When the Body Teaches What the Mind Cannot Grasp: A Somatic Yoga Lesson
Recently, I sent an email to my mailing list announcing the restart of my Friday yoga classes – the first group classes I’d taught since my total hip replacement in January 2024. In that email, I used the word “healing” and wrote about “learning much about facing pain.” As I crafted those words, something nagged at me: was I being genuine?
This question would lead me deeper into what somatic yoga truly means – not just as a practice, but as a way of listening to the body’s own intelligence.
The universe has a sense of timing.
For the days I spent polishing that email, my body felt strong and capable. I moved through my work at Saint Valentine’s Liquorice Company – offloading 300kg pallets, bending and reaching in the pick-and-pack room, carrying mail sacks – without any discomfort. My operated hip felt solid, reliable. I was, quite literally, embodying the healing narrative I was writing.
Then, the evening I scheduled that email to send, my symptoms exploded. Pain dialled up to an eight, relentless and consuming. None of my practice methods brought relief. No position offered respite. By morning, I was in the hospital emergency department, convinced my operated hip was in grave danger.
I had been humbled, precisely at the moment I proclaimed: “I’m healed and ready for you.”
A Somatic Yoga Journey, Again
This experience became a visceral education in what my teacher Pete Blackaby calls “somatic soteriology” – a somatic yoga approach that focuses on reducing unnecessary suffering through awareness of our embodied patterns. Pete’s somatic yoga isn’t about achieving perfect poses or even eliminating pain entirely. Instead, it’s about developing the capacity to notice – to observe our unconscious physical and emotional habits and learn to respond rather than react.
In my case, I began to recognise that while my body was managing physical demands beautifully, something deeper was at play. The very act of stepping back into my teaching role, of putting myself forward as someone who could guide others in their healing, had activated patterns I hadn’t even known were running. My nervous system, it seemed, had its own opinion about my readiness – a perfect example of how somatic yoga teaches us to listen beyond our mental narratives.
This is precisely what Pete describes in his profound essay “Yoga in the 21st Century: A Somatic Soteriology” – the way our muscular responses to life events operate largely below conscious awareness, creating patterns of holding that affect not just our physical comfort but our entire experience of being alive. As he explains, we have exquisite potential control over our muscular responses, and through that control, we can literally change how we feel and how we engage with life’s challenges.
What Pete offers in the piece that follows isn’t just yoga theory – it’s a roadmap for a more conscious relationship with our own embodied experience. His humanistic, secular approach grounds somatic yoga practice in biology and psychology rather than mysticism, making it accessible and practical for anyone seeking to reduce unnecessary suffering in their lives.
My hip episode reminded me that healing isn’t a destination but an ongoing somatic yoga practice of noticing. Each time pain returns, each moment of discomfort or emotional reactivity, becomes an opportunity to apply Pete’s somatic approach – to pause, breathe, soften unnecessary holding, and respond from a place of awareness rather than habit.
This is yoga as soteriology: not the eradication of life’s inevitable difficulties, but the cultivation of skilful means for meeting them. Pete’s essay illuminates this path with clarity, wisdom, and profound practical insight.
I invite you to read his words not just as philosophy, but as a guide for your own practice of conscious living.
Yoga in the 21st Century: A Somatic Soteriology
By Pete Blackaby
The following essay is published with the generous permission of Pete Blackaby, whose teaching continues to deepen my understanding of yoga as a practice of embodied awareness and skillful response to life’s challenges.
‘Soteriology’ (noun): ‘The doctrine of salvation’ (Oxford English Dictionary)
The blossoming of yoga in the 21st century is something of a marvel. Helped along by social media and its influencers, there are a bewildering number of activities that now come under the heading of yoga – everything from the deep pursuit of Sanskrit texts to the performance of certain asanas on a paddle board or even, as with ‘goat yoga’, in the presence of baby animals.
Where are we going with all this and how do we make sense of it?
