The word "somatic" simply means relating to the body. Somatic therapy is therapy that works with the body's experience, not in addition to the mind, but as the primary site of both the problem and the change. That might sound abstract until you're in a session and someone asks you to pause and notice what's happening in your chest right now.
Then it becomes very concrete, very quickly.
It starts with slowing down
Most of us spend very little time paying attention to our physical experience in real time. We narrate our lives, we analyse, we plan, but we move quickly through the felt sense of what's actually happening in our bodies from moment to moment. Somatic therapy begins with an invitation to slow that down.
In a session, you might be in the middle of talking about something (a relationship, a situation at work, a memory) and I'll gently ask you to pause. Not because the words aren't important, but because something just shifted in your body that's worth attending to. Maybe your jaw tightened. Maybe you felt a pull in your throat. Maybe your breathing changed in a way you weren't aware of.
That shift is information. Not metaphorical information: actual data about how your nervous system is responding to what you're exploring. And that's where the work begins.
What we're listening for
The body doesn't communicate in sentences. It communicates in sensation, in impulse, in the subtle language of constriction and release, of bracing and ease. Learning to listen to that language is one of the core skills somatic therapy builds.
In a session, you might be asked questions like:
Where do you feel that in your body? What does it feel like? Is it heavy, tight, warm, numb? If that sensation had a shape, what would it be? What wants to happen there? Does it want to move, contract, expand? What changes when you put your attention there?
These aren't abstract or philosophical questions. They're practical. The answers aren't right or wrong; there's no correct sensation to report. What matters is paying attention, staying curious, and noticing what's there.
"Your body has been carrying things your mind hasn't had words for. Somatic therapy is the process of learning to listen to what it's been trying to say."
What it is not
It's worth clearing up a few things, because misconceptions about somatic therapy are common.
Someone touching you, moving your body, or doing physical exercises with you
A conversation, with your body's experience invited into it. No physical contact.
Being asked to stop talking and "just breathe" instead
Words and body experience woven together, neither excluded, both informing the other.
Something woo, mystical, or anti-science
Grounded in neuroscience, particularly how the nervous system encodes and releases stress responses.
What can happen in the body during a session
When the body starts to feel safe enough to process what it's been holding, several things can happen. Some of them might feel surprising if you're not expecting them.
You might find yourself yawning, not from boredom, but because your nervous system is beginning to regulate downward, out of a heightened state. You might notice warmth, or tingling, or a sense of something releasing. You might feel an impulse to move: to shift your posture, uncurl your shoulders, take a deeper breath than usual.
Sometimes there are tears, not necessarily tied to a sad thought, but arising from the body releasing something it's been holding. Sometimes there's shaking or trembling, which is actually the nervous system doing exactly what it's designed to do: discharging activation that has nowhere else to go.
None of this is manufactured or performed. It happens organically when the conditions are right, when the pace is slow enough, the attention kind enough, and the safety real enough for the body to start trusting the process.
The pace is different from talking therapy
If you've had experience of talking therapy where the rhythm is brisk and forward-moving, one topic flowing to the next, somatic work can feel surprisingly slow at first. You might spend a long time on a single sensation. You might return to the same moment several times from different angles.
This isn't inefficiency. The nervous system changes slowly, and it changes in response to experience, not to being rushed. Slowing down is not a detour. It is the route.
Most people find, after a few sessions, that the pace becomes less strange and more like relief. There's often something deeply restful about being asked to stop narrating for a moment and just be with what's there.
It works alongside other approaches
Somatic therapy doesn't replace the thinking or the talking. In my practice, it sits alongside Internal Family Systems work, polyvagal theory, integrative therapy, and sometimes hypnotherapy, woven together according to what each person needs, rather than applied as a fixed method.
The body and the mind aren't separate departments. What happens in one affects the other. Somatic therapy simply insists on including both in the room.