Why your body holds the key to healing — and how to work with it
You’ve done the talking. The journaling. The meditation apps. The self-help books.
You understand why you feel the way you do. You can trace it back to childhood, to that relationship, to the thing that happened. You’ve gained insight, developed awareness, learned the vocabulary of your own wounds.
And yet something hasn’t shifted.
The anxiety still lives in your chest. The exhaustion still weighs on your shoulders. The patterns you understand intellectually still run the show. You know what’s wrong — but knowing hasn’t fixed it.
If this sounds familiar, you’re not failing at healing. You might just be trying to heal in the wrong place.
Because here’s what I’ve learned as a somatic therapist: the body keeps the score, but it also keeps the key.
This guide will explain what somatic healing is, how it works, why it often succeeds where other approaches haven’t, and how you can begin working with your body’s wisdom today.
What Is Somatic Healing?
The word “somatic” comes from the Greek “soma,” meaning body. Somatic healing is any approach that works with the body — not just the mind — to process stress, trauma, and stuck emotional patterns.
Traditional therapy often focuses on the cognitive level: understanding your history, changing your thoughts, developing new beliefs. And this matters. But for many people, the deepest healing happens below the level of conscious thought.
Somatic healing recognises that your body isn’t just along for the ride. It’s an active participant in everything you experience. Emotions live in your tissues. Trauma gets stored in your nervous system. The stress you’ve carried shows up as tension in your jaw, tightness in your chest, a knot between your shoulder blades that never quite releases.
When we work somatically, we’re working with these physical patterns directly — not just talking about them.
Why Does the Body Store Trauma?
To understand somatic healing, we need to understand why the body holds onto difficult experiences in the first place.
When something overwhelming happens — whether it’s a single traumatic event or years of chronic stress — your nervous system responds. It mobilises energy to help you survive. Heart racing, muscles tensing, adrenaline flooding your system. This is the fight-or-flight response, and it’s designed to help you escape danger.
But here’s the problem: in modern life, we often can’t complete these survival responses.
You can’t run from a critical boss. You can’t fight back against a parent when you’re a child. You can’t flee from financial stress or chronic uncertainty. The energy mobilises, but it has nowhere to go.
So it gets stuck.
Dr. Peter Levine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing, observed that wild animals rarely develop trauma from life-threatening events. A gazelle that escapes a lion will literally shake afterward — trembling, convulsing — and then return to normal. The shaking discharges the survival energy.
Humans, with our big thinking brains, often override this natural discharge. We “hold it together.” We push through. We tell ourselves we’re fine. And the energy stays trapped in our tissues.
This is why you can understand your trauma completely and still feel it in your body. The body hasn’t processed it. The body is still, in some sense, waiting for the event to be over.
How Somatic Healing Works
Somatic healing works by helping your body complete what was interrupted.
This happens in several ways:
1. Building body awareness. Before we can release what’s stuck, we need to notice it. Somatic work often begins with simply paying attention to sensations — the tightness here, the numbness there, the subtle shift that happens when a certain topic arises. This awareness itself is healing.
2. Working with the nervous system. Your autonomic nervous system controls whether you’re in fight-flight-freeze or in a state of calm and connection. Somatic healing helps regulate this system — not through willpower, but through body-based practices that signal safety to the nervous system.
3. Allowing incomplete responses to complete. Sometimes, healing involves letting the body do what it couldn’t do at the time. The hands that wanted to push away. The legs that wanted to run. The voice that wanted to scream. In a safe, supported context, these impulses can finally express and complete.
4. Releasing stored tension. The chronic tightness, the held breath, the armored posture — these aren’t just habits. They’re the body’s way of bracing against a world that once felt unsafe. Somatic healing helps these patterns soften, not through force, but through creating conditions where the body feels safe enough to let go.
5. Building capacity. Healing isn’t just about releasing what’s stuck. It’s about building your nervous system’s capacity to handle life — to feel emotions without being overwhelmed, to experience stress without getting stuck in it, to stay present when things get difficult.
Types of Somatic Healing
Somatic healing isn’t a single technique — it’s a family of approaches. Here are some of the most well-known:
Somatic Experiencing (SE) — Developed by Peter Levine, SE focuses on tracking bodily sensations and helping incomplete survival responses complete. It works with the “felt sense” of experience.
Somatic therapy — A broader category that includes any therapy integrating body awareness and body-based interventions with psychological work.
Breathwork — Various practices using conscious breathing to release tension, shift nervous system states, and access stored emotions.
Body-based meditation — Practices like body scans, yoga nidra, and somatic meditations that develop interoception (awareness of internal body states) and help regulate the nervous system.
Energy healing — Modalities like Reiki, craniosacral therapy, and other subtle-body approaches that work with the body’s energy systems.
Movement practices — Approaches like authentic movement, tension and trauma releasing exercises (TRE), and somatic yoga that use movement to process and release.
In my own practice as a holistic therapist, I integrate several of these approaches — drawing on whatever serves the person in front of me.
