Coming Home to Your Body: A Guide to Somatic Therapy

Understanding how your body holds your story, and how to begin listening

Before we begin, I want you to take a moment and notice. How comfortable does your body feel positioned as it is right now? Are you too warm, or too cold? How does your clothing feel against your skin? Are you hungry, or thirsty, or maybe full? Are your shoulders tense or hunching? Jaw clenching? As you read this very sentence, is your breath flowing, or is it held, short or shallow?

Notice. 

Breathe.

What Your Body Knows That Your Mind Doesn't

As you become aware of what is happening in this very moment in your body you may begin to feel a flood of sensation, and it may feel a little overwhelming. Notice that too. Notice how you are reacting to this new influx of information. Have you already begun to shift things a little, adjusting your seat, relaxing your shoulders, shuffling things around in your body so that it feels like more of a comfortable place to inhabit, or, are you simply now aware, yet still unresponsive? 

Put simply, coming home to the body is a two step process of noticing and responding. On paper this sounds deceptively easy, but as most of us have been conditioned from the very beginnings of our lives to ignore our bodily cues, and a very many more of us will have learned that safety exists in places outside the body, responding to our physical cues can feel like a confronting experience. Whilst our body is this deeply talkative entity that speaks through feeling, most of us have tuned out from the act of listening. And this is not a bad thing, it is not your fault, because often listening means being in contact with the all the visceral and sometimes uncomfortable sensations of the human soma, and when the mind is already overwhelmed and overstimulated, this can feel like just too much to handle. 

The Language of Your Body

So in this moment now, I want you to forgive yourself, for not noticing you are hungry, or tired, or tense. Take a breath in, exhale slowly, and take a moment to tend to what you noticed your body needed. Go have a sip of water, or put a jumper on, or shift your toes in your shoes and roll out your ankles. Close your eyes for a few moments, and rub the tight spot at your temples. Please, go tend to what your body is feeling, and then when you feel lighter, gentler and more cared for in your being, come back to me. 

I want you to know that its okay if being in your body, suddenly aware of all this sensation and feedback isn’t a pleasant or enjoyable experience. Coming home to this place you inhabit is a process that takes time. Like any relationship, it requires patience and trust, negotiating communication styles, accepting differences, and developing an acceptance of what is. With gentleness and practice, it becomes easer. The more time you spend listening and tending, the more your body can relax into your presence. It can start to feel like a trusted and familiar, even loving place to reside. 

Your Nervous System: The Missing Piece

Understanding why we alienate ourselves from our own somatic experience can help bridge the gap in communication between our minds and our bodies. The mind can be a punishing and highly cerebral place, but extending compassion rather than judgement is the first and single most important step to take on the journey back home. Our physical bodies are hard wired for survival. From its very first breath, your innately intelligent body began its process of collecting data from your surrounds, coding it into the fabric of your being with the only intent to keep you safe and well. Because this process began so early, it takes time and gentleness to understand where your nervous system may have maladapted for the sake of your safety, and to unravel its tight knots so you and your body can flow in a state of harmony once more.

When we experience hurt, rejection, fear, or any other number of these primal, protective emotions, particularly within our formative years, our nervous system takes note. And so begins the programming of our early lives that will determine our default responses long into adulthood. Safety, in a childhood moment of wounding may have meant numbing out to not feel the blow, or rejecting sensation to take you into the protective space of desensitisation. It may have also encoded a response of hyper vigilance (anxiety), or reactivity (anger), or a whole host of defensive mechanisms, all in the name of caring for your wellbeing. Yet, in adulthood, these encoded reactions can begin to hinder the ways in which we live and interact. They may keep us distant, or disconnected, when all we yearn for is intimacy. They may keep us heightened, when we all we crave is calm.

