You can feel crushingly lonely in a crowded room. You can feel alone even when people are talking directly to you. You can feel isolated with a partner sleeping next to you, with family just a text away, with coworkers around you all day.
Because loneliness isn’t really about whether there are people around, is it? It’s about disconnection—and often, it’s disconnection from yourself first, from others second.
As a somatic therapist and holistic practitioner working with clients in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge, and online across Ireland and internationally, I’ve witnessed a profound truth: when you’re disconnected from your body—when you’re living up in your head, cut off from your felt experience—you feel alone even when you’re surrounded by love.
But embodiment—the practice of being present in and with your body—offers something unexpected: a path to feeling less alone, not by finding more people, but by discovering the constant companion you’ve always had.
This blog explores loneliness through a somatic lens—where it lives in your body, why embodiment matters, and how coming home to yourself can transform your relationship with being alone.
Understanding Loneliness: More Than Just Being Alone
Let’s start by making an important distinction: being alone and being lonely are not the same thing.
Being alone is a circumstance. It’s factual. It means no one else is physically present. You’re by yourself. That’s neutral.
Being lonely is a feeling. It’s emotional, somatic, sometimes existential. It’s the experience of disconnection, of not being seen or understood or met. It’s the ache of isolation even—or especially—when you’re not actually alone.
Here’s what’s fascinating: you can be alone without being lonely. You can be by yourself, in your own company, and feel completely at peace, connected, whole. That’s solitude, and it’s qualitatively different from loneliness.
And you can be lonely without being alone. This is often the worst kind of loneliness—feeling profoundly isolated while surrounded by people. Unseen in plain sight. Unmet even when others are trying to reach you.
So loneliness isn’t really about external circumstances. It’s about connection—and the first, most important connection is with yourself.
Where Loneliness Lives in Your Body: A Somatic Exploration
One of the core insights of somatic healing is this: emotions aren’t just abstract mental states—they have location, texture, and physical presence in your body. Loneliness is profoundly somatic.
Let’s explore where loneliness tends to live:
Loneliness in Your Chest: The Ache of Disconnection
For many people, loneliness lives primarily in the chest—that hollow ache, that heaviness, that sense of something missing. Your heart space is where you feel connection and disconnection most acutely.
The chest holds grief, longing, and the pain of wanting to be close to someone and not being able to. When loneliness settles here, it can feel like:
• A locked room where you’ve lost the key
• A cavity, an emptiness where connection should be
• Heaviness from carrying all the love you couldn’t give or receive
In body-centered therapy, we work with this chest loneliness not by trying to make it go away, but by being present with it—bringing breath and awareness to the space, acknowledging what’s there.
Loneliness in Your Arms: The Emptiness of Not Holding
Your arms are how you reach out, how you hold, how you touch. When you’re lonely, your arms often feel it—empty, wanting to embrace someone but finding only air.
Sometimes loneliness in the arms manifests as:
• A longing to hold or be held that goes unfulfilled
• Arms that have learned not to reach out anymore after too many rejections
• The physical memory of embraces you used to have but no longer do
Interestingly, one of the most powerful practices in somatic therapy for loneliness involves literally wrapping your arms around yourself—self-holding as a practice of embodied self-companionship. We’ll explore this more deeply later.
Loneliness in Your Belly: The Hollowness of Unfulfillment
Your belly—your abdomen, your gut—is where you often feel loneliness as emptiness. Not hunger exactly, but a hollow feeling, like something essential is missing.
From a holistic healing perspective, the belly is the seat of your vital energy and your gut instinct. When loneliness lives here, it’s often connected to:
• A sense of being unfed—not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually
• The experience of giving everything away and keeping nothing for yourself
• A void that no amount of food, activity, or distraction seems to fill
Loneliness in Your Throat: The Words That Can’t Be Spoken
Your throat is the bridge between feeling and expression. Loneliness often manifests here as:
• Words you want to say but there’s no one to say them to
• Feelings you want to express but keep swallowing
• The ache of being unheard, unwitnessed, unseen
Loneliness in the throat speaks to the isolation of having experiences, thoughts, and emotions that remain unexpressed because there’s no one who will truly listen or understand.
The Root Cause: Disembodiment and Disconnection
Here’s the paradox at the heart of loneliness: the first disconnection isn’t usually from other people. It’s from yourself.
When you live primarily in your head—analyzing, thinking, planning, worrying—you become disembodied. You’re literally not home in your body. You’re floating above your actual experience, cut off from your felt sense, your sensations, your aliveness.
And when you’re not present with yourself, when you’ve abandoned your own felt experience, you feel profoundly alone. Because you are alone—cut off from the most constant presence in your life, which is your own body.
