Awareness.
In somatic work, awareness is the key ingredient.
Before anything can shift, it must be noticed. We begin by gently turning toward our lived experience—sensation, breath, impulse, image, emotion—and allowing it to be seen, felt, and known. This kind of awareness isn’t about analyzing or fixing; it’s about building a relationship with what is happening inside the body in real time. Through allowing.
A core part of this is being witnessed. When an attuned person sits with us—curious, present, and non-judging—our system often feels safer to reveal what it has been holding. Over time, this experience of being seen from the outside begins to seed an inner way of seeing. The external witness helps grow an inner witness: a part of us that can stay close to our experience without collapsing into it or turning away. Authentic Movement creator Janet Adler speaks of this as an intimacy in emptiness—a clear, spacious presence that does not rush to fill, fix, or manage, but simply stays.
This is how we build an embodied consciousness. When we touch into the body’s experiences we can unravel old narratives and stories that are entangled within our nervous systems.
One way of engaging with this process of witnessing is through understanding the Five Acts of Consciousness[1]—five ways awareness moves in relation to our experience:
Creation – How experiences arise: sensations, thoughts, emotions, and patterns coming into being in the body. (Also known as: emission, manifestation, flowing forth)
Maintenance – How those experiences stay in place: habits, bracing, beliefs, and survival strategies that keep things “as they are.” (Also knowns as: statis, maintenance, preservation.)
Dissolution – How experiences soften or release: tension unravels, emotions move through, and old patterns begin to loosen. (Also known as retraction, reabsorption)
Concealment – How the body-mind hides things from view: numbness, dissociation, or forgetting as forms of protection. (Included occlusion, forgetting)
Revelation – How what was hidden becomes felt and known: insight, remembrance, and new meaning emerging through the body. (Also known as grace, remembering).
[1]Wallis, Christopher (2017) The Recognition Sutras. Mattamayura Press.
In somatic practice, we move slowly enough that these acts of consciousness can be observed and witnessed—by both the practitioner and the client’s own emerging inner witness—so the system has more choice, more coherence, and more room to breathe. This budding awareness is how begin to build Presence.
Presence is the capacity to be here—embodied, aware, and connected—with whatever is arising. It has room for sensation, emotion, and meaning without needing them to change immediately. As Presence deepens, we become less identified with any single state (“I am my fear,” “I am my pain”) and more able to feel those states moving through a larger, steadier field of awareness.