Liquid Pathways: Somatic Intelligence, Neuroplasticity, and the Unconscious
As a somatic practitioner and former neuroscience researcher, my work in the interdisciplinary arts lives at the intersection of experiential consciousness studies, movement as medium, the aesthetic dimensions of art-making, philosophical and metaphysical inquiry, and the scientific perspective shaped by my background in neuroscience. These elements are deeply intertwined and inseparable as part of the lens through which I perceive. Within this personal framework, embodied practice serves both as a vehicle for expanding consciousness into previously uncharted territories and as a means of creatively exploring potentialities yet to be realized.
This article is intended as an offering, with the hope that it will speak to many: to the scientifically curious who hunger for a deeper understanding of neurobiology, the brain, the nervous system and the mechanisms of somatic psychotherapy; to movement artists drawn to the experiential depths of dance-making and profound bodily awareness; to healing practitioners exploring the multi-layered dimensions of their work as pathways to transformation; to those mathematically inclined, who seek to understand the fabric of the universe from a metaphysical perspective; and to psychoanalysts, psychedelic journeyers, and those pursuing the path of transcendence, drawn to the not entirely metaphorical depths of water, where one dives inward into the depths of the unconscious material.
Foundations of Neuroplasticity: Insights from Research and Clinical Practice
The brain has a remarkable ability to reorganize itself, weaving new neural pathways in response to fresh experiences, new interactions, and shifts in its environment. Neuroscience names this living process neuroplasticity. It is the reason a pianist can refine their touch, an injured patient can learn to walk again, and a person in recovery can discover fulfillment beyond the gravity of old cravings.
It is not only our brains that are sculpting themselves moment by moment. The entire self-aware organism is also reshaping itself along with its self-concept. The body, as an evolving and changing organism, is a living constellation of consciousness that gathers itself into the experience through which the “I” can be experienced.
Research shows that in addiction recovery, cultivating new habits and supportive environments can rewire the brain’s reward systems. Family, friendships, and therapeutic alliances act as social scaffolding, strengthening new “recovery loops.” Cognitive-behavioral approaches further re-pattern maladaptive responses to stress by examining beliefs, expectations, hopes, and the individual’s perspective on self, others, and the world, helping individuals recognize limitations and thought patterns that perpetuate suffering.
Yet the science also points toward something more profound: the Body itself is an untapped laboratory of neuroplastic change. When we move in new patterns, improvise, explore beyond the known range of motion, or engage with unfamiliar sensations, the body-mind naturally reorganizes. By sensing ourselves, others, and the world in new ways, we reshape the very maps through which perception, thought, and emotion take form, ultimately transforming our experience of relatedness, connection, and belonging in the world.
Cellular Intelligence and Expanded Awareness through Somatic Movement
Over the past 15 years, I have engaged deeply in somatic movement practices including Body-Mind Centering, Authentic Movement, Gaga, Butoh, Joged Amerta, Contact Improvisation, and Water Dance. Through this immersion, I have experienced firsthand how these modalities facilitate profound transformation in the body that extends into one’s way of being in the world. This lifelong exploration informs both my professional practice and my understanding of movement as a catalyst for change.
What I found is a shared essence: each one of these modalities opens the body to transformation that inevitably ripples into the way one lives, relates, and moves through the world:
Body-Mind Centering awakens awareness of the body’s internal systems and cellular intelligence, creating shifts that ripple into perception and presence.
Authentic Movement cultivates deep listening and intuition, inviting movement to arise from within, free from external form.
Gaga emphasizes improvisation and play, sparking neuroplastic pathways through spontaneous, non-habitual expression.
Butoh dives into imagery and archetype, accessing unconscious realms and unlocking embodied memory.
Joged Amerta invites spontaneous, free movement that responds to both inner experience and the surrounding environment, integrating body awareness, spirituality, and ecological principles.
Contact Improvisation opens pathways for co-regulation and relational attunement through touch, shared weight, and moving together as one organism.
Water Dance extends these principles into the aquatic realm, where buoyancy, fluidity, and the unique sensory environment of being submerged deepen the body’s awareness, improvisation, and relational attunement.
Each of these modalities reorganizes perception beyond the movement of the body. They facilitate an expansion of awareness into a multisensory consciousness, where every cell participates in sensing, knowing, and navigating the world.
From a somatic psychotherapy perspective, the awakening of cellular intelligence unfolds as the body becomes a living instrument of perception, with each cell awakening to its own consciousness. Through movement, new pathways emerge, and as sensory information is received and processed, the nervous system learns to attune to the environment in ever more nuanced ways.
This embodied intelligence, experienced through a sense of interconnectedness, continues to evolve and expand, reshaping the way one engages with life. Listening deepens, intuition sharpens, and everyday interactions become infused with presence and attunement. The dance becomes a way of being.
Water as the Unconscious: Scientific and Experiential Insights through Somatic Movement
For the past decade, my work has flowed into water-based modalities like Aguahara, Watsu, Dolphin Dance, Water Dance, and the facilitation of Underwater Contact Improvisation. I have come to recognize that the art of underwater movement deepens expanded awareness even further. As immersion softens the body’s edges, dissolving the usual sense of separation, it invites a state where perception seems to arise from everywhere at once. The nervous system, cradled and supported, finds itself unwinding in ways impossible on land, releasing patterns of tension and opening space for subtler sensations to surface.
Submersion itself coaxes the nervous system into a state of deep calm, thanks in part to the mammalian dive reflex, a primal response that slows the heart rate, conserves oxygen, and invites the body into stillness whenever the face meets water. This natural reflex amplifies the sense of surrender, opening a portal to heightened receptivity and expanded consciousness.
