Thomas Hanna was a philosopher and educator who developed influential language around somatics, including the distinction between the body observed from outside and the soma experienced from within.
The difference is simple to recognise, even before the terminology becomes familiar.
Someone sees you raise an arm. You feel what raising it involves.
The person doing it has information the observer doesn’t.
Effort, comfort, uncertainty, a change that is too small to see. That inward experience isn’t less relevant because it doesn’t appear in a photograph.
I AWAKE’s interest in bodily attention has a related context in Hanna’s work. The books use their own authored practices, not a claim to teach or certify Hanna’s method.
Knowing the background helps the word somatic mean something more specific than a fashionable adjective placed before any activity.
Soma introduces the first-person body. Somatic learning explores what can be learned through sensing, trying and adjusting rather than only understanding an instruction.
Hanna’s own Clinical Somatic Education is a primary introduction to his terminology. Read it for the distinction he was making, rather than relying on a modern summary that treats all body-based approaches as identical.