danielle-wiggins

What is somatic movement? Moving through what words can't reach

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 08:15:02 GMT

Somatic movement is one of those phrases that keeps drawing people in without ever quite explaining itself. My read is that it names something a lot of us are missing: permission to move without being evaluated.

At its simplest, somatic movement is movement practiced with your attention on the internal experience rather than the external shape. What makes it interesting is not the technique itself. It is what becomes available when nobody, including you, is grading the result.

I want to give you a clear picture of what somatic movement is, what it actually looks like in practice, what it can honestly offer, and where I think the popular version of it goes too far.

In case you are new here, I am Danielle Wiggins, and my practice is rooted in somatic psychotherapy , movement, and embodied practice. I support reflective adults who understand themselves well and still feel far from their own bodies. Dance and movement were how I survived my own early life long before they became part of my clinical training. I come to this work with a deep respect for what movement can make possible. I also will not oversell it to you.

What is somatic movement?

Somatic movement is movement done with attention turned inward. You are noticing sensation, weight, breath, effort, and ease as they happen, rather than tracking whether you are doing it right.

That inward turn changes the nature of the activity. The same gesture can be exercise or somatic movement depending on where your attention is. Rolling your shoulders while mentally drafting an email is one thing. Rolling them slowly enough to notice where the movement catches, where it feels smooth, and what happens in your breath as you move is another.

Somatic movement vs. exercise: why the internal experience is the point

Exercise usually has an external measure: distance, weight, repetitions, duration, how the shape looks. Those measures are useful, and I am not against them.

Somatic movement removes the measure. There is no target position, no count, no progress to chart. What replaces the measure is curiosity: what do I notice? What changes? What does this want to do next? And as I follow those signals and impulses, what begins to take shape? Is there a story here? A feeling? A need asking to be noticed?

This is harder than it sounds for people who are used to being good at things. When you take away the standard, a lot of people feel briefly lost, then bored, then something else entirely. That third thing is where the practice actually starts: when we stop monitoring ourselves so closely and lose track of whether we are doing it right, we can begin to actually inhabit the movement.

Somatic movement and yoga: similar shapes, different question

I love this topic, and I am asked about it constantly: what’s the difference? For the record, I’ve been practicing yoga for almost two decades, and I’ve taught it on and off for eight years.

You can absolutely practice yoga somatically, and many people do. The postures are not the issue. The question you are holding while you move is.

In a more form-oriented class, the implicit question may be whether your body is arriving at the pose. In a more contemplative or philosophically grounded class, there may already be a great deal of depth, inward attention, and invitation to notice what is happening within you. Somatic movement is not claiming ownership of that kind of listening. Its particular focus is on following what your body is telling you as it goes, including when it declines to go. If a shape does not want to happen today, that is information rather than failure.

The other difference is often the destination. Some yoga classes are structured around a sequence, a peak posture, or a particular quality of experience. Somatic movement is less interested in getting somewhere. It follows. Sometimes that leaves you more settled, and sometimes more activated. Neither outcome means the practice went well or badly.

What are examples of somatic movement?

People expect the examples to be exotic. They are mostly not. The range runs from movements nobody would notice to movements that need an empty room, and both ends are legitimate.

Small movements: a hand toward the chest, an urge to turn away, a shift in posture

A lot of somatic movement can be subtle enough to be nearly invisible.

Letting a hand come to rest on your sternum and staying there long enough to notice what that contact does. Noticing an impulse to turn your head away from something and letting the turn actually happen instead of overriding it. Slowly shifting your weight from one hip to the other and tracking what changes in your breath. Letting your jaw be as tense as it currently is, without trying to release it, and noticing what happens when you stop instructing it.

These sound almost too minor to matter. In my experience, some of the most meaningful shifts happen here, particularly for people who have spent years managing themselves. Small is not a compromise here. Small is often the size a guarded system can begin to trust.

Bigger movements: dance, sound, imagery, and leaving the chair

Then there is the larger end, which I love and which is not for everyone every day.

