Somatic Healing: What It Is and How It Works

You've probably noticed that understanding a problem doesn't always change it. You can know exactly why you're anxious and still feel anxious. You can recognize a pattern, trace it back to its origins, have insight after insight, and still find yourself stuck in the same loops.

This is one of the limitations of approaches that work primarily through the mind. They can help you understand your story, develop awareness, and make meaning of your experiences. All of that matters. And sometimes it's not enough.

Somatic healing works differently. It works with the body directly, addressing what's held in your tissues, your nervous system, your physiology. It's based on a simple recognition: the body stores experience. And the body is often where healing needs to happen.

What Does Somatic Mean?

Soma is the Greek word for body. Somatic healing refers to any approach that works with the body as a primary pathway for change.

This includes a range of modalities: Somatic Experiencing, developed by Dr. Peter Levine for trauma resolution. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. Hakomi. Certain forms of breathwork. Body-based mindfulness practices. Even acupuncture, which works directly with the body's energy and nervous system.

What these approaches share is an understanding that the body isn't separate from the mind. Your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations are all interconnected. What happens in your body affects your mind, and what happens in your mind shows up in your body.

When we say somatic healing, we're talking about approaches that use this connection intentionally. They work with sensation, breath, posture, movement, and nervous system states to create change that thinking alone can't produce.

Why the Body Matters

Your body is constantly recording your experience. Not consciously, not in words, but in patterns of tension, activation, and holding.

When something overwhelming happens and you can't fully process it in the moment, your body stores the unfinished response. The muscles that braced for impact stay braced. The breath that got shallow stays shallow. The nervous system that mobilized for danger stays mobilized, even when the danger has passed.

This isn't a malfunction. It's your body doing exactly what it evolved to do: protecting you by staying ready. The problem is that it doesn't always get the signal that the threat is over.

Over time, these stored patterns become your baseline. The tension in your shoulders feels normal. The shallow breathing feels normal. The low-grade anxiety humming in the background feels like just how you are. You've adapted to a state that was meant to be temporary, and now you can't remember what ease actually feels like.

This is why you can understand your stress, talk about it, analyze it, and still be stressed. The understanding is happening in one part of your brain while the stress response is running in a different system entirely, one that doesn't respond to logic or insight.

Somatic healing addresses this directly. It helps your body complete what it couldn't complete, release what it's been holding, and learn that safety is possible again.

The Nervous System Connection

To understand somatic healing, you need to understand a little about the nervous system.

Your autonomic nervous system has two main branches. The sympathetic branch activates you for action: fight or flight. Your heart rate increases, your muscles tense, your breath quickens. The parasympathetic branch helps you rest, digest, and recover. It slows your heart, relaxes your muscles, and allows repair and restoration.

In a healthy, regulated system, you move fluidly between these states. You activate when you need to, then return to rest. Stress comes, and then it passes.

When the system gets stuck, this flexibility is lost. You might be chronically activated, always in some degree of fight or flight, never fully at rest even when you're exhausted. Or you might be chronically shut down, collapsed, numb, disconnected from your body and your life. Or you might swing between the two, activated one moment and crashed the next.

Somatic healing helps restore the nervous system's natural flexibility. It teaches your body that it can activate and then settle, that stress can move through rather than accumulate, that rest is safe and possible.

What Somatic Healing Isn't

Somatic healing isn't about ignoring your mind or dismissing the value of understanding. Insight matters. Making meaning of your experiences matters. The goal isn't to bypass thinking entirely.

It's also not about forcing anything. It's not about pushing through, overriding your body's signals, or making yourself feel something you don't feel. Somatic work is generally slow and gentle, working with what's already present rather than imposing anything from outside.

And it's not just for people with trauma. While somatic approaches are particularly effective for trauma, you don't need to have experienced something dramatic to benefit. Anyone living with chronic stress, persistent tension, disconnection from their body, or patterns that don't shift with insight alone can benefit from this work.

How Somatic Healing Actually Works

The specifics depend on the modality and the practitioner, but certain elements are common across somatic approaches.

Attention to Sensation

Somatic work typically involves paying attention to physical sensation in a particular way. Not analyzing it, not trying to change it, just noticing. Where do you feel tension? Where do you feel ease? What's happening in your chest, your belly, your jaw, your hands?

This might sound simple, but for many people it's surprisingly difficult. If you've spent years overriding your body's signals, pushing through discomfort, ignoring what you feel, you may have limited awareness of sensation. Part of somatic healing is rebuilding this awareness, learning to listen to a body you've been tuning out.

Tracking the Nervous System

A somatic practitioner pays attention to signs of nervous system activation: changes in breath, shifts in skin color, micro-movements, the quality of someone's voice. They track when the system is activating and when it's settling, and they use this information to guide the work.

This tracking allows the work to stay within what's called the window of tolerance, the range where processing can actually happen. Too much activation overwhelms the system and nothing integrates. Too little activation means nothing is shifting. Somatic work finds the edge where change is possible without flooding.

Completing Incomplete Responses

When something overwhelming happens, your body mobilizes a response: fight, flight, freeze. If that response gets interrupted or suppressed, it doesn't just disappear. It stays in your system, waiting to complete.

