Like Jesus writing in the sand, moral imagination invites us to resist the impulse to immediately interpret what we encounter. It creates space to remain curious and open about what may be present, allowing meaning to emerge and reorganize within relationship and context.
Embedded Files
The Body Is Not Separate From the Person
The Body Is Not Separate From the Person
Somatic therapy is sometimes understood primarily as a set of techniques for calming the nervous system, working with the body’s meridian system, or helping the body experience greater physical safety and homeostasis. These practices can be useful tools, and greater regulation and a sense of safety can be important goals and outcomes of therapy. But they are not the heart of how I understand somatic work.
My approach begins with a different understanding of the person. The body is not something we have, separate from who we are. It is part of who we are.
The Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person understands the human person as an embodied unity of body and soul. This is consistent with St. Thomas Aquinas's understanding of the soul as the form of the body. The soul is not a separate person inhabiting a body. The human person is a unity, and our embodied experience is therefore part of our experience as persons across all of our dimensions. The body isn't merely one dimension among others but participates in and expresses the person's experience as a whole.
This matters for how we understand trauma and healing.
What happens to us is not experienced only as a story we can tell or a thought we can change. Our experiences can shape how we perceive, attend, remember, relate, feel, and respond. They can become part of the ways we have learned to inhabit our bodies and move through the world.
Somatic therapy therefore involves more than noticing sensations or practicing techniques to regulate the nervous system or reduce emotional charge. It can involve learning to attend to what the body is communicating, becoming more aware of patterns that may have become familiar, and developing a different relationship with our embodied experience.
Moral imagination can deepen this work by helping us remain curious about what a somatic experience might mean rather than immediately interpreting it or reducing it to a symptom or a specific emotion. A sensation may have roots in the past, tell us something about what is happening in the present, or even point toward something we need to consider about the future. Rather than assuming that every sensation or emotion has one fixed or predetermined meaning, we can approach it relationally—with attention to the person, the context, and the history in which the experience is occurring or has occurred.
This requires a willingness to stay with uncertainty. We can ask: What might this experience be telling me? What has this sensation meant in the past? What is happening now? Is there something different I am being invited to notice or choose? The purpose is not to make the body the final authority, but to allow embodied experience to become part of a larger process of understanding.
The goal is not simply to make the body feel better or to quiet what feels uncomfortable. It is to become more present to our embodied experience and to the person we are and are becoming. This requires making room for the possibility that what we experience in our bodies may have meaning without assuming that we already know what that meaning is.
This is where I see somatic work as part of a broader approach to healing. The human person is a unity, and our embodied experience is therefore part of our experience as persons across all of our dimensions. Our emotions, memories, reason, imagination, relationships, moral agency, and capacity for freedom do not operate independently of one another. They belong to one person.
For me, taking the body seriously does not mean reducing the person to the nervous system or to felt emotional sensations through the unintegrated application of somatic techniques. It means recognizing that the body belongs to the person and that what happens in the body is part of a larger human story. Healing, then, is not simply about changing what the body feels. It is about becoming more able to encounter, more able to be encountered, understand, and respond to our embodied selves, others, and the world, and yes, to God, with greater freedom and wholeness.
Page updated
Report abuse