Social Health and Somatic Movement in Groups

Social Health

The health benefits of belonging to a group that we enjoy and value are not to be underestimated. Kasley Killam, in The Art and Science of Connection: Why Social Health is the Missing Key to Living Longer, Healthier, and Happier (2024), convincingly argues that social health—healthy, supportive relationships that help us live and grow and go through challenges—is integral to our overall health and should be regarded as equally important as physical and mental health. ⁵ She reminds us to pay much more attention to our relationships of different kinds—with family members, friends, intimate partners, colleagues, and acquaintances, with nature and animals, and with the spiritual and the sacred. Our overall health, longevity, and vitality depend on these relationships. We need to invest in them and deliberately carve out time for meaningful interactions. Spending time with people and participating in communities should be one of our priorities.

Moving and exercising in groups is one way to build good relationships and to belong to a community of people who care about health and movement. I see the importance of groups over and over in my life and work. Over 20 years of working as a movement educator, many of my friendships and important relationships come from the movement groups that I have founded as studio classes or online communities. We are a weekly support for each other. The participants often become friends with each other. Or they bring friends with them and share the joy of moving together as well as hold each other accountable and motivate one another to exercise. The social aspect of group movement is important as so many people suffer from loneliness, isolation, depression, anxiety, and the scarcity of nourishing social ties. Sara Houston, in Dancing with Parkinson’s (2019), shows how it was not only dance movement but also the practice of doing movements together, in a supportive community, that helped the Parkinson’s patients in her study. ⁶

Online communities, even though distant physically, can be just as important. ⁷ One of my groups, an online strength training community, consists mostly of people who are friends and colleagues. Many of them know each other from an earlier period of their lives, and they now live in different states of the US or in different countries. The online class brings them together again—once, twice, three times per week. Seeing familiar faces and welcoming new people and chatting with them briefly before and after class makes us feel connected—we are a community. Not only me as the teacher but they themselves inspire and motivate each other to come to class, to exercise, and to continue investing in their bodies and health. Several of them come to the class with their partners. One of the benefits of an online community is also the possibility to meet people from different cultures and languages, which widens the social circle.

During the Covid-19 pandemic I did a program called “Dance and the City,” in collaboration with Columbia University’s Global Center in Paris. ⁸ We filmed short videos in different sites of Paris—in Montmartre, in the Luxembourg Garden, and on the bridges of the Seine. I talked about each place and found a movement inspiration from the place, connecting it to some element of the body or somatic dancing. For example, one of the bridges across the Seine, made me think of the spine and how it connects or serves as the bridge between the pelvis, the ribcage, and the head. I did a brief dance for the spine. For six weeks, we had an online live dance class led by me from Columbia’s Global Center in Paris. It was free to anyone who wanted to join—people from different countries of the world came to participate. We showed the video that was pre-filmed for each week, taking the participants to the specific sites in Paris in their imagination. And then we danced, often using the images from these brief films and sites as our inspiration. We acted out, through movement, imaginary encounters unfolding in the flowery Luxembourg Garden in the spring. It was an uplifting experience of people coming together from all over the world to dance and to travel in their imagination during the times when travel was impossible or limited.

Group Movement in Somatics

The leader of the group has different roles in different somatic practices. For example, in JourneyDance and 5Rhythms—somatic dance classes where participants move freely, without a pregiven choreography—the leader facilitates the movement experience. They choose the songs and create an arc for the class, following the principles of the practice. They hold the space and create a safe environment. The verbal guidance is not extensive, and the participants’ attention is not on the facilitator at all times. In Nia, a somatic dance practice that combines both free dance and easy-to-follow choreography, the teachers cue, and there is choreography to follow. Teachers set a focus and an intent at the beginning of the class and interweave it into the hour-long experience. These explanations could be about the human anatomy, a movement principle, an element in the technique, or bringing the anatomical principle into life situations. The instructor takes on the role of an educator. For most of the class, the participants follow the teacher who stands in front of them and demonstrates the movements.

How people move as a community also differs across somatic practices. In many practices the movements themselves are not prescribed or coded: in somatic dance, we might be exploring a theme such as the relationship between the head, the ribcage, and the pelvis, but through self-guided movements. Or we might be exploring the connection to the voice of the heart or a sensation of light-heartedness, again through free movement. Everyone moves differently in space. In other practices, such as the Feldenkrais Method or the Alexander Technique, the movements might be quite scripted: a group of people are doing similar movements together, keeping the awareness inside of their bodies. In Nia, for most of the class, we follow the movements of the teacher, but we have the freedom to make these movements our own. In some songs, we might form a flock or a huddle—the students come closer together and move as a tighter group, sensing what it is like to move in this type of formation where they are as if one organically moving body. During free dance segments, this frontal organization of the classroom changes, and the teacher too blends with the group. We move as a group and individually in free dance.