Standing up and pushing hard against a wall. Making a sound without deciding in advance what sound it will be. Letting your body move to music with nobody watching, including yourself—which I mean as moving without the internal camera running. Shaking. Reaching. Walking slowly around the room. Working with imagery until the image begins to change your posture on its own.

This end of the range can give strong feeling somewhere to go. Anger often needs more room than a chair allows. Grief sometimes does too, which can surprise people who imagine grief as only quiet.

How to tell which size you need today

There is no rule, but there is a useful question: does the bigger version feel like relief, or like performance?

If a larger movement feels like something your body is already leaning toward, follow it. If it feels like an assignment you are about to complete correctly, go smaller. The instinct to do the impressive version of a practice is often the same instinct that made the practice necessary.

Depleted days may call for smaller movement.

Charged days may want more range. Neither is more advanced than the other.

Do somatic movement practices release trauma?

Something real can happen in somatic work. People shake, cry, feel heat move through them, and afterward say that something loosened. I believe them. What I am more cautious about is the story we attach to those experiences.

Paying sustained attention to sensation can change how we relate to it. Slow movement, breathing, focused attention, and having another person stay present with us can all affect how an experience unfolds. None of that requires us to conclude that a traumatic memory was literally stored in a muscle and then released from it.

This distinction matters because interpretation can become powerful very quickly. If a person is shaky, emotionally open, and trusting you, telling them that a sensation or movement is evidence of an event they do not remember can cross into suggestion.

Psychology has a long and difficult history with recovered-memory practices, in part because memory is reconstructive and can be influenced by what we are told and what we expect to find.

I am also wary of explanations that cannot really be disproven. Shaking means release. Not shaking means you are armored. Symptoms returning means there is another layer. When every possible outcome confirms the theory, it becomes difficult to tell the difference between a useful metaphor and a factual claim about how memory works.

So I think it helps to keep two claims separate. Somatic work may help with trauma symptoms is a reasonable thing to say. Somatic work releases trauma stored in the body makes a much more specific claim about mechanism, and the evidence for that claim is far less clear.

A good practitioner should be able to describe what they are doing without turning your body into a decoder ring. The work can still be meaningful without pretending that every tremor, posture, or sensation is a buried memory announcing itself.

What I can say honestly: what tends to shift, and what I won't claim for you

Here is what I will say. People who practice somatic movement over time often report more room around difficult experiences, more choice within them, and more trust that they can move through something without being flattened by it. Long-held tension patterns sometimes shift. Emotional range can widen. Creative work can open back up.

Here is what I will not say. I will not tell you that a specific movement removes a specific trauma. I will not interpret your body’s signals as proof of an event. I will not promise that a practice, done consistently enough, will resolve what you are carrying on a predictable schedule.

If you experience something as a release, I will absolutely call it that with you. The word is yours to use. My objection is to someone else assigning the meaning before you have had a chance to find it for yourself.

Can I practice somatic movement at home, and how often?

Yes, and I would encourage it, with one adjustment to how you are probably thinking about it.

How you practice matters more than how long

Two minutes of genuinely noticing what happens as or after you move can be more useful than thirty minutes spent monitoring whether the practice is working. For many people, brief and frequent is easier to sustain than long and scheduled.

A reasonable starting point is a few minutes on most days, ideally at a time when you are not already depleted. Begin with something small and specific. Let your attention follow rather than direct.

If you want a concrete way in, try this. Stand or sit, and let one arm rise as slowly as feels tolerable. Not slowly because you are trying to perform slowness correctly, but slowly enough that you can notice where the movement stops feeling smooth. Notice what your breath does. Notice the impulse to speed up and finish. You do not have to obey it, and you do not have to resist it either.

That whole thing can take ninety seconds! It counts.

When to do this with support instead of alone

If turning attention inward consistently brings on flooding, panic, or dissociation, that is a sign to do this with support rather than alone. That is not a personal failing. It is information about what your system can comfortably stay with right now, and that can change over time. Working with someone is a different arrangement entirely, and my overview of somatic therapy explains what changes when another person is in the room.

