Somatic Therapy
About Somatic Therapy
The essence of somatic therapy is an intentional shift: the intention to approach rather than avoid, experienced at the embodied (experiential) level rather than just conceptually. Across the animal kingdom, we instinctively contract around painful experience and hold ourselves away from it. While this instinct can be protective (like not putting weight on an injured paw or foot), it can also freeze experience in place.
When the felt sense of danger is no longer happening in the present—but the nervous system, body-mind, and even the connective tissue (fascia) are still reacting as if it were—we remain stuck in the very suffering we long to heal. The beliefs bound up in those past experiences create filters that shape how we perceive the world, continually confirming the very pain we wish to release.
An Example
Imagine as a child you felt unseen, and therefore unloved. To find safety and belonging, you may have learned to overgive—leaving your own experience to attune more closely to others. Over time, you may have disowned your needs, desires, and even your own voice.
As an adult, this may show up as difficulty knowing what you want, or speaking it aloud. You might find yourself in relationships where you feel unsupported, burdened, or unseen, reliving the same old wound.
Simply knowing logically that “this isn’t true” is not enough to unwind the pattern. Healing requires learning, at the somatic level, that it is safe to be seen, safe to receive, and safe to want. It also means discerning who can meet you there and softening the subtle, unconscious barriers you’ve built to intimacy, connection, and support.
Beginning the Healing Journey
Somatic therapy creates a safe container around the parts of yourself you instinctively avoid, so it becomes possible to approach them. Being present there—actually arriving rather than observing from a distance—welcomes these parts back into your wholeness.
At the same time, somatic therapy orients you to where you are already whole—deeply resourced, free, and connected—and helps strengthen and expand your access to those places.
Instead of living from constructed mental models of how the world is or should be, you begin to deepen your contact with what is actually here—living and present within the body. This gradually frees awareness from being trapped inside rigid concepts, opening into a field of greater possibility.
As you do this, you begin to live more fully from your wholeness. From here, a sense of spaciousness, freedom, and peace gradually grows. The false division between self and other begins to dissolve, while your unique presence shines more authentically.
Unwinding Bound Patterns and Integrating Unintegrated Experiences
Being present with what you’ve avoided looks and feels very different from simply observing it. Because this move is not instinctive, it requires volition: an intentional turning toward what was once intolerable.
Somatic therapy uses gentle exercises and techniques—depending on your needs and depth of self-contact—to support this process. By entering into the rigid holding patterns at every level (somatic, emotional, conceptual, and more), you create the conditions for release.
Presence allows life to return to places where it had moved so deeply underground as to feel totally absent. Brainspotting, embodied meditation, and yoga all work at this somatic level and can be woven into the process, helping frozen energies thaw and your being reorganize into the present, opening into the field of possibility and potentiality that exists within the infinitude of now.