By Lauren Mechling
"You're Zooming with a bunch of napping ladies?" That's what my friend asked when I sent him a snapshot of my workday weirdness. He was right: There was something eerily peaceful about the grid of women folded in fetal position.
Technically, I was exercising with the napping ladies. We were performing minuscule scrunches and releases of our pelvises after working on clenching and unclenching our sternums and shoulders during a midday somatics workout with Kristin Jackson, who runs a boutique gym in Waynesville, N.C. "The world thinks we should stretch and force change," Jackson said during the class. "Somatics means tuning in and sensing what you're doing, and learning how to release your muscles."
Ever since Taryn Toomey put "somatic" on the boutique-fitness map in 2011 with what became known as the Class, a celebrity-favorite workout that mixes boot camp-style training and woo-woo breathwork, the word has hummed in the background of the wellness world. Lately, though, "somatic" has moved from supporting character to leading role, increasingly advertised as the central focus.
Earlier this month, a Tuesday-night event at Prema Brooklyn billed as "Le Scream" invited students to yell as a form of "somatic release and recovery." A recent scan of the offerings at WSA, a clubby Manhattan co-working space, showed that nearly half its fitness classes were billed as "somatic."
Something about the word called to me. After years spent clenching, tightening and torquing myself out of all types of alignment, I am ready to surrender my way back to something like order. My adult physical life has been a mixed bag of hyper-athletic hot yoga, long country runs and hunching over my computer for days on end. Add two childbirths to the mix, and it's easy to see why I liked the idea of a chance to unwind, maybe even rewind my body back in time to before I had an uncooperative left shoulder.
The core tenets of somatics are a series of slow movements designed to release tension that leads to pain and hinders flexibility and mobility. The practice proposes something more rare than perfectly toned arms: un-jangled nervous systems.
"The somatic world is in this place of rapid development," said Laura Temple, a psychiatric nurse practitioner who founded the multi-disciplinary wellness destination Held Space in Brooklyn in 2022. The collective includes an integrative somatic yoga instructor, a somatic healer and a somatic chiropractor.
Many somatic practitioners are certified. Some institutes specialize in the mental-health and trauma-work applications of body-based awareness, while other courses are geared for life coaches and movement instructors.
"It's definitely the big buzzword in every bougie exercise class," said Los Angeles-based yoga instructor Kyle Miller. Still, when she co-founded the digital yoga platform Tenon Movement in 2025, she decided against using the term in its branding. "I don't want to diss it. But sometimes people use it as a way of making things seem more holistic and important," she said.
Just as Pilates has a patron saint in Joseph Pilates, the field of somatics has the late Thomas Hanna, a philosopher and student of neurology who coined the term in 1976. He believed that retraining our nervous systems to live in a state of calm was essential to healing our stiff, sore bodies. As he wrote in his landmark book "Somatics" (1988), Hanna created a method to help people "unlearn what has been learned; and to remember what has been forgotten." He published it at age 59, when his own adventures in nervous-system regulation allowed him to bend his formerly stiff body backwards into a plow pose. The body's accumulated patterns added up to the "Dark Vise," defined by Hanna as the gradual buildup of muscular contractions.
A 2025 pilot study found that directed somatic movement interventions helped improve body awareness and spine mobility in older adults. Other studies show that somatic practices can help with motor control and flexibility. "We often see clients that are tightly wound -- literally and figuratively -- and the first thing we will encourage them to do is be very conscious of the way their muscles feel when they exercise," said Heather Milton, a clinical exercise physiologist at NYU Langone Orthopedics' Sports Performance Center who is training to compete in a punishing days-long Hyrox fitness challenge. "The act of paying attention to how the different parts of your body feels can change your neural patterns and the way you move."
In my case, as a massage therapist showed me during a rather dispiriting bodywork session, overcompensating for an injury in my right big toe has led to a habit of standing with my weight in my left foot. My right hip tends to thrust out and my right shoulder hikes closer to my ear, which explains why my right hip resists pigeon pose.
In a private room at a yoga studio where she also leads group classes, Hanna-certified somatic educator Lisa Sack sounded incredibly happy as she coaxed my right arm down by my side onto the cushioned table. "That's right, your shoulder's coming down," she said in her calming whisper. She took my wrist and told me to think of my arm as a baker's rolling pin, guiding it through tiny arm rotations to bring my shoulder all the way down onto the table. "Try less. Breathe more," she said often through our session. When it was over, I felt oddly aglow and weightless. "Like a happy, colorful starfish...made of jelly," I found myself saying.
"People tend to come because they're having physical trouble," Sack said. "Then we start working, and things change. After some time, they say, 'I'm going to graduate school,' or 'I'm quitting my job,' or 'I'm getting out of this relationship.' "
My posture is tight and hunched as ever. But I've also been paying closer attention, which means that I can slow my breathing and gently roll my shoulders down and away from the Dark Vise of the moment.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 19, 2026 12:00 ET (16:00 GMT)
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