And if the practice has become one more item you are failing to complete correctly, stop for a while. A practice that has turned into self-surveillance is working against its own purpose. I would rather you take a month off than add somatic movement to the list of things you are behind on.

What does somatic movement offer when words stop being enough?

Some experiences do not organize into language, or not yet.

Grief is the clearest example. People come to me able to narrate a loss with complete accuracy and still feel no real relief. They have told the story many times. The telling has stopped doing much. That is often the point where movement becomes useful, because it does not require the experience to be already understood in order to give it somewhere to go.

Ambiguous loss works this way too. The losses without a funeral: a relationship that changed shape, a body that no longer does what it did, a version of your future that quietly stopped being available, a person still living who is no longer reachable. Those griefs are hard to talk about partly because language keeps asking you to justify calling them grief. Movement does not ask for the justification.

This is a large part of my grief therapy work, and it is why I rarely start there with words. The goal is to stop having to hold it entirely in your head, not necessarily to move through it faster.

What this looks like when grief is the reason you came

It usually starts smaller than people expect.

Often the first thing we find is not grief itself but the effort of containing it: a held breath, a set jaw, a chest that has been braced for months. We stay with the containing rather than trying to get underneath it, because the bracing is doing a job and it deserves to be understood before it is asked to change.

What may shift first is not the intensity of the loss. It is how alone you are with it inside your own body.

That is a smaller claim than the internet often makes, and in my experience it is the one that actually holds.

What could somatic movement give somewhere to go?

You already know a lot about yourself. That knowledge is not the problem, and it is not going to waste. It may have simply reached the edge of what understanding alone can change, and some part of you noticed that a while ago.

What I offer is a space where you do not have to explain first. Where a movement can happen before you know what it means, and where nobody, including me, is going to hand you an interpretation you did not arrive at yourself. I work with adults navigating trauma, chronic illness, transition, and grief that has not followed anybody's timeline, using movement and creative practice alongside conversation.

My practice is in Santa Monica for in person sessions, and I also see clients virtually across California, including people in Mar Vista and Playa Vista who want to work from a room where they already feel able to move.

Book a consultation

What is somatic movement therapy? Moving as a path back into the body

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 08:15:30 GMT

There is a moment I see often in a first session. I invite someone to move, even slightly, and they freeze. Then they ask some version of the same question: what am I supposed to do? It makes sense. Almost every movement context most of us have been in comes with a shape to match and someone watching to see if we matched it.

Somatic movement therapy asks something different. It is less interested in what your movement looks like and more interested in what it feels like from the inside – what you notice, what emerges, and what your system does when it is given a little room. If you have been curious about this work but suspect you would be bad at it, I want to take that worry off the table early.

Here is what this work is, what happens in a session, what it can support, and how to find it where you are.

In case you are new here, I am Danielle Wiggins, and my practice is built around somatic psychotherapy , with movement and creative practice woven through it. I support capable, self-aware adults who are used to pushing past their own capacity.

Movement was my first language long before it was my profession, and my own experience of illness and grief taught me the difference between overriding a body and pacing with one. That difference shapes how I work.

What is somatic movement therapy?

Somatic movement therapy is therapeutic work in which movement is the primary way we explore what is happening, with conversation woven in to help us notice, understand, and integrate what emerges. The movement is not a break from the therapy. It is the therapy. Instead of describing an experience only in words, we let posture, gesture, weight, breath, and impulse take part in expressing it too.

The word somatic points to the body as it is lived from within. So the question is not whether a movement looks right or good. We are interested in what you notice as it happens, what changes, what wants to continue, and what the movement itself may be expressing. A gesture can sometimes show us something before there are words for it—a sense of chaos, overwhelm, resistance, reaching, pulling away—and part of the work can be noticing that shape and later putting language to what emerged.

This is not a performance, and it is not a workout. Nobody is counting reps. Much of what we do might be almost invisible from across a room.

What does a somatic movement therapist do?

Mostly, I pay close attention and slow things down.

