This emphasis on personal exploration requires students to enter deeply into their own bodily experience, exploring various rhythms of movement, modes of perceiving the world, and the capacity for touching. They are also asked to examine the familial, social, and cultural roots of their experience. Touch, movement, bodily awareness, and visualization are important components of the program. The Somatics curriculum provides a rigorous groundwork in those theories, strategies, and transformational attitudes that are basic to any method of psychotherapy and that are required in any somatics practice. In addition to traditional forms of assessment, the program teaches assessment of individual and family dynamics through observation of body movement and nonverbal communication.
Students learn both verbal and body-based methods of intervention.
Students also benefit from the emphasis on research and concern for the development of the field that has characterized the program. Members of the faculty have worked with each other since 1980 on developing theoretical issues in the evolution of somatic theory. Students and faculty are encouraged to initiate and advance collaborative research on various issues in the field of Somatics. Faculty and students present at national and international conferences concerned with body-oriented psychotherapy, the social sciences and various aspects of Somatics theory and practice. Rather, the program introduces students to various approaches, compares and contrasts them, and helps them to develop a basic ground of Somatic psychotherapeutic practice.