What Kind of Thing Is a Human Being?
- Sara McRae
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Machines can be managed. Living societies must be participated in.
The Word Soma (and The Body As a Living System)
Recently I’ve noticed practitioners using the word soma instead of body.
At first, I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.
I’ve always been comfortable with the word body. It’s familiar, simple, and universally understood. Why introduce another word?
But there was something about it that I liked. The more I sat with it, the more I noticed something.
When I hear the word body, I tend to picture anatomy—a structure made of muscles, bones, organs, and skin. Something that can be measured, strengthened, repaired, or studied.
Soma evokes something different.
The experience of being alive.
The body as it is lived from the inside.
That distinction surprised me.
As I often do, I started wondering if there was an even better word.
Organism came to mind. From a systems perspective, it’s quite accurate. It reminds us that we are self-organizing, adapting, continuously responding to our environment.
But somehow saying, “Have you checked in with your organism today?” probably isn’t going to catch on.
I considered living intelligence.
I liked it for a minute. It speaks to the body as a living system.
Until I realized we’re more than intelligence.
We’re awareness.
We’re relationship.
We’re consciousness.
None of the words seemed quite right.
Maybe that’s because we’re trying to name something that isn’t primarily understood through language.
It’s understood through experience.
And somewhere in the middle of all of this, I realized I wasn’t really asking what soma means.
I was asking a much bigger question.
What kind of thing is a human being?
A Different Way of Seeing the Body
Over the last fifteen years, my answer to that question has changed dramatically.
When I first became a massage therapist, I thought of the body mostly in terms of structure and systems. Muscles, joints, posture, movement, circulation, hormones.
Then Touch For Health opened another door.
Through muscle testing, I began seeing something I hadn’t expected.
People’s bodies remembered experiences they had long forgotten consciously.
Sometimes a muscle would weaken around a memory the person hadn’t thought about in years. Sometimes a balancing technique would unlock an emotion before the mind understood why.
I was not working with a machine.
I was working with something that was listening, adapting, remembering, protecting, and communicating.
As I continued studying the Five Elements, meridians, and organ relationships, that feeling only deepened.
The organs no longer seemed like isolated structures performing separate jobs. They behaved more like members of a community.
Each with its own qualities.
Its own strengths.
Its own vulnerabilities.
Its own relationships with the others.
Its own requests.
Whether you understand those relationships through Traditional Chinese Medicine, systems biology, lived experience, or another lens almost doesn’t matter.
The point is this:
The body began looking less like a machine...
...and more like a living society.
Machines and Living Societies
That simple shift has changed the way I think about healing.
Machines have functions.
Living societies have relationships.
Machines are repaired.
Living societies reorganize.
Machines can be managed.
Living societies must be participated in.
I’ve come to believe that our bodies are doing much more than keeping us alive.
They carry memory.
They adapt.
They compensate.
They protect.
They seek balance.
They reorganize after injury.
They preserve what matters.
They prioritize.
The more I work with people, the harder it becomes for me to think of the body as simply a collection of systems completing assigned jobs.
Instead, I see an extraordinary living community, continuously communicating within itself.
One of the deepest shifts in my thinking has been realizing that the body isn’t merely made of relationships.
It exists through relationship.
The Language We Use
One of the places I see this most clearly is in the language we use.
I often hear people talk about their bodies as though they’re speaking about someone—or something—else.
It won’t let me sleep.
It’s getting old.
It keeps betraying me.
It just won’t cooperate.
I understand why people say these things. When you’ve lived with pain, illness, or exhaustion for a long time, it can genuinely feel as though your body has become an adversary.
The way we speak about our bodies reveals the kind of thing we believe them to be.
If the body is a machine, then perhaps it makes sense to speak about it as an it—a malfunctioning object that needs to be fixed or controlled.
But if the body is a living society... if it exists through relationship... then the conversation begins to sound different.
Instead of asking, “Why is it doing this to me?” we might begin asking, “ What conversation am I being invited back into?” Or perhaps even more simply, “What am I not yet able to hear?”
Losing the Conversation
One of the things I’ve noticed about myself is how easy it is to leave my relationship with my body. For my awareness to be entirely external or yang focused.
I spend much of my day listening deeply to other people.
Writing.
Teaching.
Thinking.
Solving problems.
Creating curriculum.