I notice the small things that tend to pass unnoticed: your hand traveling toward your sternum while you describe something painful, the way your breath catches at a particular word, a subtle turn away that happens before you have consciously decided anything. I might name what I see, gently, and ask whether you want to stay with it.

I also hold structure. That means tracking your capacity, noticing when curiosity begins to tip into overwhelm, and helping us pull back before we cross that line. Depth without containment is not brave. It can become too much, too fast, and make it harder to stay connected to what is actually happening.

What I do not do is tell you what your movement means. If your shoulders lift, I am not going to tell you that you are carrying your family’s expectations. I am going to get curious with you about what happens next.

How is somatic movement therapy different from yoga or Pilates?

Yoga and Pilates can both be deeply somatic, depending on how they are taught and how you practice them. Plenty of people first meet their own interior through a yoga class, and I would never want to talk anyone out of that.

There are already enough people telling us that we are moving our bodies the wrong way. I am not interested in adding to that. Life is hard, and we shelter where we can. If a movement practice helps you feel more present, more connected, more alive, or simply gives you somewhere to land for an hour, I think that matters.

The differences here are not about one form of movement being better than another. They are mostly about frame and relationship. A class usually has a form to move toward, a sequence to follow, and a teacher guiding a group. Somatic movement therapy has no shape you are supposed to arrive at. It happens inside a therapeutic relationship where your history, your emotional life, and your patterns can all become part of the work.

One of the things I have come to value most about this work is the way it helps you become more fluent in your own internal language: the particular way your body says yes, no, not yet, enough, more, I’m bracing, I’m disappearing, I’m here. Yoga, Pilates, and other movement practices can absolutely deepen that relationship with yourself. In somatic movement therapy, that listening becomes the central focus of the session. We pay attention to how your body communicates through tension, impulse, breath, gesture, pacing, reaching, pulling back, settling, or stopping.

Over time, you begin to recognize what those signals mean for you. Not because I hand you a dictionary for your body, but because we keep paying attention to what your own system is showing us.

There is also the question of what happens when something difficult surfaces. In a class, there may not be space to stop and explore it, and you may need to tend to that experience on your own. In therapy, what surfaces can become part of the work itself, and you do not have to make sense of it alone.

What happens in a somatic movement therapy session?

Less choreography than you are imagining. Most movement-specific sessions start the way any therapy session starts. You tell me, in a few brief words, what is going on—or you show me. Then we follow it.

Movement enters when it seems useful, and often it starts small. You might stay in your chair the entire time. You might lie down and spend time making contact with the floor. You might stand up once, just to notice what standing changes. You might discover that a particular gesture, repeated slowly a few times, brings up something that words have been circling for weeks.

What techniques might we use together?

Tracking often comes first: following sensation as it shifts, without rushing to explain or name it.

Pacing, which is closer to a principle than a technique, means approaching charged material in small doses and coming back out again, rather than going as deep as possible as quickly as possible.

Resourcing means finding something that feels steadier—a place in your body, an image, a memory, a physical anchor like a heavy stone, or a quality of contact with the floor—and letting your attention rest there before we go further.

Then there is completing a movement. Sometimes the body starts something and never gets to finish it: an arm that began to reach, a push that never happened. Letting that movement continue now, slowly and with attention, can sometimes shift the way an experience is held.

We might also use sound, imagery, drawing, or rhythm. My own movement-based expressive arts training brings creative practice alongside clinical work, and for people who think more easily in images, sound, or movement than in sentences, that can sometimes open a different route into the work.

Do I have to be a dancer or good at movement?

No. And the worry itself is usually worth talking about.

Most people who ask me that question are describing something bigger than movement. They are describing a lifetime of being evaluated, of self-monitoring, of only doing things they can already do well. If that is you, then the discomfort of not knowing what you are supposed to do is not an obstacle to the work. It is a direct doorway into it.

Many of the people I work with are highly capable adults—professionals, artists, and deeply reflective people—who have not felt unselfconscious in their bodies since childhood. They are used to watching themselves, evaluating themselves, correcting themselves. Part of this work is practicing something different: simply being in a body without constantly watching yourself be in it.

