Somatics is a field within bodywork and movement studies that emphasizes internal physical perception and experience. Somatics approaches people as a holistic living organism, working with all these aspects of who we are: thinking beings, but also emotional and spiritual.

Interestingly enough, the first somatic practitioners in the West were dancers who under the ideas of existentialism and experiential learning started to shift the focus traditionally given to the experience of the public – the spectators – to their own inner experience they were living through on stage… Building on their ideas, the „somatic pioneers“ Frederick Matthias Alexander, Moshe Feldenkrais, Mabel Elsworth Todd, Gerda Alexander, Ida Rolf, Milton Trager, Irmgard Bartenieff, and Charlotte Selver were active, primarily in Europe, throughout the early twentieth century.

In the 1970s, American philosopher and movement therapist Thomas Hanna introduced the term „Somatics“ to describe these related practices collectively.