Somatic Liturgy: Navigating Chaos and Stillness

To your call I fall
Daylight breaks through heavy rain
Stillness calls my soul
~Thomas C. Maples

Somatic Liturgy and Building the Inner Sanctum

To mend the tensions of the soul, my thought processes immediately turn to the chatter of what came first: the chicken or the egg. Or maybe, as we have explored in Thomistic hylomorphism, the question is whether the soul is merely the driver of the ship—trapped in a physical hull until it reaches its final destination—or if the two are simply one and the same substance. Engaging the work through a juxtaposition of somatic Liturgy invites us to reconsider how body and soul interact within these age-old questions.

Yet, when posed with the philosophy of the chaos that constantly envelops us, notwithstanding the noise that ultimately ends up being processed between our ears, it is no wonder that with an attention span of fifteen seconds, we get lost in the relentless static of the modern world, ensnaring ourselves in a prison of our own creation.

But these are simply mind games, distractions meant to pull us away from the urgency of the work at hand: building the inner walled garden. This is the interior castle that calls upon us to be fully present with the Imago Dei—or, as the patron saint of mysticism and holistic medicine once stated:

“The soul is not in the body; the body is in the soul. The body is the soul’s garment, its instrument, and its garden. When the body is parched and anxious, the greenness of the soul withers. We must tend to the vessel so the divine sap can flow.”

— St. Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias

To tend to a parched and anxious vessel in a world saturated by noise requires more than good intentions; it requires a structural sanctuary. It requires a stillness, depth, and liturgy to heal the inner walls of trauma and create a space for the Imago Dei to work its wonders.

“To Your Call I Fall”: The Neurobiology of Somatic Surrender

“The body is the canvas on which the psyche writes its story. In our modern rush, we treat the body as a machine to be driven, rather than a temple to be inhabited. We live from the neck up, in a state of chronic exile from our own grounding. Healing begins only when we drop back down into the somatic reality of our bones.”

— Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation

Let go, and let God. To your call I fall. In Alcoholics Anonymous, twelve steps are prescribed to assist those undergoing a chronic state of addiction to find a higher meaning, a purpose in something other than the immediate high the ETOH spirits give the waiting recipient. It is a psychological framework designed to dismantle the frantic, controlling ego. If we distill the foundational movements of this recovery, we find a triad of surrender:

3 Steps to Let Go

Step One: The Honest Inventory. In order to give up a detrimental, synthetic source of spirit, we must succumb to the True Spirit. We admit that we are powerless over the chaos between our ears, and we hand those troublesome, fragmented areas over to God.
Step Two: Finding Faith. When we surrender to a Higher Power, we let go of the ego’s false belief that it somehow controls our destiny. We realize we are the ship, the ship operator, and the destination all in one. When we integrate an ethereal belief in the unknown, we finally create a nurturing environment that honors body, mind, and spirit as a single, hylomorphic reality—capable of holding these deep paradoxes while honoring the Divine Presence within the temple it craves.
Step Three: Absolute Surrender. To your call I fall. When a person genuflects, they take physical grounding. They prepare the body in literal humility, assuming a position ready and willing to surrender to a much greater force: the presence and power of God, waiting to transform the spirit through deep soul work.

While the 12 Steps provide an integral roadmap to sobriety, the liturgy of the Mass goes deeper still. It operationalizes this recovery path, leading the fragmented seeker away from intellectual mind games and back into faith through the ultimate surrender of the soma, as it seeks unification with the soul (psyche).

The Neurobiology of Genuflection

We start the Mass in genuflection, giving presence to the Host, who has gathered us to the table to hear good words and to conduct good works in a gathering of people of all origins, ethnicities, creeds, and affiliations. We are one. At a party that celebrates life, we should pay our respects and reflect on what is about to occur.

When we take a knee, we ground ourselves physically. We prostrate ourselves to God’s presence and its limitless capacity to transform the soul. Have you ever felt the peace present when you enter the Mass? It differs greatly from the fight-or-flight loop, so common to the amygdala’s core reality of a hostile world. To let go does not mean death. Instead, it means union.

To drop to the knee is a radical physiological interrupt. We lower our center of gravity, pulling ourselves closer to the earth. In this position, we are physically exposed; we lose the immediate ability to run or fight. It is an evolutionary surrender to those very vulnerabilities we so desperately seek to avoid in the modern world.

Yet, because we are consciously in a sacred space, this physical posture allows us to bypass the logical mind entirely. It signals to our nervous system that we can finally let go and let God in, simply by lowering our guard and prostrating ourselves to the immediate moment.

“Daylight Breaks Through Heavy Rain”: Psychological Chaos, Liturgical Stillness, and Weathering the Storm

Letting Go of Psychological Chaos

“Ritual… is a safely barricaded road into the subliminal world… It expresses the psychological need for a regular expression of those archetypal contents which, if left to themselves, would create devastating effects.”

— C.G. Jung, Psychology and Religion

The soul craves spirit. But it also knows its keen need for ritual to ground itself in a safe and sacred space where the external noise of the world can be stilled, so that the Self may find its space within.

As I step into the Cathedral, I see the long pathway before me to the Crucifix. Lonely, solemn, I walk forward, reflecting upon the One Passion, given for the sanctity of all. A sense of peace finds me. Church is just that: a safe and quiet space. While it may take a moment for the inner storm to calm, psychological chaos slips away in a place like this, allowing the physical representations of the archetypal motifs to make their presence felt.

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One drops into the pew to reflect upon those inner and outer mysteries that bring stillness. This is the place to let go and let God, so that the anxieties, depressions, or hasty thoughts of the world can simply slip away. The soul needs ritual to discipline itself. Yet, it is in this sacred space that spirit finds its root.