In this weightless environment, awareness sinks deeper and spreads wider. Subtle shifts in pressure and currents can be felt, allowing touch to be anticipated even before contact. The gentle brush of another body heightens cellular sensitivity, making it perceptible that each cell carries its own consciousness that is perceiving, interacting, and responding to stimuli.
This often evolves into a sense of profound interconnectedness, as awareness extends far beyond the actual physical body, creating a recognition that the self is inseparable from the larger field of life. Emerging from the water, people often describe feeling reordered in their very way of relating to the world, experiencing a sense of fluidity, spaciousness, and attunement to the invisible threads of connection that weave all things together.
From a neuroscience and somatic psychotherapy perspective, the nervous system is indeed the key instrument through which perception is experienced. But when we step back into the elemental view, water precedes and underlies this entire system. When we talk about neurons “firing,” what we are really describing is an electrochemical event called the action potential. Neurons maintain a resting potential by controlling the concentration of charged particles (ions like sodium, potassium, chloride, and calcium) inside and outside the cell. These ions are dissolved in the extracellular fluid (outside neurons) and the intracellular fluid (inside neurons). Both are essentially salty solutions, water full of electrolytes. The neuron’s membrane acts as a barrier, but it has specialized gates (ion channels) that open or close in response to signals. When enough stimulation occurs, sodium ions rush in and potassium ions flow out, creating a rapid electrical change across the membrane. That electrical wave, the action potential, travels down the axon like a spark, triggering the release of neurotransmitters at the synapse. Neurotransmitters then cross the synaptic cleft (again, a watery space) and bind to receptors on the next neuron, continuing the cascade.
Without water, none of this could happen. Water is the medium in which ions dissolve and move. The sodium, potassium, and calcium gradients that drive neural firing are only possible because water stabilizes these charged particles, allowing them to flow and carry current. The cerebrospinal fluid (the clear liquid that bathes the brain and spinal cord) provides the extracellular environment that neurons rely on, continuously cushioning the brain and delivering the ions, nutrients, and signaling molecules neurons need.
At its most elemental, every thought, every flicker of memory, every sensation that rises in awareness is an electrical current moving through water. Neurons, suspended in a sea of fluid, ignite when ion channels open. Each surge of sodium and potassium crossing the membrane becomes a spark, each spark part of a vast constellation of firing patterns.
Consciousness emerges not from a single neuron but from the orchestration of billions, their waves of current rippling across the liquid landscape of the brain. Memories, sensations, and images are patterns of firing, resonances of circuits that re-light in waterborne electricity, weaving fragments together into meaning.
Now, as we submerge our body in water, breath suspends and heart rate slows. The mammalian dive reflex induces a parasympathetic state of calm, proprioception shifts, and the body floats between directions. In this visceral state, the nervous system is bathed inside and out in water, entering a rare alignment.
This is when altered states emerge. The brain, with its oxygen demand slowed and sensory input reorganized, begins to loosen the rigid loops of ordinary consciousness. Neural networks that normally fire in constrained patterns soften. The default mode network, associated with self-referential thinking and inner narrative, becomes more fluid, allowing dreamlike imagery and unconscious material to surface.
People often describe these underwater inner experiences as visions, dreamscapes, or even echoes of past lives. From a neuroscientific lens, these are the brain’s associative networks firing in freer, less linear ways. Sensations, memories, and symbols intermingle. From a poetic-metaphysical lens, this is the psyche opening itself, revealing the deeper archives of experience and imagination that remain hidden in ordinary states.
The water amplifies this because it is both the literal medium of neural current and the symbolic substance of memory, emotion, and life itself. To move underwater is to step into a state where inner and outer water converge: the cerebrospinal tide within, and the vast aquatic embrace without. In this convergence, the psyche feels safe enough to release. Images surface. Old imprints arise for resolution. Insights crystallize like bubbles breaking the surface.
It is a state of liminality, a threshold where the unconscious, and the body’s own intelligence intertwine. The dreamlike visions people encounter carry significance because they are drawn from the person’s deep neural and symbolic reservoirs.
Witnessed in a state of safety and fluidity, these experiences can be integrated into new self-understanding, healing, or creative awakening. This is what I love most about the post-experience integration we do, whether in group settings or during individual Aguahara ~ An Aquatic Journey Back to Self sessions. The integration and meaning-making work that occurs helps to reorganize our self-concept and our sense of belonging in the world and the universe.
Conclusion
At the most elemental level, the body is a shimmering field of intelligence. Every cell breathes, senses, communicates. Each is bathed in fluid, listening and responding to the subtlest shifts in its environment. Membranes pulse with electrical charge, opening and closing their gates to ions that ripple like tides. Intelligence is certainly not confined to the brain. It lives in every fiber, every cell, every stream of water within us.
Thought, sensation, and even memory, are all living currents, reshaped by perspective, and reframed by new information. They arise and dissolve within an ocean of liquid pathways: the cerebrospinal tides that bathe brain and spine, the cellular waters that carry the spark of life.
When awareness drops from the head into the body, the sense of self expands. It begins to know itself as porous, connected, alive. At this depth, life feels less like something happening to us and more like something arising with us. Creativity flows, meaning reveals itself moment by moment. The nervous system finds regulation through resonance with the larger field of life. Awareness becomes participation, rather than just mere observation, in the unfolding fabric of life itself.
Neuroscience affirms what artists and somatic practitioners have long known: the body and consciousness are sites of continual renewal, transformation, and expansion. For me, the study of consciousness is a lived practice. It is a dialogue between body and cosmos, self and other, science and spirit. Within this dialogue, I encounter renewal. Each moment becomes an opening to recreate myself in relation to life, free from the echoes of the past, arriving always new and fully present.