Signs You Might Need Somatic Healing
How do you know if somatic healing might help you? Here are some signs:
• You understand your patterns but can’t seem to change them. Insight hasn’t translated into lasting change.
• Your body holds chronic tension. Tight shoulders, clenched jaw, stomach that’s always in knots — tension that won’t release no matter how much you stretch or massage.
• You feel disconnected from your body. Numb, floaty, like you’re watching life through glass. This dissociation is often the nervous system’s way of coping with overwhelm.
• Talk therapy has helped but hit a ceiling. You’ve gained valuable insight but something remains stuck.
• You experience anxiety or panic that seems to come from nowhere. The body is responding to something the mind can’t access.
• You’re exhausted in ways that sleep doesn’t fix. This bone-deep fatigue often signals a nervous system stuck in chronic stress or shutdown.
• You struggle to relax even when you’re “safe.” Your body hasn’t gotten the message that the threat is over.
When Rest Isn’t Enough: A Somatic Perspective
One of the most common experiences I see in my practice is exhaustion that rest can’t fix.
People come to me bone-tired. They’re sleeping but not resting. They know they’re burnt out, they’ve tried taking time off, and somehow it hasn’t helped. The fatigue runs deeper than physical tiredness.
From a somatic perspective, this makes perfect sense.
When your nervous system is stuck in a chronic stress state — or worse, in shutdown mode — rest doesn’t feel restful. Your body is still bracing, still vigilant, still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Lying on the couch doesn’t discharge the accumulated stress. It just gives you more time to feel how exhausted you are.
True restoration requires something different. It requires helping the nervous system shift out of survival mode. It requires giving the body permission to let down its guard. It requires working with the exhaustion, not just around it.
I created a somatic healing meditation specifically for this — for the tiredness that sleep doesn’t fix, the exhaustion that lives in your nervous system rather than your muscles. It’s called “You Can Rest Now.”
This meditation works with the nervous system directly — helping it learn that rest is safe, that you’ve done enough, that you can finally put down the weight you’ve been carrying.
What to Expect from Somatic Healing
If you’re new to somatic work, here’s what you might expect:
It’s often slower than you’d like. Somatic healing respects the body’s pace. Rushing can actually backfire, overwhelming a nervous system that’s already overloaded. We work in small, manageable doses.
Sensations might arise. Tingling, warmth, trembling, waves of emotion — these are signs of the body processing. They’re not problems to fix but movements to allow.
You might not “understand” what’s happening. Somatic work operates below the level of narrative. You might release something without ever knowing what it was. That’s okay. The body doesn’t need your mind’s permission to heal.
Results often show up in daily life first. Before you notice dramatic shifts, you might notice you’re sleeping slightly better, reacting less to triggers, feeling a bit more present. Small changes that accumulate.
Old symptoms might briefly resurface. As stuck material moves through, you might temporarily re-experience some symptoms. This is usually a sign of processing, not regression. A skilled practitioner can help you navigate this.
How to Begin Somatic Healing
You don’t need to wait for professional support to begin working somatically. Here are some ways to start:
Practice body awareness. Several times a day, pause and notice: What sensations are present in your body right now? Don’t try to change anything — just notice. This simple practice builds the foundation for all somatic work.
Work with your breath. Your breath is a direct line to your nervous system. Slow, extended exhales activate the parasympathetic response — the “rest and digest” branch. Try breathing in for 4 counts, out for 6-8 counts.
Use grounding practices. Feel your feet on the floor. Notice the support of the chair beneath you. Look around the room and name what you see. These simple practices signal safety to a nervous system stuck in threat mode.
Try somatic meditations. Guided practices that work with body sensation can help you develop somatic awareness and begin releasing stuck patterns. The meditation above is one place to start.
Move your body. Not exercise for fitness, but movement for release. Shake your hands. Roll your shoulders. Let your body move however it wants to move, without agenda.
Work with a somatic practitioner. While self-practice is valuable, working with a skilled professional can take you deeper — especially if you’re dealing with significant trauma or patterns that feel stuck.
Somatic Healing vs. Talk Therapy
I want to be clear: I’m not suggesting somatic healing replaces talk therapy. They work beautifully together.
Talk therapy helps you understand your patterns, develop insight, and work with the cognitive and relational aspects of your experience. Somatic work helps you process what’s stored in the body, regulate your nervous system, and shift patterns that operate below conscious awareness.
Many people find they need both. The insight from talk therapy gives context to what the body is releasing. The somatic work helps the insights actually land and integrate.
Think of it this way: talk therapy helps you understand why you’re stuck. Somatic healing helps you actually get unstuck.
Working Together
Somatic healing isn’t a quick fix. It’s a journey of coming home to your body — learning to listen to it, trust it, and work with its wisdom rather than against it.
If you’re ready to explore somatic healing more deeply, I work with clients online and in person, integrating somatic therapy with holistic approaches tailored to your unique needs.
We go at your pace. We respect what your body knows. And we trust that the same system that’s holding your stress also holds your healing.
Your body has been waiting for you to listen. Maybe it’s time.
In-person: Dublin | Naas | Newbridge
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