do the mind and body relate? What is healing? What is energy? How does the gut participate in reason? How is our experience of our self as embodied beings constructed by culture? This challenging course will require thinking through multiple lines of reasoning and a curiosity to experientially explore to come to a critical and basic understanding of the field of Somatic Psychology. Through the assigned texts and other interdisciplinary literature, lectures, discussion, online research, and experiential inquiry, we will examine the emergence of a transdisciplinary inquiry into the nature and debatable unity of the body, the mind, the environment, and the self-organizing felt sense experience of these three influences embodied. This inquiry is a radical departure and critique of modernist assumptions about the role and relationship between mind, body, society, and self. This course will examine Somatic Psychology as offering a profoundly different narrative surrounding our human condition. Somatic psychology is not about the body but rather of the body. This is in stark contrast to fields of inquiry that view the body as object, mechanistic, or something to be controlled or probed. Somatic psychology is about our living experience of embodiment and holds this experience as foundational to our being-ness in the world. Over the past two decades this inquiry has matured into a relatively new field. The field is attempting to publish, advance, and hold the core of the inquiry while multiple streams of philosophical and empirical evidence support, refine, and clarify the basic assumptions of a somatic life. Parallel to this mission is developing practical applications, clear narratives, theoretical explorations, and functional models within the five branches of somatic psychology.