Somatics 101: What Is Somatic Healing and What Happens in a Session?
Somatics is the art of attuning to your lived experience – the study of your body, your nervous system, and the mind-body connection as one whole, intelligent system. It’s the study of who you are beneath conditioning: the belief systems you’ve inherited, the survival strategies you’ve shaped around pain, and the quiet truths that live under it all.
Through somatic inquiry, you’re invited to listen closely to what your body is trying to communicate: what it wants to feel, what it needs to release, and what’s ready to move through you. Somatics invites you into the language of the body – sensation, emotion, movement, and memory. Each element is a doorway, offering insight into what your body holds and what your nervous system is seeking to express or release. Together, we create space to witness these experiences with curiosity, compassion and presence.
As a somatic practitioner, my role is to gently guide you inward – toward your sensations, your inner landscape, and the wisdom held within your body. I ask questions that open pathways to insight, helping you discover greater agency, clarity, and understanding. Together, we co-create new ways of being that truly support you – finding embodied resources and anchors that you can carry with you every day, empowering you to move through the world as the person you long to be.
Most people come to somatic work because they sense something needs to shift. For me, it was chronic anxiety, dissociation, leaning on old, worn-out coping habits, and feeling so disconnected that I questioned my own grip on reality. I felt overwhelmed, like I was spiraling beyond my control – and deeply aware that I needed to strengthen a trust muscle inside me that had never been built.
For you, it might show up as freezing in place, unable to move forward, stuck dead in your tracks. Or it could be the relentless urge to people-please, giving so much of yourself that there’s barely anything left – running on empty at 20%, propping yourself up just to keep going.
The entry point is often a feeling that something needs to change – and what’s beautiful is that it can. Change doesn’t happen all at once; it happens through practice. We become what we return to. By inviting in somatic resources and embodied anchors into your daily life, the insights from sessions linger, settle and integrate. This is how transformation takes root: gently, consistently, in the body.
Somatic self-exploration offers you greater agency, deeper understanding, and clarity around the patterns you live inside – why you move through the world the way you do. Why certain habits keep repeating. Why your shoulders tense the moment you speak. Why you hold your breath or bite back your tears. Why panic floods your system, or why you keep walking a path that no longer feels like yours.
Somatics invites you beneath the stories and conditioning –into contact with what’s real, raw, and alive within. Your body holds more information than your mind alone can access. Somatic exploration becomes the gateway: not to “fix” who you are, but to finally feel who you are.
I can hold space for this. I’ve walked this path – I continue to walk it. This work is not something I teach from the outside. It lives in me. I’m committed to traveling deeper, daily, and to meeting you wherever you are on your journey—with tenderness, attunement, and reverence for the wisdom your body already holds.
What does ‘Somatic’ mean?
The word somatic comes from the Greek sōma, meaning “the living body.” In the context of somatic healing, soma refers not just to the physical body, but to the body as a sensing, feeling, intelligent being – a vessel that holds memory, emotion, instinct, and the imprint of lived experience.
In much of modern culture, we’re taught to disconnect from this inner intelligence. We override, suppress, or numb. We're conditioned to prioritize productivity over presence, intellect over intuition, and to treat the body like something to control or fix. But the body is not the problem – it’s part of the solution.
Somatic healing invites us to come back into relationship with the body. Instead of analyzing or intellectualizing your experiences, somatic work asks: What happens when we slow down enough to feel? What becomes possible when we track sensation, when we notice how the nervous system responds, when we make space for what’s been held, hidden, or silenced?
This is the heart of body-based healing: learning to trust the language of the body, to regulate the nervous system through felt experience, and to access lasting transformation – not through force, but through presence.
Somatics vs Talk Therapy: What’s the Difference?
In somatic work, we follow sensation rather than story. We tune in to your breath, your posture, the tension in your shoulders, the clenching of your jaw, the collapse in your chest—each holding a message. The body becomes the doorway to healing, not something separate from it. Where talk therapy might help you understand a pattern, somatic therapy helps you transform it – by working with how it lives in your body.
Talk therapy asks, “Why do I feel this way?”
Somatics asks, “Where do I feel this, and what does it need?”
What happens in a somatic session?