One thing we can be fairly sure of is that throughout yoga’s long history there has never been one consistent approach or method. There have been deeply religious perspectives, supernatural perspectives and secular perspectives. Perhaps the only thing that these differing perspectives have had in common is that they are all a form of soteriology, or liberation from suffering, and therefore this is the starting point for the perspective I take.
A small aside regarding the concept of suffering. A religious or spiritual soteriology often suggests that suffering is done away with completely if the right religious behaviours are followed precisely. This is certainly not my view. In fact, I think a human life will always have to experience quite a lot of suffering. We all eventually die and on that journey we age, while the process of gradually letting go of youth and eventually life is undoubtedly a hard one. All of us will be touched by the inevitability of this faustian bargain.
So my version of a soteriology is not the eradication of suffering but the removal of unnecessary suffering – life will inevitably involve suffering but there are ways to avoid making it worse than it needs to be. To be even clearer: I’m not arguing for the avoidance of suffering, as this I think would be foolish.
Philosophically, my leaning is towards a humanistic outlook rather than a religious or supernaturalistic one. So I consider yoga as a secular soteriology rooted in biology and the psychology that emerges from it. For inspiration, I lean towards Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis, Lisa Feldman Barrett’s predictive brain view of emotions, and a broader view of a systems theory of life.
Damasio has a particular appeal because of his carefully argued explanation of how feelings, mind and consciousness emerge out of biology due to our interaction with the environment. He describes how feelings, mind and consciousness are part of a triumvirate: the world and how we notice it; how that noticing changes us (based on previous experience); and finally how we respond to what we have noticed.
In short, we perceive, we change, we act, in our ongoing process of existence. Our actions (based on our perceptions and what those perceptions mean to us) will determine how well we thrive or falter in our lives, so it makes sense to enquire into the quality of our perceptions and then to notice how those perceptions change us and what we then do with those changed feelings. This for me is the process of yoga – because it is in this pursuit that yoga remains, at its heart, a soteriology rather than something like exercise or performance.
Modern postural yoga has blurred significantly into the realm of exercise and performance, and although I’ve written about this elsewhere it is worth a brief review. When we think about something like exercise it has a clear intention: generally, that intention is to change structure in certain ways. We may want to gain bigger muscles and improve our strength, or we may seek to improve our range of movement and become more flexible, or improve our cardiovascular fitness. When our main focus is one of these things I would call that exercise – and if in yoga strength or flexibility become the main aim then it has become exercise.
There are of course many beneficial side effects of exercise, which might include an improved sense of well-being, better sleep, lower blood pressure etc., but these are the side effects of the main aim, which is to affect structure in the ways mentioned above. With performance, the main aim is to achieve some (usually physical) task – this is very obvious in sport, dance or gymnastics, where doing is the priority. When doing becomes the aim it is not uncommon to end up with an injury of one sort or another, and in yoga when the emphasis becomes the doing of asanas it is more performance than yoga.
I make these distinctions not to denigrate either exercise or performance but rather to distinguish them from yoga.
Uncovering Somatic Habits – Reducing Suffering
Practising yoga can be seen as a sort of metaphor for what we do in life, except in a yoga class we have a chance to slow things down and examine moment by moment what is happening. We have time to clarify our intention – to ask ourselves ‘what are we trying to do?’ As we start to execute our intention, how are we doing it? Are we huffing and puffing, struggling and straining? Or are our actions smooth and fluid? Is there economy in our movement?
The difficulty we have as human beings is that we have evolved to habituate behaviour. This is a wonderfully economic way to engage with the world – anything that has to be done on a repeated basis becomes learned and we then need to pay less and less attention to it as the learning goes deeper. Learning to drive is a good example: we have to develop a good proprioceptive sense of ourselves to know where the gear stick is, how much pressure to put on the pedals etc, while at the same time engaging with the environment, noticing and anticipating the action of other road users. After many lessons we develop an integrated sense of ourselves as drivers, moving our cars with ease in and out of traffic in busy city centres.
