The concepts of learning and teaching in the realm of bodily awareness, self-regulation, and physical expression have little connection in our culture with the ideas typically evoked by the word “academy”: places of intellectual life, institutions serving as guardians and administrators of a society’s sciences and arts.
“Somatic Academy”—this sounds presumptuous, like the claim of a contradictory territory, an impossible place, a utopia. Yet, we have all been to this impossible place before; we carry it within us; we are this utopia.
For the body—experienced as the medium of life, the living body—is our first academy.
Without the living body, there is no knowledge.
It is our first field of learning and our first tool for learning—the foundation of all learning. It is both the subject and the object of all expressive gestures and the basis of all communication.
We have all experienced this, yet we have mostly forgotten: every understanding carries a trace of the first grasping, and everything we later consider as experience and knowledge, everything we are able to hold and endure, finds its foundation in the earliest experiences of being held.
Without the living body, there is no knowledge and no world.
Becoming disconnected from this knowledge, from this experience, is not just an academic issue but a societal one as well.
Our first, somatic learning enables us to undergo the most astonishing and profound learning processes: acquiring language for the first time—without any textbook or school—and discovering the possibilities of our own body.
Both occur through playful interaction with the environment—by perceiving, reacting, experimenting, correcting, and repeating.
This requires the desire and will to participate in life, the need to be in resonance with oneself and others, as well as an environment that listens to and responds to this desire—one that supports and nurtures it.
A crucial and undeniable characteristic of our first, fundamental learning—within our first academy—is that learning cannot be separated from living together in the world. The acquisition of the inner and the personal takes place through encounters with the external and with others.
Somatic knowledge is embodied knowledge.
At the Somatic Academy, we ground ourselves in this first, integral process of life-learning. We explore this foundation, making it conscious and increasingly accessible for all future learning and teaching.
We work with abilities that we have practiced and refined since our very first breath: perception through all senses, attention, connection, expression, and exchange.
We restore the rightful place of subjective bodily experience alongside objective, measurable knowledge about the body. We do not separate the learners’ experience from the subject matter.
Somatic knowledge is embodied, lived knowledge—shaping perception, sensation, thought, expression, and action.
The Somatic Academy’s curriculum integrates the latest objective knowledge about the body with an empowering experience of embodied existence. It offers new access to memories, emotions, sensations, and possibilities for action, while also fostering reflection on these experiences and the ways to engage with them.
For this reason, the relationship between teachers and learners is of great significance, requiring deep attentiveness and profound respect.
The Somatic Academy is committed to creating protected learning spaces—dedicated time and environments for exploratory, experiential learning—where strengths and weaknesses, knowledge and uncertainty can be shared. Through this exchange, individuals are supported in discovering their own path.