My name is Jenny Haycocks and anyone who knows me well knows I am curious, that I listen and ask many questions. I created the company ‘Somatic Health’ to alleviate suffering and bring people to the fullness of life enjoyed. In one-to-one and group sessions, ‘Somatic Health’ connects us to what is natural to us through somatic, embodied self-awareness; our direct felt sense of body-mind connection.
‘Somatic Health’ brings us to our senses so that we may tune in to what is natural and life affirming for us and potentially for other people with whom we come into contact. ’Somatic Health’ is about sensing and feeling and action; aligning your behaviours with your deepest values.
I have sixteen years’ experience as a teacher within further education and I’m a Registered Somatic Movement Educator with ISMETA (International Somatic Movement Educator and Therapist Association).
As a young child, I wanted to better understand. I asked many questions. I experienced many moments of intense bliss and of extreme and low-lying suffering. It is no surprise then that I followed a path of study firstly through psychology, later in teaching, community dance leading and most recently an MA in Dance and Somatic Wellbeing.
On completion of a psychology degree, finding the need to do something practical, I became a builder and director in Giroscope Workers Co-operative; housing ourselves and other disadvantaged people since 1985. This seven-year, day-to-day experience of living empowerment and of challenging the status quo informs the way I experience possibility. Giroscope was the winner of the prestigious Queens Award for Voluntary Service in 2014 and the UN World Habitat Award in 2015-2016.
Although I come from a long line of teachers, I only became interested in teaching in 2000. At that time, when I was coming out of a period of debilitating chronic fatigue, I met and worked alongside Halima Nicholls in a small outreach further education centre. Halima was teaching in a more friendly and informal way than I had seen before; supporting and encouraging students’ motivations and interests in a kind of community of discovery.
I went on to teach in Further Education for sixteen years; working with students experiencing learning difficulties and challenges to their mental and emotional health. I continued to work in the way Halima had inspired in me, following students’ interests and developing the curricula with them in dance, drama, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and Emotional Wellbeing.
I took many courses myself during this time, most notably with the Laban Guild for Movement, Dance and Drama. I was a regular contributor to their quarterly journal and one of my articles appeared on the reading list for The Royal Academy of Dance. I also completed the Post Graduate Certificate in Education (Post Compulsory Education) in 2005.
During these teaching years I felt education was steadily becoming biased to narrow forms of intelligence while other forms; sensing, feeling, intuiting and deeper sources of knowing were overlooked. This led me to take a master’s degree in Dance and Somatic Well-being: Connections to the Living Body, at the University of Central Lancashire for which I was awarded a distinction. This course supported me to sense and express myself more clearly and to frame this approach I offer here in my company ‘Somatic Health’.
I was particularly inspired, during this degree, by the work of Janet Adler in ‘Authentic Movement Practice’, Mae Wan Ho in ‘Quantum Coherence’, Korzybski and Bois in ‘Levels of Abstraction’ and to what Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, founder of ‘Body-Mind Centering’, calls ‘Cellular Intelligence’.
This MA course also introduced me to practice-led research methodology. My own research project was a living inquiry of the skin as boundary, container and meeting place.
In 2019 I started volunteering with Emerging Futures. Emerging Futures were already looking to enhance their programme of workshops by introducing body-based approaches. At the start of 2020 I, and a small group of people in recovery, trialled an eight-week programme of ‘Somatic Health’. This body-mind approach had such success for participants, in finding their inner resources to wellbeing, that we are now looking to grow this work; to raise awareness of it and find funding so that we may offer it to more people. You can read more about this successful pilot programme here.
I am also currently assisting Andrew Cook, a craniosacral therapist, on a programme about overwhelm and burn out. Sessions define, through poly-vagal nerve theory, how the body and mind are stitched together. Participants are then taken through somatic, body-based explorations, to reconnect with the bodily sense of safety and from that to naturally find their way out of burn-out. i then follow on this course with somatic practice sessions so that participants can embed the somatic practice into their daily lives.
My most important teachers and teachings have come through personal experiences of loss and suffering. I now experience this suffering as grace; enabling me to relinquish what is not life enhancing and life affirming, opening me to a wealth of inner resources, to the place of no thought, to deeper sources of knowing. Through this moment by moment practice, initially learned in Soto Zen meditation, somatic body-mind awareness takes me from sensing and feeling to taking conscious action; action that inspires me and connects me to my ease and what is natural to me, to nature around me, undivided.
This body-mind approach has had such great success for participants, in finding their inner resources to wellbeing, that we are now looking to grow this work; to raise awareness and find funding so that we may offer this to more people. If you would like to contact me about this new way of working with people in recovery and of any plans to run further programmes, contact me below.