Finding Sensory Grounding in the Liturgical Container

Follow the safely barricaded road, oh my! But to where do we go?

Like the blossom of a sunflower, the Self yearns to touch the divine light that nurtures its being. But to touch that light directly, without a filter, would mean certain death to the ego. Like the flower, we cannot know the brevity of the life we will create. Instead, we must learn to build healthy roots in the message, belief, hope, and aspirations we find from a higher order. Rituals of spirit build this container. Liturgy, prayer, contemplation, and meditation are all exercises meant to ground the self in deeper experiences that help us weather the personal storms within.

Building the soul to touch spirit, we shed the bark of being. Yet, like a tree, the skin of Self is strong and rebrands itself like concentric rings, showing the storylines of growth that fed it the month, year, or decade before. When we learn to lower our guard of control, we make space for daylight to guide the longing flower of Self to its nurturing source, creating space for new exercises to both ground and lift the spirit. Let us explore..

The Choreography of Soma Sancta

So what does the dance of dances look like, as we learn to drop the defenses of the body and mind to allow spirit to take its space?

Soma Sancta—the holy, living body—moves us through the inner peace of this space, creating an environment sacred enough for its essence to take presence. It is a precise coordination of sound, sight, and smell designed to bypass our intellectual mind games and retrain our nervous system from the roots up.

Auditory Vagal Stimulation: Want to get rid of the fifteen-second loop? Listen to some Gregorian chant. Want to expand upon the exercise? Sing along. The monotonic cadence of spoken responses and the low, resonant frequencies of Gregorian chant act as a biological pacifier. Because the vagus nerve passes directly through the vocal cords, chanting and responsive prayer stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, slowing our heart rate and calming the amygdala.
Panoramic Soft Focus: Hypervigilance narrows our vision into a sharp, defensive tunnel, always hunting for the next threat. The visual architecture of the sanctuary—the soaring vertical lines, the flickering candlelight, and the diffuse glow of stained glass—invites the eyes to relax into a panoramic gaze. This physical shift in vision signals directly to the brainstem that it is safe to rest, transforming the eye from a weapon of survival into a window of contemplation, possibly even inviting your gaze to go within.
Olfactory Grounding: The scent of frankincense and myrrh acts as an immediate somatic anchor. Olfactory pathways bypass the logical mind entirely, charting a direct course to the limbic system—the emotional center of the brain. The unchanging aroma of incense triggers deep, contextual memory, whispering to the parched vessel that it has crossed the threshold into a timeless sanctuary where it can safely shed its bark.

“Stillness Calls My Soul”: Cultivating the Contemplative Garden

“The soul that is seeking God must find for itself a hidden place of quiet, a secret garden closed to the tumult of the world. For the Divine Word is a shy lover; He will not enter where there is noise, nor reveal Himself where attention is scattered. It is in the profound stillness of the interior landscape that the soul learns to gaze upon the Uncreated Light.”

— St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs, Sermon 23

Finding spirit isn’t about chasing some guru who will give you a magic key, that one-word bullet point that will solve everything. Instead, it flourishes in the place where the push-ups of the soul are done. It is here that the soul builds strength to make sense of itself, so that it can find its place with that higher essence that God wants of us. It is this labor that allows us to move with a stillness of gaze upon that which calls our soul to be—in that one space it seeks with God.

Stillness calls the gaze. To find the Imago Dei, we must tend the sanctuary to give space to house His presence. To cultivate this essence is not passive. It is profoundly active. As the personal development legend Jim Rohn famously said, “You can’t hire someone else to do your push-ups for you.” It is your work. What kind of environment do you want to give God if He were to show up in your presence right now?

Quieting the Castle: Accepting the Divine Will

The next time you are at Mass, be conscious in your efforts to quiet the castle. When you engage in the ritual and the spirit of all the Mass has to offer, you are training the soul to go within its safe space, so that the spirit knows it has safe passage to enter.

We are not simply ships being driven down the aisle to the crucifix. We are also not simply sailors directing the ship towards its final crossroads. No, instead, we are one. Within ourselves individually, as well as collectively, when we celebrate the Last Supper, and take part in the Body and Blood of that which redeems us.

Engaging our Hylomorphic Reality

“The soul is united to the body as its substantial form… Hence, it is not correct to say that the soul is in the body as a sailor is in a ship; for a sailor is only accidentally united to his ship, and the two do not form one natural substance.”

— St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, Question 76

If we are not the ship and the ship does not drive us, perhaps we are like the individual cells of God’s greater body, each with its place and purpose, bringing God’s stronger will to bear. It is up to us to feed the soma in this space. It is also up to us to quiet the mind, so the silence may attract that presence. For the soul dwells here. But maybe, there is also just a little room for spirit.

Until our next journey together, may your days be filled with wanderings and blessings as you advance confidently in the direction of your dreams.

References

Aquinas, Thomas. 1948. Summa Theologiae. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Brothers. (Orig. pub. ca. 1265–1274).

Aquinas, Thomas. 1984. Questions on the Soul (Quaestiones Disputatae de Anima). Translated by James H. Robb. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press.

Bernard of Clairvaux. 1971. Sermons on the Song of Songs. Translated by Kilian Walsh. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications. (Orig. pub. ca. 1135–1153).

Hildegard of Bingen. 1990. Scivias. Translated by Columba Hart and Jane Bishop. New York: Paulist Press. (Orig. pub. ca. 1151).

Jung, C. G. 1938. Psychology and Religion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Rohn, Jim. 2002. The Five Major Pieces to the Life Puzzle. Southlake, TX: Jim Rohn International.

Woodman, Marion. 1985. The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation. Toronto: Inner City Books.