We start where you are, at whatever size of movement feels possible, including very small.

Can somatic movement therapy help with anxiety, pain, or chronic illness?

It can support all three, and I want to be specific about what support means, because the wellness world tends to overpromise here.

With anxiety, what often shifts first is not necessarily the frequency of anxious moments, but your relationship to them. Rather than every sensation becoming evidence of an emergency, you develop more capacity to notice activation, stay with yourself through it, and choose a response. That is a real change, even when the anxiety has not vanished.

With chronic tension and pain, movement can help interrupt long-held bracing patterns and restore some sense of choice in a body that has felt like it operates on its own. What I will not promise is that your pain is purely emotional, or that the right practice will resolve it. Sometimes pain has a medical cause, and it deserves medical attention alongside this work.

With chronic illness, this is personal territory for me. Much of my work is chronic illness therapy , and what illness taught me is that the body is not a project I can perfect if I just do everything correctly. There are things we can influence and change, and there are things we have to learn how to meet. Movement can help with both, but only if it stops pretending to be a cure.

What if my body has limits that movement has to respect?

Then those limits shape the work, and they are not a problem to be solved before we begin.

Fatigue, pain, flares, restricted range of motion, days when getting to the session was the whole accomplishment: all of this is workable. Somatic movement therapy can happen lying down. It can happen entirely in imagination, tracking a movement you picture without physically performing it. It can consist of one small gesture and a lot of listening.

Honoring limits is not a lesser version of this work. For people who learned to override their own signals in order to keep functioning, learning to pace can be one of the most significant changes of all.

How long does somatic movement therapy take to work?

Slower than you want, and often faster than you expect in one specific way.

People frequently notice something in the first few sessions. A breath that drops lower than usual. A moment of feeling present that lasts longer than it used to. Those moments are real, and they are also not the finish line.

The larger changes—the ones where your default responses begin to shift—usually take more time and unfold unevenly. This kind of change tends to happen through repetition, practice, and relationship. It hardly happens through a single insight. Most people I work with begin weekly, and we adjust the rhythm as we go.

I would be wary of anyone offering you a precise timeline. Healing has more to do with developing a trustworthy relationship with yourself than with reaching a fixed state by a particular date.

How do I find somatic movement therapy near me?

The search can be genuinely confusing, partly because the titles people use do not always tell you exactly what kind of training, licensure, or scope of practice they have. Two things will get you most of the way there: understanding what the credentials mean, and asking good questions during the consultation.

Sorting out credentials and scope

Somatic movement educators, somatic practitioners, and licensed psychotherapists who work somatically are not the same thing, and the distinction matters if you are bringing trauma, grief, or a mental health diagnosis into the room.

A movement educator may be excellent at what they do and still be working outside the scope of mental health care. That is not a criticism of their work. It is a question of training, scope, and accountability: what is this person qualified to work with, and what happens if something emerges that requires mental health care?

If your reason for looking is stress, creative block, or wanting to feel more at home in your body, a somatic movement class or practitioner may be a great fit. If your reason involves trauma, grief, an eating disorder, dissociation, or an active mental health condition, look for a licensed mental health professional who works somatically.

Questions worth asking in a consultation

Bring these to any consultation, including mine:

How do you pace things when something intense comes up?
What happens if I want to stop in the middle of something?
Do you use touch, and how is consent handled?
How do you think about what a movement or sensation means?
What is your training, and what kind of consultation or professional support do you use in your work?

That fourth question tells you a great deal. If someone answers with certainty about what your particular tension signifies, you have learned something useful about how they work. Curiosity about your experience and confident interpretation of it are very different stances, and only one of them leaves the meaning with you.

What would somatic movement therapy give your body room to do?

You have been holding a lot, and holding it well. That is usually the problem. The competence that got you here is the same competence that can keep you a half step ahead of yourself: managing, anticipating, staying composed. Nothing about that is a character flaw. It kept you going. It also kept you tight.