Helping others one-on-one in the treatment room.
And then, somewhere in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, I suddenly realize...
I’ve been holding my breath.
Or my shoulders have slowly crept toward my ears.
Or I’m hungry.
Or I’ve been sitting in the same position for three hours without noticing.
It’s humbling.
I spend my life helping people reconnect with themselves, and I still drift away from my own living experience.
Perhaps you do, too.
Why Awareness Is Becoming More Difficult
For most of human history, awareness of ourselves wasn’t something people had to schedule.
Life itself demanded it.
People lived closer to seasons, weather, hunger, fatigue, movement, one another, and the rhythms of the natural world.
They didn’t have to remember to listen to their bodies.
Hunger interrupted them.
Cold interrupted them.
Darkness interrupted them.
Community interrupted them.
Birth. Death. Illness. Weather.
Life itself continually invited participation.
For us, many of those invitations have been replaced by notifications. Our attention is pulled in hundreds of directions before we even finish breakfast.
Text messages. Schedules. Responsibilities. Headlines. Productivity.
The next thing.
The next problem.
The next screen.
Awareness is no longer our cultural default.
Because we’ve gradually been trained away from it.
We have gained extraordinary convenience.
We’ve also lost countless invitations to remain in conversation with life itself.
I know I certainly have.
Yin and Reality
Yin is our capacity to receive.
Over time, I’ve realized that’s only part of the story.
Yin is our capacity to receive reality.
To receive what is actually here.
The tension in our jaw.
The fullness in our chest.
The excitement.
The grief.
The fatigue.
The ease.
The breath we’ve been holding without realizing it.
Awareness isn’t about fixing any of it.
It’s about allowing ourselves to know that it’s there.
Truth doesn’t need us to create it.
Reality is already unfolding.
The question is whether we have the capacity to receive it.
Healing as Participation
One of the most important things I’ve come to appreciate is that the relationships inside us rarely disappear.
My heart never stopped communicating with my lungs.
My muscles never stopped responding to my nervous system.
My organs never stopped adapting to one another.
The conversation continued.
My participation in it became disrupted.
I notice this in small ways all the time.
I’ll realize I’ve been sitting at my computer for hours without noticing the ache in my back. Or I’ll suddenly become aware that I’ve been holding my breath while answering emails. Or that my butt is clenched when I watch the news. Nothing inside me stopped communicating. My body had been signaling the whole time.
The signals weren't absent. My capacity to notice them was.
That realization changed the way I think about healing.
Healing isn’t simply about restoring function. It’s about restoring participation.
The relationships didn’t vanish. My awareness of them did.
Stress has a remarkable ability to narrow what we can perceive.
Survival asks us to focus on what is immediately necessary.
Trauma teaches us to pay attention to some things while losing contact with others.
Distraction scatters our awareness across dozens of competing demands.
None of these stop the conversation inside us.
They simply make it harder to participate in it.
No one is outside reality. We are all participating in life.
The question isn’t whether we’re participating.
It’s what reality we’re currently able to receive.
When someone is living in survival, they are not failing to participate. They are participating through the reality their nervous system has learned to perceive.
That changes the conversation.
It replaces judgment with curiosity.
Instead of asking, “Why won’t this person change?” We can ask, “What truth has their system had to organize itself around?”
Integration Is Relationship
Perhaps this is also why the word integration has become so important to me.
Integration isn’t about becoming a better version of yourself.
It isn’t about assembling scattered pieces into a more complete person.
It’s about restoring participation in the relationships that make you who you already are.
Between your thoughts and your emotions.
Between your breath and your attention.
Between your organs, your nervous system, your movement, your memories, and your awareness.
Between what you’ve experienced and what you’ve learned.
A healthy body isn’t simply one where every part functions well.
It’s one where the conversation between the parts remains alive.
Participation makes integration possible.
Integration makes deeper participation possible.
Like breathing in and breathing out.
Like yin and yang.
One supports the other.
Returning to the Conversation
I still don’t know whether body is the best word.
Or soma.
Or organism.
Or something else entirely.
Maybe every word eventually becomes too small.
What I do know is this: The more closely I pay attention, the less I experience myself as a machine.
I experience myself as a living society.
A living conversation.
And maybe healing doesn’t begin when we finally find the perfect technique.
Maybe it begins when we remember what kind of thing we are.
Comments