The 📝Somatic Practice Glossary collects the terms used when 📝Somatic Practice appears in a Somatic Realignment Therapy session or home practice, defined in plain language for clients.
Glossary
A
- 📝Arriving — the first minute of a practice spent feeling support and looking around before anything else.
- 📝Awareness — noticing sensation without trying to change it.
B
- 📝Body Scan — moving attention slowly through the body region by region.
- 📝Bracing — holding tension to feel safe or ready, often without knowing it.
C
- 📝Completion — letting an interrupted body response, such as a shake, a push, or an exhale, finish on its own.
- 📝Constructive Rest — lying on the back with knees bent and feet flat so the body can settle without effort.
- 📝Cue — a short phrase that points attention somewhere, such as "feel both feet."
D
- 📝Discharge — the shaking, warmth, or sighing that can follow the release of held activation.
E
- 📝Embodiment — being present in and connected to one's physical self.
- 📝Experiment — a small, optional movement tried to see what the body does, rather than an exercise to perform.
F
- 📝Felt Sense — the body's pre-verbal read on a situation.
G
- 📝Grounding — feeling weight through the feet or seat to arrive in the present.
H
- 📝Habit Pattern — an automatic way of holding or moving that runs outside awareness.
I
- 📝Interoception — sensing internal states such as breath, heartbeat, and tension.
M
- 📝Micro-Movement — a movement small enough to feel, often smaller than can be seen.
N
- 📝Noticing — the neutral act of registering a sensation before doing anything about it.
O
- 📝Orienting — slowly looking around the room to let the nervous system register that it is here.
P
- 📝Pandiculation — the slow, deliberate contract-and-release of a yawn-stretch, used to reset muscle tone.
- 📝Pendulation — the natural swing of attention between a tense area and an easy one.
- 📝Presence — the practitioner's calm attention treated as part of the work.
R
- 📝Resourcing — finding a place in the body, or an image, that feels steady enough to return to.
S
- 📝Sensory Motor Amnesia — Thomas Hanna's term for a muscle held contracted so long the brain has lost the sense of how to release it.
- 📝Settling — the body downshifting as tension lets go.
- 📝Slow Is the Practice — the pacing rule: sensation is only available below a certain speed.
- 📝Soma — the body as experienced from the inside.
- 📝Somatic Dialogue — the practitioner asking what the client notices and following the answer.
T
- 📝Titration — meeting intensity in small, tolerable doses rather than all at once.
- 📝Tracking — following a sensation as it changes moment to moment.
W
- 📝Window of Tolerance — the range in which sensation can be felt without overwhelm or shutdown.