In my practice, we make room instead. I work with adults navigating trauma, grief and ambiguous loss, major transitions, and the daily reality of living with a body that will not be managed, using movement, sensation, and creative practice alongside conversation. Not to fix you, and not to get you calm, but so more of you has somewhere to go.

I see clients in person in Santa Monica , and I work virtually with people throughout California, including adults in Culver City and Palms who prefer to move in a space that already feels like their own.

Book a consultation

What is somatic therapy? And how movement helps regulate your nervous system

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:00:08 GMT

Most people who find their way to this question are not short on self-knowledge. You can name your attachment style. You know which part of your history shaped which reaction. You have language for all of it. And still, in the moment, your jaw tightens, your breath goes shallow, and you handle it, the way you always have.

Somatic therapy starts somewhere else. Instead of beginning with the story and working toward the body, it begins with what is actually happening in you right now, and lets meaning arrive later, if it arrives at all. That shift sounds small. In practice it changes almost everything about how a session feels.

Below, I want to walk you through what somatic therapy actually is, what happens in a room, what movement has to do with your nervous system, and where the honest limits of this work are.

In case you’re new here, I’m Danielle Wiggins. My work is rooted in somatic psychotherapy , and I support thoughtful adults who have done years of inner work and still feel braced, distant, or half a step ahead of themselves. My approach is relational, trauma-informed, and slower than most people expect. I am not here to get your nervous system into a particular state. I am here to help you build a relationship with it that you can trust.

What is somatic therapy?

Somatic therapy is psychotherapy that treats bodily experience as part of the conversation rather than a side effect of it. Sensation, breath, posture, gesture, impulse, and movement all get to participate. So do thoughts, memories, relationships, and everything else you would bring to any other kind of therapy. The body is not a replacement for talking. It is an addition to it, and often the part that has been missing.

The reason this matters is simple. Most of the people I work with are not short on insight. They have read the books, listened to the podcasts, and done previous rounds of therapy. They can explain themselves with unusual precision. What they describe, over and over, is a gap between understanding something and being able to live differently with it. Somatic work lives in that gap.

A metaphor I like to use with clients is that there’s a difference between knowing a walk in nature will make you feel good and actually taking your body on that walk. You find the tree, feel the texture of the bark, hear the sounds around you, notice the smells and the colors. You experience the felt sense of being there. That’s a whole different kind of knowing.

Actually inhabiting an experience, again and again, can be medicine. Talking about why something might be healing is a start. But there’s a whole other world of letting the body experience it.

Somatic therapy vs. talk therapy

In a lot of talk therapy, the movement is from event to interpretation. Something happened, we make sense of it, and the sense we make is supposed to loosen its hold. That works more often than people give it credit for.

In somatic therapy, we might start from the fact that your shoulders climbed toward your ears the moment you began telling me about a particular conversation. We slow down there. Not to interpret it, and not to fix it, but to stay with it long enough to see what it does next. Sometimes it softens. Sometimes it gets stronger. Sometimes an image arrives, or a sentence you didn’t know you were carrying, or an urge to push something away with your hands.

The pace can be different, too. Talk therapy can cover a lot of ground in fifty minutes. Somatic work often covers very little ground, very slowly, and that slowness is the point. We’re not asking your nervous system to reorganize through understanding something in a short amount of time. We tend to it through repetition, relationship, and time.

The word somatic: treating the body as information, not proof

Somatic comes from the Greek word for body, soma. In this work, it refers especially to the body as it is experienced from the inside. Not the body as an object you evaluate in a mirror, but the body you are living in as you read this.

Here is where I part ways with a lot of what gets published about this work. There is a popular version of somatic therapy that treats the body as a decoder ring. Your hips are holding grief. Tight shoulders mean you carry too much. Shaking means a specific trauma just left you. I understand the appeal. Certainty feels like relief when you have been confused for a long time.

But I do not want to tell you what your body means before we have actually listened to it. Sensation is information worth exploring, not evidence of a conclusion I have already reached. When a client tells me their chest feels tight, my first question is not what that symbolizes. It is what happens if we stay with it, what shifts, what wants to move, what becomes possible afterward. The meaning, when it comes, tends to come from them.

