When we stop and focus upon one feature of our experience while inhibiting any notice of the rest of experience, we are making voluntary use of the function of awareness.  It is for this reason that focusing awareness was earlier (Part One) described as “exclusionary: It uses motor inhibition to exclude any sensory recognition other than that upon which it is focused — which could be something external in the environment (third–person awareness) or internal within the soma (first–person awareness).

The soma is a process of experience and nothing but experience. This experience is two-layered, extending from the layer of the unconscious core to the layer of the conscious cortex surrounding this core. The somatic core is experienced as the stable foundation upon which conscious experience rests. The core conditions and shapes the nature of conscious experience, the latter being comprised of learned habits.

The Three Patterns of Movement in Somas

Inasmuch as human somas are particular instances of somas in general, we can discover some fundamental features of human life by examining the most general traits of somas. These general traits will come to light if we look beneath the soma's layer of biological history and examine its primordial layer of cosmic history.

Excerpt from the article What is Somatics, by Thomas Hanna

Somatics is the field which studies the soma: namely, the body as perceived from within by first-person perception. When a human being is observed from the outside -- i.e., from a third-person viewpoint-the phenomenon of a human body is perceived. But, when this same human being is observed from the first-person viewpoint of his own proprioceptive senses, a categorically different phenomenon is perceived: the human soma.

The two distinct viewpoints for observing a human being are built into the very nature of human observation which is equally capable of being internally self-aware as well as externally aware. The soma, being internally perceived, is categorically distinct from a body, not because the subject is different but because the mode of viewpoint is different: It is immediate proprioception -- a sensory mode that provides unique data.

High Quality UK videos from Conscious TV demonstrate Somatics Individual Sessions.

Check out this Conscious TV interview in the UK of Certified Hanna Somatic Educator, Jonathan Hunt.   If you love a British accent and want to hear about a professional footballer (that's soccer in the UK) gone CHSE, you must see this video.

Here is another great Jonathan Hunt video on Conscious TV in the UK.  This one is Jonathan demonstrating a protocol for individual sessions in Somatic Education.   If you want to see what individual sessions are like, watch this.

The summer of 1990 saw the opening of the first class in Hanna Somatic Education. It is the flowering of a series of developments that have led to a discipline that is as consistently effective as any branch of medical science.