The Benefits of Somatic Movement Therapy: Gain More Access to Your Most Grounded and Creative Self
- Dr. Rhea Komarek
- Feb 21
- 2 min read
“Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe.” -Ursula K. Le Guin
This quote opens a book I have been sipping on lately called The Universe in Verse. It’s an incredible weaving of scientific concepts and poetry. It’s like weaving the hemispheres of the brain together while expanding them at the same time. This to me is like the marrying of the grounded self and the creative self.
It’s so easy to think of the creative realms of self and experience as unimportant when walking through the logic needed to decipher what matters in a life, what choices to make next, what is important.
We are in the midst of an outsourcing of creativity into and with AI. But what of the value of creativity for our own lived experience? What about the deep valuing of the creative, the poetic insight, for recognizing the poignancy of this lived experience?
I love how much a poem can open me immediately to an aesthetic, or deeply felt response to something I am moving through. Drink one with me:
Lullaby for the Grieving, by Ashley Jones, from the gorgeous anthology You Are Here
make small steps.
in this wild place
there are signs of life
everywhere.
sharp spaces, too:
the slip of a rain-glazed rock
against my searching feet.
small steps, like prayers—
each one a hope exhaled
into the trees. please,
let me enter. please, let me
leave whole.
there are, too, the tiny sounds
of faraway birds. the safety
in their promise of song.
the puddle forming, finally,
after summer rain.
the golden butterfly
against the cave-dark.
maybe there are angels here, too—
what else can i call the crown of light
atop the leaves?
what else can i call
my footsteps forward,
small, small, sure?
Can you feel how something soft opens up when some morsel of your lived experience is mirrored in a poem? Imagine what it’s like to locate corners of your own creative expression for marking this moment you find yourself in. A poem, a short story, a few lines. They are avenues for giving voice to parts of the self we can’t hear in the rhythm of everyday life.
They both mirror our current experience while revealing the next steps bit by bit.
This creative self doesn’t emerge when we are in our survival responses. In the face of the unknown, when these responses are triggered, our brains and bodies are prioritizing a survival physiology that narrows what we perceive while also narrowing our thinking. Quite literally, even our peripheral vision narrows.
When we can locate the safety of the nervous system to land in our more supported self, we can access creativity. From here we can be surprised by what emerges, while truly sharing in the best of who we are as human beings. Resourceful. Connected. Solution oriented.
This is the kind of environment we cultivate together in expressive arts infused somatic movement therapy- and it’s what we will be doing together in the Orienting: A Pathway of Self-Discovery small groups starting March 5 & 6.
Come, connect to your story in a new way. It matters.
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