A Moving Community

What can make somatic practices different from group fitness practices is a feeling of a community where participants interact with one another as they move and cocreate an experience. In free dance, I often create mini-stories with the participants. I ask people questions like, “Where are we going in this song—let’s choose a location. Brazil? Great, let’s go. How are we getting there? First by bike, then by plane, wonderful! What shall we do there? We’ll go to a carnival! What happens there?” and so on. Or I might go from one person to another and ask them to share a movement or an image, and we all follow that person’s lead. For example, in one class we were moving the pelvis side to side. I said, “Imagine you have a tail. What animal comes to mind?” “I’m a tiger. A rabbit. A cat. A donkey.” We then mimicked one another’s animals. I often take this further later on and ask the participants to remember these quick images that come to their mind—the animal that we conjure up might have something to teach us that day.

Even without narrating a story in movement together, when we dance freely, we go around and between people; we might smile and acknowledge them with our eyes or with a wave of the hand. We interact, nonverbally and sometimes verbally, and are mindful of one another’s bodies in movement. How to move with other people’s moving bodies is an important skill in its own right, a type of bodily intelligence. In daily life, we need to navigate environments with other people and their movements. In movement classes, we dance together, with or without interacting with one another directly.

I have not seen a formal study on this, but I believe that moving mindfully in somatic movement classes in groups can impact how we perceive and interact with other people’s bodies in our daily lives. Especially in crowded cities and in public transport, we are constantly surrounded by other people. Absorbed by our smartphones, we are even less aware of people around us. To be intelligent kinetically, we need to learn to move well when surrounded by other people. In a somatic dance class, especially when we dance freely without following a leader, we are constantly surrounded by other people that move to some extent unpredictably—they are moving freely as well, coming up with movements spontaneously. In these settings, we practice dual attention: I keep awareness on my own body and my own movement, and I am also aware of other people’s movements. People have a tendency to move in a circle even during free dance—I deliberately disturb the circle by inserting myself in between the movers or ask them explicitly to break the circle. In this way, we see and sense people moving in different directions and learn to find ways to keep moving between and around them. We stay in a movement flow, another crucial aspect of navigating a city, for example.

Sometimes we do deliberately dance in a circle. For example, we move toward the center of the circle and back. It is a moment of gathering closer together—maybe looking into each other’s eyes and lifting the arms up, as if lifting up the energy of this group—and becoming a bigger circle again. Or we move sideways in a circle. Doing the same, simple movements as a group in a circle—moving in unison, in one rhythm—brings harmony and strengthens the sense of a community. Movements in a circle can have an effect of a ritual. Bringing in an element that looks or feels like a ritual can be especially powerful during particular moments—the end or the beginning of a new season, a holiday, or a celebration, a transition, or a loss that needs to be acknowledged in the group. We become a healing and supportive community where each individual feels seen and treasured.

Dancing and moving freely can feel quite vulnerable for many people. Even though one of the main principles of somatic movement is the lack of judgment and performance in front of others, moving freely reveals something of ourselves: our style and voice as movers, our expressiveness and creativity, and our courage to be ourselves. The music that we dance to is expressive—it is not one kind of music that stays in the same register of emotion (as in upbeat exercise music). There are different dynamics and emotional expression in the music, and the music might evoke different emotions in the movers. The presence of emotions, vulnerability, authenticity, and creativity through movement makes somatic dance classes different than fitness classes: more of our “whole” self is engaged—and exposed—in these practices.

Learning to Lead with the Body

Perhaps surprisingly, somatic movement practiced in groups can also help with what feels like the opposite of group movement—being a leader. In a somatic movement class, we can practice, in our body, mind, and imagination, the stance of someone who is in the spotlight. Many of my students hold leadership positions in their lives—they are teachers, academic chairs and deans, directors, business owners, and entrepreneurs. Some of my students are performers—musicians, actors, and dancers. Most of us need to face an audience in some contexts of our lives. Somatic approaches give us an opportunity to practice leading with the body, even in a group class where we are not the teacher.