Let me paint a picture that may help shape things for you. When I, adult Lucienne, a professional, a partner, and a grown up who would like to think she has all the education, maturity and experience to respond in a sound way when confronted with conflict, maintaining a level head and seeing all sides of the story - do I? Me, a therapist? No, not always. I am learning, but I am also unlearning. I too have coding from my early years, that can still run the show when that part of me is activated. See, little Lucienne still lives inside me, and when my adult self senses a threat, even if it’s not threatening to me now, it triggers all the fears of this little Lu. A minor conflict takes her back to being berated by a primary school teacher for a mistake she didn’t know she was making, it takes her back to being left behind by a group of friends, it takes her back to all the places where she felt like she was being abandoned, punished and misunderstood. And what did she do then? She shut down. She went mute and retreated somewhere deep inside herself, because that place felt far safer than the pain and embarrassment of the rejection she was confronted with at the time. So, adult Lucienne, aware of this response mechanism (sometimes) can still play out this response. Even as a therapist, I can go numb, disassociate from my body, my emotions and my needs, and run from my present experience so as not to relive the pain. 

Now, I don’t want to live from the lens of little Lucienne anymore. I love her, but she’s not the most competent ruler of my very full life. I want to be able to connect with my partner, to listen presently with my clients, to process my experiences in real time, as they are happening to me, so I can resolve things as they need to be - so I can evolve. This means I have to partake in the ongoing process that is coming home to the body. This is life’s work for all us human beings, relearning what it is to listen to our feelings, reorienting toward our emotions, seeing them as teachers, not as threats. 

Beyond Talk Therapy: The Somatic Approach

That work is really what much of somatic therapy entails. In its essence, it is just a coming back to you. We move slowly, we go gently, into the parts of you that feel desensitised, or highly activated, or blockaded or sharp, and we start to enquire into the stories these parts of you hold. As your nervous system (your body protector) imprinted responses in moments of pain, these imprints serve like signals to return to, ones that give us the map to the landscape within. These memories that your body holds can be restructured by processing the emotions in a way you couldn’t when they first occurred, thus recoding the story they left behind. When the inner world changes, the outer world will follow, so when these body memories shift, so do the challenges or blockages we experiences in our external lives.

And so, the process of somatic therapy begins very much like we began at the top of this article. 

First, we breathe. We soothe the nervous system, through slowing things down, through conscious presence. Through noting what is happening in and around us, we come into the visceral feeling world of the soma. We might stay here for a short or long while, for moments or for  whole sessions, there is no right or wrong timeline, only patience and compassion as we start to repair the relationship between you and your body. Bodily safety can only be built through quality time and listening, and this is the corner stone of somatic therapy, a foundation that will be returned to, and hopefully carried with you far beyond just the space of a single session. 

When this relationship is rebuilt, and there is an establishment of trust between you (thinking mind) and you (feeling body), only then do we begin to descend deeper. We come back to those signals of sensation, those living body memories, and we begin to get curious about what they are saying. This is a process called somatic inquiry, a merging of talk therapy with breath and body scanning. It’s the mechanism of learning the language of your body. Just like those sensations you noted, of hunger, or temperature, or comfort, body memory holds similar signals that indicate toward emotional needs rather than physical ones. These are what we work to guide the next steps.

The Journey of Embodied Healing

What is deeply important to note about the somatic therapy is that just as each of us has a different physical makeup of skin and hair, appearance and genetics, each of our inner worlds of soma are just as vastly unique. No two journeys in will look the same. And so, where we move together from this point on is entirely determined your body’s lead. 

When a memory is touched, it will have a way it wants to be tended to, and I promise your body will guide us there. The therapist (in this instance myself) will have a toolbox of practices and prompts to help you uncover and safely process any unresolved feeling that may lay there, but really the work is in having us both step out of the drivers seat and letting your body take the wheel. 

The Path Forward: Living an Embodied Life

Processing may look like crying, it may look like moving, or shaking, or making sound. It may also look like having a conversation with that little you, or simply holding them for the length of time. It’s not up to me, nor is it up to you. The deep wisdom that lives inside you, as you, as your soma, is the only intelligence needed to guide you. It knows what it will need to heal, and to liberate you into living as a more in touch, more regulated, more feeling and thriving version of yourself. 

So breathe, because without even knowing it, you’ve got this. This is all the journey is. I cannot tell you what to expect, because the body’s wisdom lies deeper than prediction, but I can tell you it will be beautiful. Tender maybe, at times, as you learn to spend time with the long neglected parts of yourself, but it is you that you are meeting. It is only bringing you closer to who you really are.

The greatest liberation of somatic therapy is learning that you don’t need to outsource to anyone or thing outside of you. All the answers live within the fabric of your body, all somatic therapy does is help to clear the way.