Wild Firefly Studio offers a variety of somatic movement practices. But what is somatic movement anyway? Somatic movement is about the "felt body" or how something feels to you in your body.

We all experience our felt body when we are excited or scared. It is the prickling of your spine when you feel unsafe, or the tightness in your throat when you are frustrated, or the warmth you feel when you hug someone you love.

Somatic movement is an intentional way to tap into those sensations. But why? Sometimes those feelings hang around in the form of an old injury that has physically healed but still aches. While most of our learned responses are automated for peak performance, we can occasionally learn habits and responses that we outgrow over time through injury, trauma, and experience. It can show up in a connected part of the body from longterm neglect and strain. 

 When we neglect the emotional element of injury/trauma our body might not fully process our the hormones intended to protect us and those hormones become stagnant in the Fascia.

Fascia is a fine membrane-like tissue surrounding your nerves, blood vessels, bones and muscles (similar to the membrane surrounding juice cells in oranges) that  holds everything in place. The brain uses the fascia to send messages to the muscles.

Stagnant hormones like adrenaline or cortisol can create a messy path for those messages. In our most natural state, we cry when sad, shake when angry, shiver in fear and those are all hormone driven responses many of us have learned to repress. When we repress our natural responses, the loop for an emotion might not close and the hormone is left to process out of the body with no way out.   

Somatic Movement can help close emotional loops left stuck in stillness by reactivating the fascia to move through something that may have been too painful to when it initially occurred. .

What we have learned, we can unlearn through practice and repetition.