In my somatic strength training classes, I often weave the theme of standing in front of an audience into the exercises. Many of the standing exercises where the body does not move around in space are excellent for this: we practice being in a vertical position and tracking our sensations. Let’s imagine a side lateral lift for the shoulders. I stand in place, with the knees slightly soft. I sense the soles of the feet, grounded. I sense the pelvis, the ribcage, and the head—are they stacked easefully one over the other? Do I notice any tension or does my body want to adjust something? Can I lengthen the space between the hips and the base of the ribs? Do I feel the length on the sides of my neck? I feel the crown of the head reaching toward the sky.

With these questions, I bring myself into a vertical alignment. I feel my vertical center, my connection both to the ground, through the feet, and the sky, through the crown of the head. I then take light or medium weights or an elastic band, bend the elbows slightly, and move the arms to the sides, not higher than the shoulders and back toward the sides of the pelvis. I feel the lateral deltoids contracting. I sense the weight of the bones as the muscles are lifting them.

As we are doing this exercise, I ask my students—many of whom are authors, educators, and artists—to imagine that they are standing in front of an audience. It could be any audience—their students, readers, family members, friends, or a friend. How do you feel in your body as you are imagining this audience? What might your body communicate in front of this imaginary audience? Can you sense the width of your chest and your collarbones? The open presence of your chest, without the shoulders rolling forward and the sternum sinking back? Do you feel the upliftedness, abdominal strength, and the slight contraction in the glutes? Imagine how your message—in your book, in your speech, in what you stand for—is reaching more and more people in the audience, as your arms are coming out to the sides, as if welcoming and holding this group. Imagine that this influence of your words, your presence, and your life’s work is reaching wider than this audience in front of your mind’s eye—to the family members and friends of this imaginary audience, to the entire block, the community, the city, the entire country, and in other countries as well. Feel how your influence expands. Feel the connection to this imaginary audience and beyond.

Many such movements where the arms are reaching up or to the sides could be beneficial for imagining expansion because we are literally taking up more space with the upper extremities. Calf exercises are excellent for feeling vertical alignment and standing in front of audiences with confidence, feeling the wide chest and the wide back. I could be doing a chest exercise in a seated, standing, or lying down position and ask, “How could I touch my audiences from the heart? What is the message that I want to give to my audience that comes from the heart?”

Doing a back exercise, such as a latissimus dorsi pulldown—pulling the elastic band from over the head down toward the chest and letting the chest lift and expand as the back is contracting—you can connect to the power of the back. Who or what is behind you that gives you strength, that supports you, that has your back? This supportive presence could be a friend, a partner, a group, a family, a teacher, or the energy of a city or the space in which you exercise because you feel safe and protected in it. With the same exercise, the latissimus dorsi pulldown, I could focus on my throat: as I pull the band toward the chest, my head tilts slightly to the back, lengthening the throat. What is the message you want to deliver to this audience? Feel how it is freeing for your throat—imagine and feel yourself expressing this idea clearly and with conviction.

As I practice the exercises with these questions and remarks in mind, they become ingrained, both in my body and in my consciousness. When I stand in front of an audience, I check in with the body and its sensations. I remind myself of what has been helpful in the somatic practice: for example, feeling the width in my chest, I remember to communicate from my heart. Feeling the muscles of the back, I remember the support of the people and places that “have my back.” Feeling the length of the back of my neck and the front of my neck, I remember to speak with conviction and clarity and believe in my message. Feeling the feet underneath me, I remember that I am grounded: I belong to this place right here right now. Feeling the feet, the pelvis, the ribcage, the head stacked over one another, I remember my alignment. Feeling the central line from the crown of the head to the feet, I remember that I am connected both to the earth and to the sky.

Practicing all of these aspects in advance, repeatedly, is important because in front of an audience, many other elements come into play at the same time. I cannot be sensing my body only; I also need to focus on what I am here to do, my message, the audience, and the place itself. I need to learn to be able to move my attention both inside my body and outside of it. This is a skill that comes with practice—the ability to stay connected to my body and to what is happening around me, including the presence and reactions of other people.

Conclusion

Somatic group classes, like any good experiences with groups, can give us a renewed energy by being and moving together. Other people’s movements can invigorate, inspire, and support us. We step into the flow of moving in rhythmic unison in practices where we follow the leader. It is a way to tap into a sense of harmony in movement. When we dance freely, sometimes interacting with the other dancers directly, sometimes not, we create together—new shapes, new patterns of movements around one another, and new images and stories. By extension, somatic practices help us stay connected to our bodies when we are not a part of a group but step in front of an audience ourselves. With somatics, we learn to feel well in our bodies, which is ultimately the best way to be in front of any audience and a goal of a healthy life.

Further Suggestions

Reflect on your movement habits—would you benefit from a community with whom to move together? Do you like moving in groups? Why/why not?