Somatic psychotherapy emphasizes body sensations, but what are they really? How might we differ or share these experiences and their significance? How do they evolve over time, and can the tools of data science help us navigate this world of feelings?

While filming this emres session, I was on a remote zoom session in a class of 15 people. The practitioner was projected opposite me as a sort of god like figure with his gray beard and sky blue background.

The session begins with a memory trace, as the client I narrate, in the present moment, what happened, at the point of activation, the practitioner stops me and we begin the protocol.

• Close eyes, Connect with sensation, do nothing, let change

That's it!

For ~2 minutes I feel my sensations, speaking them out loud so the practitioner can guide me to continue allowing the sensations to change.

What these images show is a rather typical evolution, at first the memory trace evokes a somatic reaction, but as we spend time present with the feelings they resolve into pleasure and openness.

This whole setup was in the basement of Encyclopedia/People/Michael Nagle's house, in retrospect it is funny because he had a whole world of experience in this very thing, I think he was entertaining me, or perhaps deferring to my pride a bit in not totally schooling me on the subject. While he was knowledgeable in many practices, the one he would go back to time and again was Organic Intelligence a very gentle approach to healing. (He did tell me, people tend to identify with the first practice community they receive)

To the motivation of this experiment -- to illuminate the unseen.

Prior Work

This viral image is wonderful science of the deep world of feelings. However, the phenomena is much richer than this method captured. What they did is ask people, when you feel XYZ, where in your body is the sensation, then they highlighted the diagrams based on how often people reported a body part linked to a feeling word. As Lisa Feldman Barrett has strongly communicated, feeling words by themselves do not correlate with any one psychophysiological signal.

Emotion words are constructs used for communication!

So while this image is compelling, the phenomena of feelings is much deeper. To get at that, a method would do well to start with fundamentals of affect (more to come on this).

Circling Sensations

While developing the above technique, I spent a lot of time on zoom circles, it was the pandemic, and I enjoyed connecting with people across the world in those emotionally vulnerable group practices, at times I would sketch on the faces of other participants, or draw in minute detail the qualities I felt in my body.

Using this template, as reference and inspiration:

A totally ironic thing that has arisen multiple times for me in this research is that catching pleasure and joy is difficult, often the moment of laughter or excitement is lost to my recording, as spontaneous expression obliviates the watcher.

Finally a few standalone pieces I have made in this exploration

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That's it for now, I have a lot more experiments in this area to share, stay tuned!