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

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