How Trauma Creates Disembodiment
Often, disembodiment isn’t a choice—it’s a survival response. When your body doesn’t feel safe, when you’ve experienced trauma or overwhelming stress, leaving your body feels like the only option.
This is what trauma-informed somatic therapists call dissociation—a disconnect between mind and body that protected you when you needed protection. But what was once adaptive becomes a chronic pattern, and you find yourself living permanently disconnected from your embodied experience.
The result? You feel lonely even when surrounded by care, because you’re not actually present to receive that care. You’re not home to experience connection when it’s offered.
Your Body as Companion: A Revolutionary Reframe
Here’s the radical reframe that embodiment offers: You are never actually alone. Ever.
Your body has been with you since the moment you were conceived. It’s been with you through every experience you’ve ever had—every joy, every heartbreak, every moment of your life. When everyone else left, your body stayed. When you felt most abandoned, most isolated, most alone—your body was still there, breathing you, holding you, keeping you alive.
Your body is your most constant companion.
This might sound strange. You might think, “My body? My body is just… me. It’s not a companion—it’s just my body.”
But that perspective—body as object, as tool, as thing you manage—is precisely the problem. You’ve been treating your body like a vehicle you drive, not a companion you’re in relationship with. And that treatment creates the very disconnection that feels like loneliness.
What if you shifted that? What if you related to your body the way you’d relate to a dear friend who’s always been there for you?
Embodiment as Antidote: Somatic Practices for Loneliness
So how do you actually practice embodiment as a response to loneliness? Here are foundational approaches from integrative somatic therapy:
1. Body Awareness: Simply Noticing
The first practice is deceptively simple: notice your body. Right now. Bring your awareness to physical sensations.
Feel your feet on the ground. Feel the rise and fall of your breath. Feel the weight of your body in your chair. Feel the temperature of your skin, the beating of your heart.
This is embodiment at its most basic—coming into sensory awareness of your actual, physical experience. And when you do this, something interesting happens: you’re not alone anymore. You’re here, with yourself. You’re in relationship with your own felt experience.
2. Being Present With Loneliness (Not Fixing It)
When loneliness arises—when you feel that ache in your chest, that emptiness in your belly—the impulse is usually to make it go away. Distract yourself. Do something. Find someone. Fix it.
Somatic healing invites something different: be present with the loneliness. Feel where it lives in your body. Breathe into it. Say to yourself: “I feel this. And I’m here with it. My body is here, experiencing this loneliness, and I’m not abandoning myself in it.”
This is embodied self-compassion. Not rescuing yourself from difficult feelings, but accompanying yourself through them. That presence, that companionship with your own experience, shifts the quality of loneliness. You’re still feeling it—but you’re not alone in feeling it.
3. Self-Holding: Physical Self-Companionship
One of the most powerful practices for loneliness is literal self-holding. Your arms can hold you.
Try this: Wrap your arms around yourself. However feels natural—a full self-hug, hands on opposite shoulders, arms crossed over your chest. Feel the warmth, the contact, the gentle pressure.
This might feel awkward at first. That’s okay. Stay with it. Breathe into the holding. Feel your arms supporting you, your hands on your body, the sensation of being held—by yourself.
This isn’t the same as being held by another person—but it’s also not nothing. It’s real contact, real comfort, real presence. Your body can offer this to you. You can be your own source of holding.
4. Breath as Constant Presence
Your breath has been with you every moment of your life. It’s the most constant presence there is—more constant than any person, any relationship, any external circumstance.
When you feel lonely, bring your attention to your breath. Feel it moving in and out. Follow it into your chest, your belly. Notice how your body expands and contracts with each breath.
Your breath reminds you: you are alive. You are here. Your body is with you, breathing you, sustaining you. Even when everything else feels absent, breath is present.
The Nervous System and Loneliness: Understanding Your Body’s Response
From a trauma-informed somatic perspective, loneliness often indicates a particular state in your nervous system.
When you’re in a dorsal vagal state—the freeze or shutdown response—you feel disconnected, numb, isolated. This isn’t just emotional loneliness; it’s physiological disconnection. Your nervous system has gone offline, and you feel profoundly alone because you’re literally not in contact with your own vitality.
Sometimes loneliness manifests as sympathetic activation—anxious loneliness, desperately seeking connection but unable to settle into it, pushing people away even while longing for them.
Somatic practices for loneliness work by:
Regulating Your Nervous System: Bringing you out of freeze or fight-flight into ventral vagal engagement—a state where connection (with yourself and others) becomes possible.
Creating Safety in Your Body: Teaching your system that it’s safe to be present, to feel, to connect—first with yourself, then with others.
Rebuilding Body-Mind Connection: Returning awareness to parts of yourself that have been numbed or dissociated from, restoring your capacity to feel accompanied by your own presence.