What do we do during somatic therapy?

Most sessions look like a conversation with pauses in it. We talk. Something lands. I might ask you to notice what happened in your body just then, or where you feel most settled right now, or whether there is an impulse you are talking yourself out of. You answer, or you do not know, and we sit with not knowing for a minute, which can be more useful than rushing toward an answer.

What a first session usually looks like

People are often braced for a first session to be intense, so it is worth saying plainly that it usually is not.

We start with what brought you here, in whatever order it comes out. I am listening to the content, and I am also noticing pacing: where you speed up, where you flatten out, where you check my face to see how it is landing. None of that gets named as a verdict about you. It is just early information about how your system organizes itself in a new relationship.

Somewhere in there I will probably ask a small question about sensation. Not because sensation is the point of the first hour, but because I want to find out what happens when attention turns inward. Some people find something immediately. Some people find nothing and feel a flicker of failure about that. Finding nothing is a completely workable starting place, and it is far more common than the internet suggests.

We also cover the practical scaffolding: what stopping looks like, how often we might meet, what you want to be different. You do not need to arrive with a clear goal. Wanting the inside of your life to feel less effortful is enough of a place to begin.

Examples of somatic therapy: what a session can include

Tracking sensation is the baseline. That means noticing temperature, pressure, tension, movement, and stillness as they change, without immediately deciding what any of it means.

Orienting is another. Looking around the room, letting your eyes land where they want, noticing that you are here and it is now. It sounds almost too simple to matter. For a system that has been scanning for threat, it can be a genuine relief.

We might work with pacing, which means going toward something difficult in small amounts and then coming back out, rather than diving in and hoping you can swim. We might work with resourcing, which means finding a place in your body or your life that feels even slightly more settled and letting your attention rest there before we go further.

And we might work with movement, which can be as small as letting a hand travel toward your own chest or as big as standing up, pushing against a wall, making sound, or moving something that has no words yet. My background is in movement, so this door is always open. It is never required.

Touch and consent: what to expect and what to ask before you start

People ask whether a somatic therapist touches you. It is a fair question and you should ask it directly of anyone you are considering working with.

Some somatic practitioners do use touch, always with explicit consent, and there are frameworks that train for it carefully. My own work does not center on physical touch. What it does center on is your right to say no, to change your mind mid-session, to stop something that is happening in your own body, and to have that treated as useful information rather than resistance.

If a practitioner cannot answer questions about consent, scope of practice, and what happens if you want to stop, that tells you something worth knowing before you book.

How does movement help regulate your nervous system?

Movement was my first language long before it was part of my clinical work. Dance, being outside, moving without having to explain myself. Later, chronic illness and grief taught me something I could not think my way around, which is that my body was participating in my life whether I invited it into the room or not.

Movement helps because it gives a charged system somewhere to go. When you have been holding a lot, stillness is not always soothing. Lying down can make sensation louder, not quieter. Movement offers another route in: rhythm, pressure, weight, breath, and a pace your system can actually follow.

Regulation is not calm: what a regulated response can look like

This is the belief my whole practice hangs on, so I want to be direct about it. Regulation does not mean calm.

Somewhere along the way, regulated started to mean unbothered, grounded, sleeping well, breathing deeply, never overwhelmed. I do not think that holds up to a real life. Grief disrupts people. Illness disrupts people. Falling in love disrupts people. The world disrupts people. I do not want anyone measuring their healing by how little they are affected by being alive.

What I am actually building with clients is capacity. The capacity to notice what is happening, to stay in relationship with yourself while it happens, and to have more choice about what you do next. A regulated response can look like rest and softening. It can also look like anger, movement, tears, saying no, taking up space, or becoming far more expressive than you have let yourself be. Regulation is not becoming impossible to disturb. It is having more capacity to stay with yourself when you are.

Somatic therapy exercises

There is no shortage of somatic therapy exercises online, and some of them are genuinely useful. Slow exhales. Feeling your feet. Gentle shaking. Orienting the room.

