METHODS and principles on keeping A SOMATIC LEARNING JOURNAL

Somatic learning journal is a method for mapping and organizing your embodied learning process over time. The focus of the journal is to create a space where you can stretch out all your senses, fumble and rummage, so that sense making arises from exploration and following ones’ own curiosity. The format for this type of journalling is open (see suggestions below), and can change over time.

I suggest you start each journalling entry from an idea, principle or experience which was explored in a class. And take it further. Remembering that what was explored in a class, is specific to that moment. The explorations in the class are meant to ignite your own path of an embodied query. Learning and integrating the information so that it may become a useful and meaningful practice, is an arc that extends well beyond any training weekend. The somatic learning journal is a tool to map the steps in our personal process of embodiment.

principle 1. play

The main organizing principle of this type of journalling is play.

Natalie Goldberg writes in her book Writing Down the Bones: “You need a large field in writing [...] Don’t pull in the reins too quickly. Give yourself tremendous space to wander in, to be utterly lost with no name, and then come back and speak.”

But don’t rush your speaking, let your thoughts collect like water. Let them find their shapes as drawings, as mind maps, as doodles. Challenge the format, the syntax, the grammar. Challenge the ways you typically organize your thoughts to reflect who you are. For once: make no sense - but let sense arise. Try not to impress others, try surprising yourself. If you get stuck, take a colored pencil, or some fabric or yarn, or paint. Or go for a walk. Sing. Play an instrument with your lymph or blood flow as the support. Improvise. Play with the material and let it create its own connections. Organically, without forcing it to pre-existing ideas.

Over time your voice will arise. You become more attuned to the environment, your ways of moving, speaking and touching. Remember the learning journal is for you, in the present - but may yield its fruits in the future.

principle 2. emergence

Through play - which includes trial and error, falling and fumbling - we explore what is possible. Only through this process we get to begin to notice what works, which questions we find intriguing and how we might want to apply them. That is a process called self-organization, it happens because we’ve engaged the process of inquiry - and it never ceases happening. Life (actions, experiences, ideas) organize themselves in relationship to other events, experiences, ideas and actions. This self-organization is also called emergence, and at a micro scale, somatic learning journal is an act of enabling the self-organization. Life begets life, creativity feeds creativity.

We often talk about the learning window, the hours and days following a training, which are more fertile for new kinds of thinking and experiences to arise. Some previously fixed relationships have perhaps been unrooted; you may notice things in unusual ways, have sensations that shape your perceptions to pick up different types of stimulation from the world. Try to prolong those visitations, by staying with the sensations and letting them lead your writing (or other ways of documenting your experiences). By extending the learning window, we strengthen the new connections, give them the gift of our witnessing, so that they can become part of our perceptual repertoire.

Keeping a learning journal then becomes a practice. We practice noticing new connections, relationships and niches. Over time we become aware of our inherited prejudices and biases, which affect our abilities to be present and hold others. When doing it, you may choose a time limit for your journalling. Do it in 5 minutes, in 20 minutes, or give yourself a full day to graze and meander with the material. Do it alone and with others. Let the material be personal or shared. Write to different audiences, write to no audience. Write to an audience of one, or of billions. Write to your microbiome, or to your grandmother. Write so that you stay interested and engaged. Write so that each and every cell in your body is awakened. Write so that you may figure out what that last sentence means.

principle 3. niches

Margaret J. Wheatley writes how “emergence is life exploring connections, to create new and surprising capacities.” Emergence breaks us out of our individual shells, our competitive strategies, our assumptions that embodiment is a a personal goal that somehow puts us above others - those “less embodied”. And from that place of more and less, we can somehow sell embodiment as a commodity.

What if this work of embodiment is really a coevolutionary, symbiotic, process, where success (however we define it) cannot arrive in isolation, but through collaboration. More support and complexity and diversity and capacity comes possible when we recognize, how self becomes possible only through participation and co-operation.

Let your writing also explore those ideas and beliefs that have created limits for this collaboration. Find in your journalling new niches, spaces where collaboration and support can exist, creating new possibilities and capacities. Niches are essential examples of how symbiosis, coexisting and coevolving, take place.

principle 4. moving toward coherence

Life coheres into systems through movement, through play, through participating and collaborating. Embodiment then becomes more about how we engage in these motions, not through rigidly controlling the outcomes or seeking definite answers, but releasing ourselves into the question, the inquiry and the awareness of our interdependencies.

organize/gather your thoughts into:

• Actions

• Altars

• Collections

• Colors

• Doodles

• Drawings

• Flip books

• Images

• Improvisations

• Labyrinths

• Lists

• Lullabies

• Maps

• Meditations

• Movements

• Performances

• Poems

• Puzzles

• Relationships

• Rituals

• Songs

• Sound recordings

• Storybooks

• Taxonomies

• Walks

• And more…

Somatic learning journal is a continuation of the notes you take in the class. It is not a repetition of what has been said in the class. Those words are just a spring board to your own expression in the learning journal.

Creating your own maps - and letting them develop over time

Maps are representations of the ways we experience the world. They evolve as our perceptions change, so treat them each as a perspective that holds its own, momentary truth. Recognize that each map can lead us some place, but we may need a new map to get out of the old one. Start somewhere, see where it leads.

Below are some examples of depicting anatomy, life and relationship. Note that they are all true in their own way.

Now, create your own.

© Satu Palokangas, 2020

Note: While journalling is a major practice in most all learning environments, I would like to take credit for the somatic learning journalling-term and the way I have introduced the practice in this short essay.

Somatic Learning Journal is a practice further explored within the longer trainings I lead.