Written by: Emma Masters
Therapy Co-Founder
There’s a moment in every Connect class that I love to watch.
It happens somewhere in the first few tracks. You can see it, it’s a shift. Someone who walked in carrying the weight of their day, shoulders up, jaw tight, eyes a little glazed, and then something changes. The music gets into them. They stop thinking about what they look like. They start to feel.
It is not an accident, and it isnt just a good playlist.
It’s the nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do, when you give it the right conditions.
Connect is built on a body of science that mainstream fitness has been slow to catch up with. This is my attempt to lay it out clearly; what we do, why we do it, and what it’s actually doing for you.
The word somatic comes from the ancient Greek soma — meaning body, specifically the body as experienced from within. Somatic movement is the practice of moving from the inside out. From sensation. From feeling. Not from what the body looks like, but from what it does.
Most fitness is designed around external outcomes – performance, appearance, efficiency. It asks the body to comply, to achieve something externally… Somatic movement asks a completely different question: what does my body actually need right now?
This distinction matters more than it might seem. Because your body is not a machine. It is a living nervous system – intelligent, communicative, and deeply connected to every thought, emotion, and experience you’ve ever had.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s research shows that emotions are not simply mental events. They are body-based processes. The body feels before the mind understands. Grief sits in the chest. Anxiety lives in the stomach. Fear contracts the throat.
And if we never give the body a way to move that through, it stays.
The music in Connect isn’t just something I focus on because I am passionate about it (even though I am!). It is one of the primary tools in the class.
There’s science AND magic when it comes to music.
There is a phenomenon called entrainment, the nervous system’s natural tendency to synchronise with an external rhythm. Your heartbeat begins to align with the tempo. Your brainwaves follow. Something in you drops in, stops analysing, and starts feeling.
Rhythmic, repetitive movement – moving the same pattern, over and over, to a beat also quiets what neuroscientists call the default mode network: the part of the brain responsible for self-referential thinking. The inner critic. The mental to-do list. When repetitive movement takes over, that voice gets quieter.
There is also something called bilateral stimulation — movement that alternates between left and right, crossing the body’s midline. It is the same mechanism used in EMDR therapy, a clinically validated treatment for trauma processing. We are not running a therapy session in Connect. But we are using the same doorway – the same neurological pathway that allows the brain to process what it has been holding.
Music and movement together also trigger the simultaneous release of dopamine and serotonin. When you walk out of class feeling lighter, more like yourself, you are literally receiving a a big dose of feeling good hormones and neurotransmitters.
This one needs its own explanation, because I know it surprises people when they come to Connect Yang for the first time.
Every HA. Every hum. Every exhale with sound – They are one of the most direct ways to access your vagus nerve – and your vagus nerve is everything.
The vagus nerve is the 10th cranial nerve in the body. It is the superhighway between your gut, your heart, and your brain, and it is the master switch of your autonomic nervous system. When vagal tone is high, when this nerve is well-regulated — you are better able to self-regulate under stress, recover from difficult emotions, and feel genuinely safe in your own body.
Humming, sighing, and exhaling with sound all directly stimulate the vagus nerve. Research confirms that these self-generated sounds increase vagal tone — the same mechanism activated by singing, chanting, and deep connected breathing. Your body already knows this. It’s why a long sigh of relief actually is relief. It’s why singing in the car on a hard day works (we all know how good that one feels!)
We also hold an enormous amount of tension as unexpressed sound. The things we didn’t say. The emotions we swallowed because the moment wasn’t right, or safe, or convenient. That tension lives somewhere — in the jaw, the throat, the chest.
What we do in Connect — using self-generated sound within somatic movement — is something I’ve come to call somatic sound movement. It sits at the intersection of nervous system science and embodied practice. Making noise in a room full of people who are also making noise is not strange. It is one of the most radical and empowering things you can do for your mental health in a group fitness class.
Underpinning all of this is a framework developed by neuroscientist Dr. Stephen Porges called Polyvagal Theory — and it reframes what a fitness class is actually doing to you.
Porges identified three states of the autonomic nervous system. The first is ventral vagal — the state of safety, connection, and openness. This is where genuine somatic experience is possible. The second is sympathetic activation — fight or flight, the state of threat and mobilisation. The third is dorsal vagal shutdown — dissociation, numbness, going away.
Most people arrive at a fitness class somewhere between the second and third. Activated, exhausted, or both.
The environment of a Connect Yang class — the lighting, the music, the warmth of the room, these are cues of safety. They signal to your nervous system: you are not under threat here. You can drop in.
Porges calls this neuroception — the body’s continuous, unconscious scanning of the environment for safety or danger. It happens before thought. Before choice. Your nervous system arrives before you do.
Connect is not yoga. It is not dance. It is not a stretch class with good music.
At its core, it is a somatic movement practice rooted in mat Pilates — the structural awareness, the breath, the connection to deep stabilising muscles — blended with somatic principles that shift the intention entirely. We are not here to correct the body. We are not here to make it lose weight, or change anything about it – We are here to listen to it.
Even the mirrors serve a different purpose than you might expect. In most fitness environments, mirrors are about comparison — checking form, watching yourself perform. In Connect, they are a tool for entrainment. For togetherness. When you glance up and see the room moving as one, something in your nervous system registers: I am not alone in this. The mirror becomes a portal into the community around you rather than a reflection of your own judgement. Our verbal cues are designed to support this too – directing attention inward, toward sensation and self-connection, so that when you do see yourself, you are looking with curiosity rather than criticism. Ideally, recognising yourself as someone to love.
This is the environment Connect is built to create. Not performance. Not perfection.
But Feeling. Together.
That’s why we move like this.
Still not tried a class? Book here!