A somatic session is not something you need to prepare for or perform in. It’s a space to soften, arrive, and explore what’s alive in you – at your own pace, in your own way. You don’t need to have the “right” words. You don’t need to have it all figured out. We begin wherever you are.
Each session is guided by what you’re bringing to the work: a theme, a question, a place where you feel stuck. That might be something like:
“I keep shutting down in conflict.”
“I want to stop people-pleasing, but I don’t know how.”
“I feel disconnected from my body.”
“There’s a grief I can’t seem to move through.”
“I don’t feel safe being seen.”
Whatever the thread, we’ll work with it somatically – through sensation, breath, awareness, and nervous system attunement.
Why We Work in Containers
One session can be deeply revealing – but true transformation happens over time, inside a safe and consistent space. That’s why I offer somatic coaching in containers of 5 or 12 weeks.
This creates a held arc for your nervous system to soften, open, and begin to reorganize. It gives us time to track the deeper patterns, explore the roots, and build embodied tools that support lasting change.
Each session is a conversation between your body and your awareness. We follow what arises in the moment – whether that’s a sensation, an emotion, a memory, or a sense of numbness. Sometimes we move toward the stuckness. Sometimes we just stay with the breath. There’s no rigid plan – only attunement.
A somatic session is not a performance. It's not something you have to get “right.” It’s a space to slow down, tune in, and come back into contact with yourself – without judgment, without pressure, and without rushing to make sense of it all.
Here’s what a session with me might include:
Landing in the body. We begin with gentle grounding – orienting to space, breath, and the present moment. This might include simple prompts, visualization, or body-based inquiry.
Tracking sensation. We follow what’s alive – not just the words you say, but the sensations beneath them. A tight jaw. A flutter in the chest. A sense of fog. We don’t push or pry; we listen.
Attunement + energetic support. As we work, I attune deeply to your system. I might offer gentle somatic cues, questions, or mirror what I sense.
Titration + regulation. We move in micro-moments, never forcing your system beyond what it’s ready to hold. This is slow, steady work –always with the intention of building safety and resilience.
Movement + completion. Your body might want to move. To cry. To sigh. To stay still. We allow that. Completion is a felt sense – the body knowing something has shifted, even subtly.
Integration. We close with reflection, grounding, and often stillness– giving space for what’s been stirred to settle and integrate.
How Might Somatic Healing Make Me Feel?
Sometimes, lighter. Sometimes, clearer. Sometimes it stirs what’s been buried – old grief, unmet need, forgotten rage – but always with care, pacing, and presence.
Over time, clients often describe feeling:
More emotionally regulated
Able to stay with themselves during hard moments
Less reactive or shut down
Deeply connected to their inner knowing
More alive, more whole, more here
It’s not about “getting over” your pain. It’s about being in right relationship with your body again –trusting it, honoring it, moving with it rather than against it.
Who Is This Work For?
Somatic healing meets you where you are – whether you’re coming in from a place of quiet curiosity or deep rupture. It’s especially supportive for those moving through major life shifts, relational ruptures, or experiences that have left you feeling fractured, frozen, or far from home.
This work is for you if:
Feel disconnected from your body, emotions, or inner sense of self
Struggle with anxiety, shutdown, or overwhelm that feels bigger than what your mind can explain
Have done talk therapy but still feel stuck in the same patterns
Are navigating heartbreak, grief, or life transitions that feel too big or too complex to hold alone
Find yourself dissociating or going numb when things get hard
Crave a deeper, more embodied connection to yourself – beyond overthinking, beyond performance
Work with Me 1:1: Releasing, Reclaiming, Rewilding
If something deep in you is stirring – a quiet ache, a knowing in your bones – this is your invitation to come closer. To step into 1:1 somatic work with me.
Here, we release what’s been carried for too long. We reclaim the parts of you that went quiet to keep you safe. We rewild – gently, honestly – by returning to your body’s truth, your instincts, your unedited self.
This is the remembering. The return. The beginning.
Somatic work offers a space to land. To reconnect. To re-inhabit your body at the pace your system can hold.
To heal is to return – slowly, gently, bravely – to the body. Somatic healing is the practice of listening to the body as the source of truth. It’s about attuning to what lives beneath the mind’s story. This work isn’t about forcing anything to change. It’s about building the capacity to stay –with sensation, with emotion, with whatever is asking to be felt.
