Military & VeteransSomatics is a movement therapy that refers to the internal sensations of the body, how you're moving your body, what you feel inside your body. When teaching yoga to veterans through the Emory Healthcare Veterans Program, Marty Yura focuses on interoceptive awareness — the ability to identify, access, understand, and respond appropriately to the patterns of internal signals, which can provide a distinct advantage to engage in life challenges and on-going adjustments. He explains: "When you are focusing on somatics, you are not working against gravity which offers you more space, more room, and more awareness to home in on what you are feeling."
Marty Yura is a yoga teacher and co-owner of Vista Yoga. A veteran with a Masters in Psychology, he served as a psychologist in the military for five years. He now teaches yoga to civilians as well as to veterans with PTSD and other physical and mental health conditions through the Emory Healthcare Veterans Program.
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Somatics refers to internal sensations of the body. How you’re moving your body. What you feel on the inside of your body. So you can take your hand and place it behind your back and not see your hand, but you have an awareness of where your hand is. I’m focusing a lot on introceptive awareness. What do you feel when your knee moves out to the side and your hip externally rotates? And giving people occasions to experience those sensations that maybe they’ve not done before. So, people begin to feel things in their body that they hadn’t felt before. If you’re going to go right into a pose, pick the pose, whatever the pose is, people are trying to get the pose right. And there’s a whole host of variables in the pose and how to do that. But when you’re focusing on the somatics and you’re not working against gravity, you have more space, more room, more awareness to focus and tell what you’re feeling.
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About the author: Marty Yura, MA
Marty Yura is a yoga teacher and co-owner of Vista Yoga. A veteran with a Masters in Psychology, he served as a psychologist in the military for five years. He now teaches yoga to civilians as well as to veterans with PTSD and other physical and mental health conditions through the Emory Healthcare Veterans Program.
