1.1 Background and development of Somatic Consent
Somatic Consent – a personal & spiritual development system
The practices of Somatic Consent enable you to transcend habitual patterns which greatly limit your relationship with yourself and others.
They enable empowered choice towards building trust, safety, connection, intimacy and spiritual union with another person.
The name Somatic Consent Engagement System comes from a combination of:
Somatic – relating to:
1. Your sensory nerves which receive the inflow of information from your skin and relay it to your brain, producing the experience of sensation, pleasure and connection.
2. Your motor nerves which send information to muscles, generating body movement.
Consent – relating to:
1: Permission
2: Agreement
Engagement system – relating to:
1: The Polyvagal Theory of the nervous system
2: The ability to establish safety and connection in your environment
When it comes to connection and intimacy with another person, your nervous system must be in a calm, relaxed state.
Somatic Consent helps balance the nervous system through:
• Cognitive understanding
• Somatic embodiment
• Emotional intelligence
• Personal empowerment
Who is doing the action and who is it for?
In every scenario you happen to be in your life, you’ll notice that any action is either for your benefit or for another person’s benefit.
Knowing who an action is for highlights who needs to ask for permission or an agreement.
When consent is given—the nervous system can relax and feel safe.
Consent creates the safety needed in order for connection to happen.
The first step of empowered communication with others are the key questions:
1. “Who is doing the action?”
2. “Who is it for?”
The answers creates the following scenarios:
- When you are ‘doing’ the action—it is either for yourself or for the other person.
- When you are doing something that you desire—you need permission and you need to respect the other person’s limits.
- When you’re doing something to fulfil the other person’s desire—you need a clear request from them and you need to take care of your own limits.
When someone is doing something to or for you, it is either:
1. in response to your desire and request – within their limits
2. to follow their own desire – you have given permission within your limits
This seems relatively simple, but we’re all in the habit of confusing who we’re actually doing things for.
You may find yourself:
- Avoiding voicing your desires, going along with things or feeling the “NO” get stuck in your throat.
- Saying yes to please or to have an ‘easy’ life.
- Expecting others to ‘mind read’ your needs, longing for them to do something without actually asking them for it.
- Feeling let down when things don’t go your way, which leads to a build up of resentment.
How Somatic Consent came to be
A note from founder, Matthias Schwenteck
Consent is much more than just respecting other people’s boundaries.
You will gain a deeper embodied understanding of your sensory experience—and choose what you want and don’t want from a place of embodied understanding.
Consent changes everything.
We all get confused when it comes to the concepts of giving and receiving.
When you explore the difference between; ‘Who is doing the action’ and ‘Who it is for’ you’ll notice blind spots in your past interactions.
The Realisation
By practicing giving and receiving and focusing on the sensations being picked up by the nerves in your skin—over time you’ll gain an entirely different and embodied understanding of what it is to receive pleasure.
While developing this system, I personally learned that by practicing each day, my awareness shifted—as a new understanding ‘landed’ in my body.
I realised that we are all de-sensitised to our experience of touch. And we all need to regain the ability to feel more deeply, before we can truly receive.
Through personal experience and practice you;
Learn to fully receive by re-training yourself to notice the sensory inflow of sensation when you touch
Make habitual changes in the way your brain works (neuroplasticity)
Notice your body make a neurological ‘switch’ from focusing on the active role of giving, to the active role of relaxed receiving
Learn the exceptional difference between being led by your conditioned mind, to being led by a deeply embodied experience of life.
Why is this so important?
From both a practical and spiritual perspective, you make a quantum leap from doing—into being
- To receive in any great depth requires noticing what you’re receiving by being receptively open to the experience you’re having
- Waking Up The Hands to the sensory inflow creates this opportunity
- Being fully receptive with another person requires trust
- Trust happens when we communicate clearly and consensually while respecting each other’s limits
- When you access your nervous system’s ability to trust, you’ll feel safe
- In this safe nervous system state you’re able to relax and be as you are.
This state is:
- how you naturally feel when being your authentic self
- an experience of pure is-ness and freedom
- beyond any obligation or need for action to achieve a sense of belonging
- an experience of being a gift to yourself, to others and to life
This experience is the peak of the Somatic Consent Engagement System and known as the Apex; the interpersonal state of relating in a conscious and transformative way (the we state).
This realisation showed me the infinite possibilities of deepening somatic embodiment for the purpose of personal and spiritual development.
I continue to experiment and experience the magic. It fuels my motivation to facilitate this embodied understanding—providing guidance and support for others to create their own personal path of awakening.
Inner Reflection
Reflect on your experiences of touch
Can you remember instances when you engaged in touch for your own benefit?
What about times when you allowed someone to touch you for their benefit?
What feelings come up for you as you consider these experiences?
USE THE NOTES BUTTON TO RECORD YOUR RESPONSES
