A somatic therapist’s guide to releasing anxiety and fear from the body, with a free guided meditation you can practise at home.
If you live with anxiety or fear, you’ve almost certainly been told to manage it in your mind. Challenge the thought. Reason with the worry. Talk yourself down. Think positive. And if you’ve tried all of that and found it doesn’t really work — or works for a few minutes and then the feeling comes back — you are not doing it wrong. You’re using the wrong tool, on the wrong part of the problem.
Because anxiety and fear, so much of the time, don’t actually live in your thoughts. They live in your body. And they’re often not a problem to be solved at all — but energy that’s trying to move, and can’t.
Where anxiety actually lives
Notice where you feel anxiety. Not the worried thoughts — the actual feeling. For most people it’s unmistakably physical: a tight chest, a knot in the stomach, a buzzing under the skin, shallow breath, a sense of something coiled and waiting. Fear is the same. Before it’s ever a thought about the future, it’s a state in the body — a bracing, a gripping, an alarm running through you.
This is why thinking your way out so rarely works. You’re trying to resolve in the mind something that’s happening in the body. It’s a little like trying to talk a knot in your shoulder into untying itself — wrong tool, wrong floor of the building. The feeling was never in your thoughts, so your thoughts can’t reach it.
Emotion is energy in motion
Here’s the idea that changes everything, and it’s hidden in plain sight. Listen to the word emotion: e-motion. Motion. Movement is built right into it — because that’s what an emotion fundamentally is. Energy in motion.
A feeling isn’t a fixed thing that sits in you like a stone. It’s a movement — a wave of energy and sensation that’s meant to rise, be felt, reach its peak, and pass. Feelings are designed to move through us, the way weather moves across a sky. The cloud comes, the cloud passes, the sky clears.
You knew this once. A small child feels sad, cries fully, and two minutes later is playing again, completely clear. The feeling rose, moved through, and left. That’s how emotion is meant to work.
What happens when a feeling gets stuck
Most of us learned, early, to stop feelings from moving. Don’t cry. Calm down. You’re fine. Pull yourself together. So we developed a protective skill: we catch the wave as it starts to rise, and we press it back down. We brace against it. We hold it still.
But a blocked feeling doesn’t disappear. It can’t — it’s energy, and energy doesn’t vanish because you’ve decided not to feel it. It gets stuck. Held. Frozen partway through the movement it was trying to make, still carrying all its charge, still quietly trying to move.
And that stuck, unmoved emotional energy is very often what we come to experience as anxiety. The tight chest is holding something down. The knotted stomach is wrapped around a feeling that was never let through. The restless buzz is the charge of everything we didn’t let ourselves feel. Anxiety, so often, is simply feeling that got stuck — still looking for the way out.
Why fighting it makes it worse
When you brace against anxiety — push it down, try to force it away — you’re doing the very thing that created it: blocking a feeling from moving. You’re adding another layer of holding on top of what’s already held. Trying to get rid of stuck emotional energy by tensing against it is like trying to put out a fire by piling on more wood.
The only thing that truly resolves a stuck feeling is the thing it wanted all along: to be allowed to move. To rise, be felt, crest, and pass — to complete the motion it got frozen partway through. And that doesn’t happen in the mind. It happens in the body, when the body finally feels safe enough to let the feeling move.
What somatic healing actually does
This is the heart of somatic work. Rather than analysing your anxiety or arguing with it, a somatic approach helps you come down into the body — where the feeling actually lives — establish a real sense of safety, and then gently turn toward the stuck sensation instead of away from it. Not to force anything. Simply to stop blocking, and let the held energy begin, at last, to move through and out.
It’s done slowly, and safely, in small doses. Feeling moves through safety, never through pressure — so the work is gentle, titrated, and always within your control. Some feelings move through all at once when they’re finally welcomed; others need to be met a few times before they trust it’s safe to move. Either way, each time you turn toward a feeling and let a little of it move, you empty a little of what’s held, and you teach your body the thing it most needs to know: that feelings are safe to feel, and that they will move, if you let them.
Feelings are weather — and you are the sky
There’s a simple image at the centre of all this. Feelings are weather. They’re meant to move through you — to arrive, be felt, and pass. Not one of them is permanent, unless it’s held. And you are not the weather. You are the sky. Feelings move through you as clouds move through the sky, and however dark the weather, it was never bigger than the sky it moves through.
The anxiety was never you. It was only weather you’d been holding still for too long.
Try it for yourself
The guided meditation above walks you gently through this, step by step — coming into the body, establishing safety, and letting a stuck feeling begin to move, at your own pace and always within your control. It’s a practice, not a one-time cure: the more you let feelings move through you, the more your body learns that they’re safe to feel, and the less they get stuck as anxiety in the first place.
If you carry heavy or overwhelming emotion, this kind of work is best done with a trained somatic practitioner who can hold the safety with you — some feelings are too big to meet alone, and there’s no weakness in being accompanied.
Abi Beri is an IPHM-accredited integrative somatic therapist offering body-based work for anxiety, stress, and stuck emotion — in person across Dublin and Kildare, and online worldwide. If you’d like to explore working together, get in touch — there’s no pressure, just a conversation.
If you’re struggling with anxiety, fear, or overwhelming emotion and need support, you’re not alone. You can reach the Samaritans free, any time, on 116 123.
