Bohm’s Gift of Soma

This is an excerpt from one of the presentations featured in the Pari Center’s event Radical Visions, in Pari on May 23-30, 2025.

I’m looking forward to sharing some memories of both David Peat and David Bohm. I will also share a series of observations and experiences regarding “Bohm’s gift of soma.” On the one hand, this alludes to Bohm’s well-known gift of bodily sensitivity, in which he felt his entire body reflected his insights and probings into physics. On the other hand, from a personal perspective, I was “gifted” inroads to this kind of bodily sensitivity over years of exploring it with Bohm. This sensitivity to “soma” has underlain all of my probings into Bohm’s work, up to and including what I have termed rheosoma – the flowing body – as a means of breaking free from the reflexive idolatry of “thingness,” and opening the prospect of a movement-oriented engagement with the world. 

Lee Nichol is a freelance writer and editor. His latest works are Entering Bohm’s Holoflux and, as editor, Holoflux: Codex – Form / Movement / Vision inspired by David Bohm (both from Pari Publishing). He was a long-time friend and collaborator of David Bohm, and is editor of Bohm’s On Dialogue, The Essential David Bohm, and On Creativity.

Lee has been on the faculty of the Arthur Morgan School in Celo, North Carolina; the Oak Grove School in Ojai, California; the Tibetan Nyingma Institute in Berkeley, California; and Denver University in Denver, Colorado. He sits on the Advisory Committee of the Pari Center, the Advisory Council of the Indigenous Education Institute, and is a member of the Founding Circle of the Native American Academy. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico with his wife Eva Casey.