What is Somajna?

Somajna is a combination of two words. The Greek word ‘Soma’ – which refers to the living body and ‘Ajna’, the Sanskrit word which refers to knowing or perception. Combined, it means knowing the living body or ‘The Wisdom of the body’

“It is through the alignment of the body that I discovered the alignment of my mind, self and intelligence.”

~ B. K. S Iyengar, arguably the most influential yoga teacher worldwide.

The wisdom of the body is the collective intelligence of 4 billion years of evolution that lives within us at a cellular level. It is also the wisdom that we have gathered through our life, largely unconsciously. This intelligence is not restricted only to our brain, but pervades our entire nervous system. We consider Somajna equally as a journey and a place or experience of knowing. It is accessible right here, right now and can also seem elusive, leaving us feeling incomplete.

But, why is this elusive wisdom so important?

As our world becomes more and more complex and unpredictable, we are experiencing newer and more serious breakdowns that affect our everyday existence. Technology is rapidly reconfiguring what we once knew as work, rendering thousands of jobs redundant and creating new niches where we have a huge skills deficit. The paradigms of our previous generations - steady employment, family and financial stability are nearly wiped out by a world that is changing faster than we ever knew. Businesses around the world are going global and hyper local at the same time, creating a super connected and also an extremely vulnerable ecosystem. Economic models and financial markets today are highly sensitive to events that take place in any corner of the world. To make things worse, the pandemic has uprooted the hitherto secure socio-economic norms that most of the civilized world balanced upon.

In such an upheaval, an individual may grapple with the existential questions of purpose and meaning while simultaneously dealing with questions of survival. These are the breakdowns modern society is experiencing and they are playing out in different colours based on the cultural context they are set in. Such breakdowns can take away the security and certainty that we seek as a bedrock for getting by and growth. These circumstances also trigger underlying and unresolved trauma to surface, creating stress that not just affects us mentally and emotionally, but also physically.

In response, the knowledge and tools we have acquired through our experience are becoming increasingly inadequate to cope with what life is throwing at us. The growing trend of mental health issues globally is an indicator of the struggle many of us face and we feel we need help.

Resilience through Body Wisdom

This is where we need to find the resilience to show up and face up. The wisdom we need to align and emerge from our purpose includes the following:

· Be able to discern what we are experiencing and realign with what matters

· Establish practices that help us get re-centered & inspired after going through unsettling experiences so that we can take action with purpose and clarity.

· We need the courage to face messy emotions and stay with uncertainty.

· Hold space for the emotions and process of those we care about and help them get grounded and emerge stronger.

· It is a call for a different kind of leadership to arise within us – one that builds strength to face adversity through a channel of vulnerability.

This is a leadership that is unique to each of us and the heart of this leadership lives within us as an embodied truth.

In fact, leadership of any kind we have known is an embodied experience. What does that mean? We invite you to consider the following perspectives and how they relate to you.

1. Knowledge is only rumour until it lives in our bones. This quote from the Asaro tribe in Papua New Guinea underscores a truth that indigenous people across the world have always known and is now validated scientifically through research in Neuroscience. Our way of being or ‘how we are’ is a full-body experience that is not only psychological, but physiological as well. Antonio Damasio, the renowned neuroscientist’s research established that what we know as the ‘mind’ is not only the brain, but an embodied experience. The body remembers everything.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher remarked that ‘All virtues are physiological and even our most sacred convictions are judgments of our muscles’. How we move is how we live. The experience of anxiety, fear, confidence, happiness, balance or any other human state we know is a ‘bodily’ experience that is a felt sense. In other words, we cannot experience life without a body and we cannot have any influence on the world without engaging our body.

3. We are what we practice and we are always practicing something – Richard Strozzi Heckler, expert somatic coach and leadership expert. It is the nature of our system to constantly practice what is required to take care of our deepest concerns as human beings. In doing that, we evolve into the complex individuals we come to be. When we are stressed or under threat, our brain switches on what we have practiced (fight/flight/freeze). Making any changes to our behavior or our way of being means shifting what we have practiced which, resides in our nervous system. This is why simply acquiring information does not result in learning or change in behavior, as learning is fundamentally a biological process. Even how we hold ourselves posturally in our day-to-day life arises from our experiences and shapes beliefs we have about what is possible for us.

4. Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence highlights the crucial role of emotion in perception, cognition and how we respond to life. Emotions are energy in motion. At a biological level, all emotions are electrochemical impulses that traverse through our entire body. As we experience life, our physiology is constantly generating emotions in response to situations, thoughts and actions. To be alive is to be in a current of an assortment of emotions at any given point. Even our rational thinking from the prefrontal cortex of the brain flows in the direction of how we regulate emotions. Emotions are also predispositions for action – we cannot sing a happy song when we are angry! When we get curious about the emotions we experience on a recurring basis, it can reveal beliefs and patterns in our brain and nervous system. Shifting these patterns is essential to make meaningful shifts to our way of being.

5. William James, considered as the father of American psychology contended that ‘no mental modification ever occurs without an accompanying bodily change’. He was one of the early exponents who proposed the plasticity of our brain and nervous system. All actions we take – thinking, speaking, listening and so on occur through the body. As we act on the body, we act on the mind. The experiences we have, particularly of early childhood are embodied – they reside in the body as stories with accompanying emotions and a worldview that we use to navigate through life.

As we can see through the work and life experiences of experts from multiple disciplines, learning and change that does not involve the body remains incomplete. When we work with the body in learning, we open ourselves up to deep changes to our way of being.

Through coaching and somatic practices like Yoga, we can find doorways to experience Somajna here and now. This doesn’t imply that one can only cultivate resilience through a Yoga practice! What we need is an ability to sense and interpret our internal experience that is on par with our competency of reading the external world.

We can find that capability in moments when we drop into a felt sense of Presence. In presence, we access a spaciousness that reveals possibilities which are not available to us in a stressed state. In that moment, we suddenly become a different observer of our own life. Somajna’s interventions are an invitation and endeavor to jointly experience that moment.

#selfacceptance #lifestyle