Somatic Body Mapping: Art, Embodiment and the Stories We Carry

Sep 1
Somatic Body Mapping (SBM) brings together visual art, bodily awareness, movement and reflection. Through life-size body outlines, colour, mark-making, images and sensory attention, experiences that may be difficult to put into words can gradually take creative form.

Its roots connect to a longer history of body mapping, community storytelling, activism and health work, particularly in Southern Africa. Below you will find some important points into both body mapping potential and the Somatic Body Mapping (SBM) approach.

From Body Mapping to Somatic Body Mapping

Body Mapping is an arts-based process in which the body becomes a visual framework for exploring lived experience. Using a life-size body outline, participants may work with colour, images, symbols, words and other materials to give form to memories, sensations, relationships, personal history and social experience.

Somatic Body Mapping (SBM) grew from this tradition, but brings a stronger focus to the lived and moving body. Rather than only representing bodily experience on a map, SBM invites the person to remain attentive to sensation, movement and bodily responses while the artwork develops. In this way, body, image and reflection become part of the same unfolding process (Schwalbe, 2019).

The Development of Body Mapping

Body mapping has a longer history than its therapeutic use. Wolf (2024) traces an early documented use to MacCormack and Draper’s (1987) cross-cultural research, in which visual body maps were used to explore bodily experience.

One of the most influential contemporary developments, however, emerged in South Africa during the HIV/AIDS crisis.

In 2001, psychologist Jonathan Morgan and researcher Kylie Thomas were facilitating Memory Box workshops with people living with HIV at Khayelitsha Day Hospital in Cape Town. At a time when effective treatment was largely inaccessible, memory-box work offered participants a way to preserve stories and memories for their children. As antiretroviral treatment became increasingly available, the focus began to shift from preparing for death toward exploring and documenting the experience of living with HIV.

Members of the Bambanani Women’s Group subsequently participated in the Long Life project, creating personal narratives and life-size body images that communicated experiences of illness, treatment, stigma and survival.

Artist and designer Jane Solomon played a central role in shaping this work into the structured arts-based process now widely associated with Body Mapping. The life-size body outline became a framework for bringing together biography, physical experience, significant relationships, memories, sources of support and personal symbols.

Solomon later documented the process in Living with X: A Body Mapping Journey in the Time of HIV and AIDS (2002), allowing the method to be adapted beyond the original project.

The importance of this work was that the body map became much more than an anatomical representation. It offered a space where personal, emotional, relational and social experiences could coexist within one image.

Art therapist Thuli Wolf describes Body Mapping as a creative way of exploring the body as a map of personal history. Through drawing, painting, imagery and symbols, experiences that may be difficult to express verbally can become visible and available for reflection (Wolf, 2024).

What Does Research Tell Us?

Research on body mapping as a therapeutic intervention is still developing.
In an evaluation of Living with X, Samosir et al. (2018) found the workshop feasible and well received by participants, with small improvements in self-esteem and resilience and positive reports of emotional expression and coping. Because the study involved only seven participants and no comparison group, the findings remain preliminary.

A 2025 scoping review in The Arts in Psychotherapy identified its use in individual and group contexts, including trauma-related work, empowerment and self-compassion. Reported experiences included emotional insight, engagement and empowerment, although much of the literature remains qualitative and based on relatively small samples (Buys et al., 2025).

Body mapping therefore appears promising while still requiring further research.
Its value does not depend on claims that emotions or trauma are literally stored in specific body parts. Its richness may instead lie in creating a meeting place between sensation, movement, image, memory, imagination and reflection. 

Somatic Body Mapping: The Story behind the Approach

Annette Schwalbe encountered the South African Body Mapping tradition while living and working in Kenya. Trained in the approach developed by Solomon and Morgan, she and visual artist Xavier Verhoest incorporated Body Mapping into the work of Art2Be, the collective Schwalbe co-founded with artists, activists and creative therapists. From 2005 onward, their projects included work with people living with HIV/AIDS and other communities experiencing stigma and marginalisation. After returning to the UK in 2009, Schwalbe continued developing the practice, integrating her background in Dance Movement Psychotherapy and Authentic Movement, alongside later somatic influences. This evolving approach became known as Somatic Body Mapping (Schwalbe, 2019; Schwalbe, n.d.).

What distinguishes SBM is therefore not simply the addition of body awareness to an existing art activity. Schwalbe shifts the emphasis from the body primarily as a surface on which a story is represented toward the lived body as an active participant in the creative process. A sensation may lead to a mark; seeing the mark may evoke movement, emotion or another bodily response; this response may in turn change the image. Talking, moving, resting, art-making and reflection can move back and forth throughout the process. The map is not approached as something to decode from the outside, but as a changing landscape through which habitual patterns, places of disconnection, vitality, memory and emerging possibilities may gradually become perceptible (Schwalbe, 2019).

Somatic Body Mapping: Bringing a New, Embodied Focus

Therefore, Somatic Body Mapping, based on a sequence of five steps proposed by Schwalbe, changes the focus from creating an image to embodying a process of somatic meaning. A mark may be made, followed by a bodily response. A movement, colour or image may then emerge. In this way, the map becomes less a fixed representation and more an ongoing dialogue between embodied experience and creative expression.

Somatic Body Mapping can be especially relevant during periods of transition, when identity, relationships and ways of inhabiting the body may be shifting. In Schwalbe’s approach, the body map is not simply a life-size illustration of sensations or past experiences, but part of a therapeutic process in which bodily experience, movement, image and reflection continually inform one another (Schwalbe, 2019).

The emphasis is on the lived body: the body as experienced from within and shaped by personal history, relationships, culture and present circumstances. Talking, movement, art-making and shared reflection may all enter the process, with attention given to what is emerging rather than imposing a predetermined interpretation. The map can gradually make this inner landscape more visible, allowing habitual patterns, areas of disconnection, sources of vitality, memory and possibilities for change to be encountered creatively. In this sense, 

SBM is less concerned with producing a symbolic picture of what has happened than with creating conditions in which embodied experience can shift, reorganize and take on new meaning (Schwalbe, 2019).
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Annette Schwalbe will facilitate an in-person introduction to Somatic Body Mapping in Montreal, on October 24. She is offering practitioners an experiential encounter with the approach through embodied attention, creative exploration and body mapping.

The workshop is relevant to art therapists, dance movement psychotherapists, expressive arts therapists, psychotherapists, counsellors and other practitioners interested in the meeting point between body, image, movement and creative process.
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References

Buys, M. E., Peel, R., & Buiten, D. (2025). Body mapping as a therapeutic activity in psychotherapy practice: A scoping review. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 96, 102383. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aip.2025.102383

MacCormack, C. P., & Draper, A. (1987). Social and cognitive aspects of female sexuality in Jamaica. In P. Caplan (Ed.), The cultural construction of sexuality (pp. 143–165). Routledge.

Schwalbe, A. (2019). Somatic body mapping with women during life transitions. In H. Payne, S. Koch, J. Tantia, & T. Fuchs (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of embodied perspectives in psychotherapy: Approaches from dance movement and body psychotherapies (pp. 104–116). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315159416

Samosir, F. J. Process and Outcome Evaluation of "Living with X": A Body Mapping Workshop in the Time of HIV and AIDS.

Solomon, J. (2002). Living with X: A body mapping journey in time of HIV and AIDS: Facilitator’s guide. Regional Psychosocial Support Initiative.

Wolf, T. (2024, September 25). Body mapping: A creative way to listen to the wisdom of the body. Thuli Wolf Art Therapy & Coaching. https://www.thuliwolf.com/blog/body-mapping
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