Somatics: Practices Toward Developing Environmental Empathy

This article discusses how somatic practices, and in particular, eco-somatic practices, may develop environmental empathy. Using a critical abductive approach, it weaves together frameworks of ecocriticism, embodied and situated cognition, and somatic practices, and presents examples of influential eco-somatics practitioners Sandra Reeve, Praptro Suryadarmo, Andrea Olsen, Joan Davis, and Helen Poynor. Drawing on perceptual psychology (Sewall, 1995), it argues that eco-somatic practices such as theirs, through attending to sensation in natural environments (Bettmann, 2009; Kramer, 2012; Laidlaw & Beer, 2018; among others), develop ecological perception and awareness of both inner and outer sensation. In so doing, this article offers an explanatory hypothesis of how eco-somatic practices cultivate a sense of environmental empathy.