What I have noticed over the last couple of years is that the people arriving in my practice are not short on techniques. They are exhausted by them. They have a folder of practices and a running internal commentary asking whether they are regulated yet, whether this is a trauma response, whether they are doing the exercise correctly. The language of nervous system work has quietly become another way to monitor and manage yourself.

So I am careful about handing out protocols. Not because practices do not help, but because a practice you are performing correctly while watching yourself from the outside is not the same as being inside your own experience. What I want for you is fewer instructions and more room.

Is somatic therapy legitimate and evidence-based?

Body-based approaches to survival responses and post-traumatic stress have been studied, and there is meaningful evidence for several of them. That research is part of why trauma therapy is where somatic work has taken hold most firmly. There is also a great deal of confident language in the wellness world that runs well ahead of what any study has shown. Both things are true at once, and I would rather you know that than be sold certainty.

What I can tell you from inside the work is narrower and more useful. People who have understood their patterns for years often report that something finally moves when the body is included. Not because insight was wrong, but because insight was never going to be enough on its own.

Criticisms worth taking seriously: certainty, overreach, and hype

A few criticisms of somatic therapy are worth holding onto rather than defending against.

The first is overclaiming. When practitioners describe exactly what your body is holding and exactly what a tremor means, they have left observation behind and entered storytelling. That is not harmless. It can teach you to outsource the interpretation of your own experience. A therapist can point, notice, and help you stay with what is there. They should not drive the meaning for you.

The second is that focusing intently on sensation can be genuinely destabilizing for some people, particularly with complex trauma. Pacing is not a stylistic preference in this work. It is a safety practice.

The third is that somatic language sometimes gets used to explain physical symptoms that deserve medical attention. Your body is not only a psychological text. Sometimes something hurts because something hurts.

Can I do somatic therapy on myself?

Partly. It is worth separating what genuinely works alone from what tends to need another person, because the honest answer is different for each.

What you can genuinely do alone

You can build a real relationship with your own body without a therapist in the room. People do it through movement, breath, time outside, creative practice, and simple attention. That is not a consolation prize. It counts, and for many people it is the thing that keeps them tethered between sessions.

What tends to work on your own is small, frequent, and low stakes. A few minutes of noticing what your weight does when you stop bracing against the floor. Letting a stretch happen at the speed your body actually wants rather than the speed you scheduled. Going for a walk without a podcast in your ears. Practices this small and ordinary can often be explored on your own.

What tends to need another person

The relational part is harder to replicate. A great deal of what shapes a nervous system happened in relationship, often early, often without words. Being met by another person while something difficult moves through you is not a nice extra. For many people it is the active ingredient.

There is also a practical limit. When you are working alone, you are both the person having the experience and the person watching to see whether something is shifting. That double role is exhausting, and it is exactly the pattern many people are trying to step out of. Part of my job is holding enough of the structure that you can stop supervising yourself for fifty minutes.

And if turning attention inward repeatedly brings on panic, numbness, or losing time, that is a clear signal to do this with support rather than alone. That is information about capacity, not a verdict about you. Capacity can grow when you do not have to hold the whole experience by yourself.

What if somatic therapy isn't one more thing to get right?

You have spent a long time understanding yourself. You have been thorough, and honest, and probably harder on yourself than you would ever be on a friend. If you are here reading about somatic therapy, my guess is that you are not looking for another framework to master. You are tired of managing yourself, and you would like to inhabit your life instead.

That is the work I do. I support adults navigating trauma and the long habits of survival, along with grief, ambiguous loss, chronic illness, and the transitions that ask you to change faster than your body can. Together we slow down, track what is actually here, and make enough room for something honest to move. Not on a schedule. Not toward a permanently regulated state. Toward a version of you that can be complicated and still stay in relationship with yourself.

My practice is based in Santa Monica , where I see clients in person. I also work virtually with people across California, including adults in Venice and Marina del Rey who would rather begin from their own space than sit in traffic before a session.

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