Embodiment Doesn’t Replace Human Connection (But It’s the Foundation)
Let me be clear: I’m not saying that embodiment solves all loneliness, or that you don’t need other people. Human beings are social creatures. We need connection, touch, love, and belonging from others. That’s real. That matters profoundly.
But here’s what I am saying: if you’re disconnected from yourself first, no amount of connection with others will fill that void. You’ll still feel lonely even when surrounded by people who love you, because you’re not actually present to receive that love. You’re not home to experience the connection being offered.
Embodiment is the foundation. When you’re present in your body, connected to your felt experience, home in yourself—then you can actually receive connection from others. You can be with people and truly be there, not floating above the experience wondering why you still feel alone.
And perhaps most importantly: when you’re embodied, being alone doesn’t have to mean being lonely. You have yourself. That’s real companionship.
Somatic Therapy for Loneliness: Available Across Ireland and Online
Whether you’re in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge, elsewhere in Kildare, or anywhere across Ireland, somatic therapy for loneliness and embodiment is accessible through both in-person sessions and online work.
Online somatic therapy has proven remarkably effective for this work, as embodiment practices translate beautifully to virtual sessions. The core of the work—your relationship with your own felt experience—is something you can access wherever you are.
Through video sessions, I guide you into body awareness, help you locate where loneliness lives in your system, and support you in developing practices of self-holding, presence, and embodied self-companionship.
For those outside Ireland seeking holistic approaches to loneliness and disconnection, my online practice extends internationally, offering the same trauma-informed, body-centered work regardless of location.
When to Seek Support: Is Somatic Therapy for Loneliness Right for You?
Somatic approaches to loneliness may be particularly valuable if you:
• Feel lonely even when surrounded by people
• Live primarily “in your head” and feel disconnected from your body
• Experience loneliness as a physical sensation in your chest, belly, or throat
• Have difficulty being alone without feeling overwhelmingly lonely
• Notice that connection with others doesn’t quite land or fill the emptiness
• Want to develop a different relationship with being alone
• Recognize that your loneliness might be connected to trauma or nervous system dysregulation
• Are drawn to body-centered, holistic approaches to emotional healing
As a non-clinical holistic practitioner, I work with the understanding that you are the expert on your own experience. My role is to guide you back into your body, help you develop practices of self-companionship, and support you in discovering the constant presence you’ve always had—yourself.
Conclusion: You Are Not Alone—Your Body Is With You
Loneliness hurts. It’s one of the most painful human experiences—that ache of disconnection, of not being met, of feeling fundamentally alone in your experience.
But what if the antidote isn’t just finding more people or better relationships (though those matter deeply)? What if the antidote begins with something you already have—your own body, your own presence, your own capacity to be with yourself?
Embodiment doesn’t erase loneliness. You’ll still long for human connection. You’ll still ache for being seen and held by others. That’s natural. That’s human.
But embodiment changes your relationship with loneliness. It means you’re not abandoned in your loneliness—you’re there, with yourself, present to your own experience. Your body is with you. Your breath is with you. You are accompanied by your own awareness, your own presence, your own aliveness.
And from that foundation—from being home in your body, connected to yourself—you can reach out to others from wholeness rather than desperate emptiness. You can receive connection when it’s offered because you’re actually present to receive it. You can be alone without being lonely, because you’ve learned to be in relationship with the one companion who’s always been there.
Whether you’re in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge, elsewhere in Ireland, or connecting from anywhere in the world, somatic healing for loneliness is available. The work of coming home to yourself, of learning to be your own companion, of transforming your relationship with being alone—this work is possible.
Your body has been with you your entire life. It’s been waiting for you to come home. To notice it. To be present with it. To recognize it not as something you live in or manage, but as the constant companion you’ve always had.
You are not alone. Your body is here. And that changes everything.
About the Author:
Abi Beri is an IPHM-accredited Integrative Holistic Therapist specializing in somatic therapy, embodiment practices, and trauma-informed healing. Based in Ireland with practice locations in Dublin, Naas, and Newbridge, Abi offers both in-person and online sessions focused on nervous system regulation, body-mind reconnection, and holistic approaches to emotional wellbeing. With training in integrative somatic therapy, family constellation work, and multiple energy healing modalities, Abi provides compassionate, body-centered support for individuals struggling with loneliness, disconnection, and the desire to develop a deeper relationship with themselves. Currently pursuing an MSc in Counselling and Psychotherapy, Abi maintains a holistic, non-clinical practice that honors the body’s innate wisdom and capacity for healing. Learn more at blissfulevolution.com, somatictherapyireland.com, and familyconstellationseurope.com.
