Thomas Hanna has been a prime researcher and innovator in the field of somatics, and has worked deeply on – what he terms – deliberate self-healing on "the other side of the paradigm shift" in healing.

Hanna says: “There are two distinct ways of perceiving and acting upon physiological processes: first, one can perceive a body and act upon a body; second, one can perceive a soma and act upon a soma. The first instance is a third-person standpoint that sees an objective body there, separate from the observer -- a body upon which the observer can act -- for example, a doctor treating the patient. The second instance is a first-person standpoint that sees a subjective soma here: namely, oneself -- ones own soma, upon whose process one can personally work, oneself. A soma, then, is a body perceived from within.

Somatic education, in other words, is the improvement of bodily awareness to gain greater voluntary control of ones bodily processes. It is somatic in the sense that learning occurs within the individual as an internalized process. I may need to verify this correlation, but I guess this is how yoga works. You develop a defense mechanism from within against a stressor or a disease, rather than fortify yourself from outside through uncontrolled use of drugs, multivitamins, and all that over-the-counter stuff.

When you heal yourself from within, medicine attains a different meaning – and you let it go through a paradigm shift. The shift is from that of medicine-as-intervention to one of self-healing. Self-healing has its own, and often new rules. This is probably why people say they “discovered” a new life after they started practicing yoga. What they call a discovery is, in fact, a paradigm shift, which they were failing to recognize earlier.

With “discovery” of this sort comes the understanding that human body is not just a machine full of different organs that would need occasional fixing if anything goes wrong, but is a noble entity that works on the delicately intricate network of emotions, thoughts, reflexes, needs, aspirations, and sensations. It is these subtle, somatic entities that help you live and understand life better, rather than various immovable organs that stay put and execute what they are supposed to do every day, every hour, every minute, and every second. Put differently, it is your mind and its paradigms and not the body that help you attain perfect wellbeing.

About this Contributor: Dr Sanjay Parva, the founder of AugustAyurveda.com, is a medico-marketing strategist with medical content developing and visualizing as his special field of interest. He has been writing extensively on Ayurvedic and holistic healing through the last ten years and has created a niche for himself in Ayurvedic web architecture and development. He has nearly 5000 pieces on health, and health issues, published through various syndicated agencies and newspapers in India and abroad. Known for strategizing and driving innovative ideas and design on Ayurveda across various media, he was part of the University of Rochester ñ Media Lab Asia researcher team for Rapid Assessment Procedure (RAP) in 2002, a path-breaking digital initiative that sought to provide in-time Ayurvedic help to people in the remote Indian villages. Some of the prestigious journals he has previously worked for include: Asian Journal of Paediatric Practice, Asian Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, Asian Journal of Clinical Cardiology, The Asian Journal of Diabetology, Medinews and The Journal of Renal Sciences.