Working Definitions
As a movement researcher, I work within a range of specific definitions—some cultivated through the lens of other scholars and theorists, and some of my own making. This list is compiled for personal reference and is a living, working document.
The ongoing, reciprocal process through which bodies sense, regulate and orient with one another in shared space. It operates through tone, touch, attention and perception, constituting both the basics of individual self-regulation and the ecology of collective presence.
Somatic Mutuality suggests that perception itself can be a practice of mutual regulation.
Attention is both an autonomous and shared organ.
My sensing of you affects your nervous system.
Your movement reorients my proprioception.
At the center is reciprocal sensing is defines empathy participatory perception.
“To be with you, I am first with what is in me.”
Somatic Mutuality
Attunement is the process of becoming aware of and responsive to the states that move through and around us. It involves perceiving shifts in tone, energy, and orientation—within oneself, another, or the environment—and responding in ways that maintain coherence rather than control.
In somatic practice, attunement is less about fixing or mirroring and more about sensing alignment: a continual calibration between perception and presence. It is a form of listening that allows what is here to be met as it is.
Attunement
The study of how awareness, movement, and perception circulate between bodies to form shared fields of visceral experience.
Relational Embodiment
The directional and relational patterning of attention, affect, and desire. To orient is to turn toward or away, shaping what is near or far in both perceptual and social fields.
Orientation
The continuous state of readiness in the body — a subtle balance between tension and release. Tone is what holds form without fixing it, the background field that allows movement, perception, and emotion to arise. It reflects both muscular engagement and emotional state, linking physiology and affect through moment-to-moment adjustment.
Tone
Peripheral Togetherness
A shared state of awareness held through the edges of attention. It arises when individuals widen their sensory field to include others without direct focus or contact. This diffused relational mode allows autonomy and connection to coexist, forming a quiet coherence sustained by mutual sensing at the periphery.
A perception that arises from within the body’s felt experience rather than visual imagination. Somatic images are sensory, textural, and temporal—they guide movement through sensation rather than representation. In relation to ideokinesis, somatic images differ in that they emerge from felt experience rather than from intentionally applied mental imagery; they are discovered rather than imposed.
Somatic Image