 THE SOMATICS
GRADUATE PROGRAM
of The California Institute of Integral Studies
One comes upon a new body within
the familiar body. And yet this new body, strange as it is, seems to be the rightful body,
a body that opens out further to worlds one has dreamed or imagined at
the fringes of reason might exist, a territory at once expansive and unknown
and yet near, close as a lover, ready, willing...
an older body, the body of origin, body of birth, the body before it has
been socialized out of its own knowledge of itself.
Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones.
 This is Charlotte Selver, born at the dawn of the 19th century, who brought to this country in 1938 the radical teaching about embodiment developed by Else Gindler in Berlin. She was the unofficial patron of our program, an honorary doctor of our school, until her death in 2003.
I came to bodywork out of a study of phenomenology, and it was from that radical philosophical viewpoint that I was attracted to the bewildering number of practical methods—Rolfing, Feldenkrais, F.M. Alexander, Bioenergetics, Continuum, Body-Mind Centering, Sensory Awareness, etc.— for exploring bodily experience which had been developed over decades in contentiously separate training institutes under the guidance of often quirky geniuses.
I wrote about the conceptual origins of this new field in my introduction to Groundworks.
Until about fifteen years ago, this mélange of practices did not appear to be a field. Private languages and rigidities abounded. One could see, however, that these groups shared an assumption that one's direct experience of his or her body was central in the healing process. That assumption set these schools apart from medicine, physical therapy, mainstream psychotherapy, chiropractic, and osteopathy, and traditional exercise technologies.
The late Thomas Hanna, author of Bodies in Revolt and several other groundbreaking books about new visions of the body, established the first professional journal for these works and coined the name "Somatics" to express and foster their unity. The noun in his usage, in contrast to the more common "somatic" (an adjective synonymous with "physical" or more technically, "the musculoskeletal frame of the body"), referred to
"the field which studies the soma: namely, the body as perceived from within by first-person perception."
He was inspired in that definition by the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, who at the turn of the century set out an agenda for what he called a "somatology," a study of the relationships between knowledge derived from direct bodily experience and scientific studies of the body. These phrases originate in the classical Greek contrast between the dead body, necros, and the enspirited person, soma. That "somatology" would stand as a corrective to what might be called a "necrology," the body of medical science whose fundamental ideas about body parts and their structures have been derived from the dissection and analysis of corpses.
A few random notes on our program in addition to the official literature:
1. Despite widespread rumors to the contrary, it is not against the law for a licensed mft who holds a degree from our program to touch clients, following the standards of ethics and professional practice.
2. Our program operates within the guidelines of consumer protection laws: we state publicly that we train psychological counselors in the appropriate, ethical, and psychologically sophisticated use of touch. Our curricula and training standards are open for public scrutiny at all times.
3. Our program originally began at Antioch Unversity in San Francisco in 1983, where it remained until Antioch's bankruptcy in 1989. We then—students, faculty, and alumni—were invited to New College of California, where we stayed for a brief two years until moving to our much better home at CIIS. Because most of the faculty, administration, and staff have experienced one form or another of Somatics practices, the Institution supports us as more than just a financially viable program, but as providing an essential component of graduate level integral studies, where body practices are seen as situated within a worldwide network of methods connected with the cultivation of spiritual wisdom.
4. Our program curriculum is designed to prepare graduates for academic and clinical eligibility for the California State license in marriage, family, and child counseling. We also have a training clinic, The Center for Somatic Psychotherapy, where trainees and interns receive regular clinical supervision and advanced education.
5. Our graduates have among the highest rates of success in passing the licensure requirements of the State of California for the MFT.
Embodiment is not a curse, not an
affliction, but the only opportunity we shall be given to learn the poetry
of mortal dwelling. If we are attentive to this poetry, I think we have
reason to believe that, with the emerging of a new body of understanding,
a new historical epoch could dawn on our horizon.
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