Somatic Learning: The Body Knows

I didn't always have the language for what I was sensing—but I knew it mattered.

When I was a teenager, my mother—who taught piano at Central Michigan University—took me to a weekend symposium on "music medicine." I didn't fully grasp the scope of the experience, but I remember the feeling in the room: musicians, doctors, and movement specialists all gathered to explore how the body, the mind, and the music were inextricably linked.

There was a Feldenkrais practitioner. The visionary force in performing arts medicine, Dr. Alice Brandfonbrener. And a sense, even then, that music wasn't just about sound—it was about the nervous system, about presence, about the way we live inside the gesture.

Not long after, at just 19 years old, I began teaching violin sectionals at Interlochen. Thirty middle school violinists. At eight o'clock in the morning. And somehow, without formal training, I remembered something I'd seen in a Dalcroze demonstration: the power of teaching without words. So I walked into the room, picked up a piece of chalk, wrote my name on the board, and began.

No words.

Just gesture.

Breath.

Tone.

Stillness.

Focus.

The room went silent.

The kids were attentive.

And I knew—the body knows.

Decades later, that thread is still alive in me. And it's one of the core pillars of ViolinWise.

That early experience stayed with me—not as a theory, but as a felt sense. Long before I ever heard the term somatic learning, I was already living it: listening with more than my ears, teaching with more than my words, and trusting that the body often understands before the mind can explain.

In essence, somatic learning is learning that begins in the body. It honors sensation, movement, breath, and internal awareness as core pathways—not side notes— in the process of developing skill and expression. In the context of violin playing, it means that technique isn't imposed from the outside in, but discovered from the inside out.

It is presence over performance.

Felt truth over forced form.

Integration, not just information.

And for many adult learners, it's not just effective—it's healing.