Social Somatics uses awareness of cultural complexity and contexts of privilege and oppression to engage in creative and embodied action. These practices aim to bridge disconnections and transform cycles of injustice into new paradigms of mutual respect for all.

Social Somatics is committed to transforming relational, structural and cultural dynamics according to the highest integral wisdom of our social bodies.

In Social Somatics we collectively examine the social body formations, functions and movement patterns in human behavior, with an emphasis on transforming, rather than treating degenerative conditions. In this way, we work to foster conditions for healthy sustainable social structures and relationships.

Key principles that emerge from our early investigation and praxis in Social Somatics as are follows:

• By attending to our social body, we are each able to re-organize the way we see ourselves in the world and work for health worldwide.
• We can accelerate shifts of consciousness into entrenched systemic networks through the application of social somatics.
• By applying the value of deep democracy, we come to recognize that “everything in them is in me” deconstructing dualities even as we acknowledge differences, supporting both realities. This awareness increases overall wisdom and sustainability.
• Constant work on rank and power is necessary. Our embodied understanding of how we are wired to particular ways of being across rank and privilege evolve. Rank and power shifts don’t happen at a system’s level without first shifting at a relationship level.
• This “relational turn” in self-identification is not new, but very old. It is based on on ecological and indigenous awareness of inter-connectedness. We return to this sensibility and engage it as a transformative power source, to shifts awareness at the paradigmatic level.

(written by: Zea Leguizaman and Sam Grant with additions from  Carol Swann and Martha Eddy)