In a sense we are trying to sift our useful habits from our unhelpful ones – the useful habits we want to enhance, the unhelpful ones we want to disrupt. This is not that easy to do because they are inevitably bound up with each other. They have very much become us. Any unpicking of these behaviours generally requires slow, attentive practice with a lot of curiosity – we are trying to notice when we do too much or too little; whether our breathing changes unnecessarily; or whether we stiffen our muscles when we don’t need to. We may start this with very simple movements, and as we become more skillful we move on to more complex movements, all the time trying to reduce unnecessary effort.
In what way is this a ‘soteriology’, or way to reduce suffering? Well, firstly, and most obviously, losing tension and moving with more ease nearly always results in a more comfortable body. I disagree with manual therapists who argue that pain is often caused by certain muscles being weak. It seems to me that it’s much more likely that muscles are being held – and when released, a sense of ease arrives. But of course a soteriology is much more than the easing of muscular aches and pains.
So how can a somatic approach create wider changes in our lives? How does it reduce suffering in a wider sense?
I would argue that it does this in two main ways: by literally changing how we feel; and then through the recognition of our somatic habits. When we start to look at these somatic habits within the context of our yoga practice, and recognise them as unconscious behaviours, it’s not a big step to then realise that we have habitual patterns in the way we interact with people and with life in general. We can then see more clearly, too, that not all of these patterns are helpful, and sometimes they cause upset.
Changing how we feel is an interesting process and probably one that many practitioners of yoga or similar disciplines are familiar with. When I talk about feelings I literally mean things like states of tonus in muscles… a smile feels different to a frown, being on the outside edges of your feet feels different to being on the inside edges, smooth breathing feels different to ragged breathing, a racing heart different to a quiet one. These changes in feeling give rise to changes in mood and emotion and are not the endorphin-induced highs that exercise can give us – they are something different.
Damasio suggests that something like this happens: as sensory input arrives from the outside world, our interior worlds – our memories and expectations – change through us reacting to the input through our muscular system and also through our neuro/endocrine systems. Damasio calls this process ‘motoric output’. Motoric output changes tonus in our muscles as we move, tighten or relax in response to what we notice, while our organs and cells of secretion release various hormones and neurotransmitters appropriate to the situation we find ourselves in. This change in our internal chemistry drives changes in our breathing, heart rate, digestion etc, and these, along with the changes in muscle tone and body movement, give rise to a set of feelings we label as emotions.
What is crucial to understand here is that the only aspect of this system of sensory input, change and then response that we have control of is the muscular part of the response. We have no control of our viscera – our internal organs – but we have potentially exquisite control over what we do with our muscles. In yoga we can learn to modify our muscular response to sensory information. We can learn to disrupt those habitual patterns of muscular activity and replace them with more appropriate ones, where we don’t, for example, hold our breath, tighten our jaw, or clench our toes.
And as we let go of historical patterns of holding, we also let go of the visceral part of motoric output because our muscles and secretory organs seem to be wired together. And when they change their output we feel different because we are different and, slowly, over time, as we disrupt our habitual patterns of response, we shake off the grip of old aches and pains and patterns of emotional distress than can dog us in life. These changes can be profound and last over time.
Finally we may start to realise that the unconscious holding patterns that play out in our bodies in response to life’s events aren’t the only unconscious patterns we have. Our emotional responses are often similarly habituated – we may respond to criticism with anger, distress, shame or something else. These responses will be associated with clenched fists, tightened jaws or whatever other responses we learned as children – and, as with any other historical pattern of holding, these types of muscular patterns also involve hormonal release patterns by our internal organs.
We can’t consciously change those visceral patterns but we can change the muscular ones – so the next time criticism comes your way, if you can notice your tightening jaw, for instance, and then relax it, or the change in your breathing and then restore it… if you can find support from your bones allowing your muscles to calm down, you will feel different, and the possibility of a change in your response to criticism becomes available. And when we have learned to change our response to life then life itself also changes – and very often for the better.
