Body-centered awareness and the wisdom that lives beneath words. Sometimes the body knows something the mind hasn't named yet.
Somatic practice is body-centered work that helps you reconnect with sensation, emotion, and the wisdom your body holds. It's experiential rather than analytical — focusing on what you feel, notice, and sense in the present moment.
The word "soma" comes from Greek, meaning "the living body." Somatic practice invites you to inhabit your body rather than observe it from the outside. Through attention to breath, sensation, movement, and stillness, you learn to listen to what your body is communicating — often before words can name it.
This work is especially supportive for people navigating stress, trauma, chronic pain, anxiety, or life transitions. It's also valuable for anyone who feels disconnected from their body or wants to deepen their capacity for presence, self-awareness, and resilience.
Polyvagal Theory helps us understand how the nervous system responds to safety and threat. Your nervous system moves through different states throughout the day. In the ventral vagal state — safe and social — you feel connected, grounded, and present. This is where healing, digestion, rest, and connection happen.
In sympathetic activation, your body mobilizes energy to respond to perceived threat: heart rate increases, muscles tense, breath quickens. Helpful in real danger, but costly when chronic. There's also the fawn response — a survival pattern of prioritizing others' needs, suppressing your own, keeping the peace through pleasing. Chronic fawning leads to burnout, resentment, and disconnection from your own needs. And in dorsal vagal shutdown, when the system perceives overwhelming threat with no escape, it collapses: numbness, disconnection, dissociation.
Somatic practice helps you recognize these states, build capacity to move between them with ease, and widen your window of tolerance — the range in which you can process emotion and experience without becoming overwhelmed or shutting down.
Interoception is your ability to sense what's happening inside your body — hunger, thirst, heartbeat, muscle tension, the quality of your breath, the sensation in your gut when something feels off. Many people have diminished interoceptive capacity due to trauma, chronic stress, or cultural conditioning that teaches us to override the body's signals.
Somatic practice rebuilds this capacity by directing attention inward with curiosity and without judgment. When you can sense what your body is communicating, you can respond to your needs before they become crises. Interoception is the foundation of self-awareness, emotional clarity, and embodied decision-making.
Trauma and chronic stress aren't just stored in memory — they're stored in the body. When a threat response can't complete, the energy remains held in the nervous system. This can show up as chronic tension, pain, hypervigilance, numbness, or difficulty feeling safe even when you are safe.
Somatic practice supports the body in processing and releasing held stress — not by retelling the story, but by attending to what the body is holding and creating space for it to shift.
Felt sense — a concept from Eugene Gendlin's Focusing — is the murky, not-yet-verbal knowing that lives in the body before it becomes thought or language. It's the sensation in your chest when you're about to make a decision, the tightness in your throat when something feels wrong, the warmth in your belly when something feels right.
Somatic practice teaches you to attend to felt sense with curiosity. By staying with these sensations without rushing to interpret or fix them, insights and shifts often emerge organically. This is the body's intelligence speaking.
Somatic practice isn't one technique — it's different doorways into the same core truth: the body holds wisdom that thinking cannot access. My work draws from Focalizing, Hakomi, Somatic Experiencing principles, Polyvagal Theory, and trauma- and shame-informed care.
Sometimes we work with felt sense — the sensations, images, and impulses that arise before they become thoughts. Sometimes we use gentle experiments. Sometimes we track sensation and impulse, following what the body wants to do and supporting the nervous system to complete responses that got interrupted.
The practice is largely experiential and inward-facing, carried out through co-meditation. I'm not directing you or telling you what to feel. I'm witnessing, tracking, and offering gentle invitations. We turn inward together.
Trauma-informed care means creating the conditions for safety, choice, and autonomy: consent and collaboration, nervous system attunement, and space for pause and integration. We don't rush. Integration happens in the pauses, the stillness, the moments of quiet recalibration.
Shame is one of our last cultural taboos — the thing we're most afraid to acknowledge. It shows up as perfectionism, not-enoughness, fear of being seen or taking up space. Shame-informed care creates space for what's been hidden. There's no pressure to perform, prove, or explain. The work is witnessing what is, with kindness.
Somatic practice can be supportive when you're navigating stress, held trauma, chronic pain, anxiety, perfectionism, shame, burnout, or life transitions. It's especially helpful when talk therapy has helped you understand patterns cognitively, but your body is still holding something. This work addresses what words cannot reach.