Somatic healing helps these responses finish. This might look like shaking, trembling, heat moving through the body, an impulse to push away or run that finally gets to express itself. The completion is often subtle, sometimes just a deep breath and a sense of settling. The body knows what it needs to do. The work is creating conditions where it can finally do it.

Building Capacity for Regulation

Somatic work is also about building your nervous system's capacity to regulate itself..

This happens gradually, through repeated experiences of activation followed by settling. Each time your system activates and then successfully returns to rest, it learns something. It builds confidence in its own ability to handle stress and come back to baseline. Over time, your window of tolerance expands. You can handle more without becoming overwhelmed or shutting down.

What a Session Might Look Like

Every practitioner works differently, but here's a general sense of what somatic work can involve.

You might begin by settling into the space, noticing your body in the chair or on the table, paying attention to where you feel supported. The practitioner might guide you to notice sensation: temperature, pressure, areas of tension or ease.

From there, the work follows what arises. Maybe you notice tightness in your chest. The practitioner might invite you to stay with that, to notice what happens when you bring attention there. Does it shift? Does it have a quality, a temperature, a color? Is there an emotion associated with it? An image? A memory?

The work moves slowly. There might be long pauses. The practitioner is tracking your nervous system, noticing when to go deeper and when to resource, when to stay with something and when to shift attention elsewhere.

Sometimes the body releases spontaneously: a tremor, a sigh, tears that come without a clear story attached. Sometimes there's nothing dramatic, just a gradual settling, a sense of more space.

Over time, patterns begin to shift. The chronic tension in your shoulders starts to ease. The background anxiety quiets. You start to notice sensation more readily, to catch activation earlier, to have more choice in how you respond.

Somatic Healing and Other Modalities

Somatic work can stand alone, and it also integrates well with other approaches.

At our practice, we combine somatic work with acupuncture. Acupuncture directly affects the nervous system, activating the parasympathetic response and helping the body shift out of chronic stress. This creates conditions where somatic processing can happen more easily.

We also use Traditional Chinese Medicine as a framework for understanding patterns. What shows up somatically often has correlates in Chinese medicine: liver qi stagnation manifesting as tension and irritability, kidney deficiency showing up as exhaustion and fear. Working with herbs and acupuncture alongside somatic approaches addresses the pattern from multiple angles.

For some people, somatic work is most effective when combined with depth psychology or other talk-based approaches. The insight work and the body work can inform and deepen each other.

Who Benefits from Somatic Healing

Somatic healing can help anyone, but it's particularly useful for certain patterns.

If you've done therapy and gained insight but still feel stuck, somatic work may address what talk couldn't reach.

If you carry chronic tension that massage and bodywork relieve temporarily but that always returns, somatic work can address the underlying pattern.

If you feel disconnected from your body, if you live from the neck up, if you're out of touch with your physical experience, somatic work can help you come home to yourself.

If you run on stress, if you've achieved a lot by pushing hard, if you don't know how to rest even when you're exhausted, somatic work can help your nervous system remember what ease feels like.

If you've experienced trauma, whether a single event or the cumulative impact of chronic stress, somatic approaches can help your body process what it's been holding.

And if you're trying to conceive, navigating perimenopause, or dealing with any health issue that involves hormones and the nervous system, somatic healing can be foundational. Your reproductive system and your nervous system are deeply connected. When your body feels unsafe, fertility and hormonal balance are affected. Helping your nervous system settle can shift everything else.

What This Looks Like in Practice

A woman came to us in her early forties. On paper, nothing was wrong. Her labs were normal. Her cycles were regular. Her doctor had told her she was healthy.

But she didn't feel healthy. She was exhausted in a way that sleep didn't fix. She carried tension in her neck and shoulders that had been there so long she barely noticed it anymore. She described a constant sense of running, of never being able to stop, of always having one more thing to handle.

She'd built a successful career by being the person who could manage anything. She was capable, competent, and completely depleted. Her body had been sending signals for years, the tension, the fatigue, the sense of being wound too tight, and she'd overridden all of them.

She'd tried therapy, which helped her understand where the pattern came from. She knew her history, her family dynamics, her tendency to over-function. Understanding hadn't changed the pattern.

When we started somatic work, she was surprised by how little awareness she had of her body below her neck. She could describe her thoughts in detail but couldn't tell me what she felt in her chest or her belly. She'd been so focused on managing everything that she'd lost connection with herself.

We worked slowly. In sessions, we practiced simply noticing sensation without trying to change anything. She began to recognize the early signs of stress in her body, the tightening in her jaw, the holding in her breath, things she'd never noticed before because they'd been constant.

Over several months, something shifted. She started catching herself in moments of tension and finding she could soften. The chronic holding in her shoulders began to release, not because she was trying to relax but because her nervous system was learning that it was safe to let go.

She described it as coming back into her body after years of living outside it. She could feel herself again. And with that came something she hadn't expected: she actually wanted to rest. The drive that had pushed her for decades started to quiet, not because she was forcing it but because her body no longer felt like it had to run.

Her energy improved. The fatigue that had seemed permanent began to lift. She looked different, softer, more present. When we asked what had changed, she said she'd stopped abandoning herself. She could feel her limits now, and she was honoring them.

Read stories from others who have done this work →

Your Next Step

Somatic healing isn't quick or dramatic. It's a gradual process of coming home to yourself, of helping your body release what it's been carrying and remember what ease feels like.

If you've done the mental work and still feel stuck, if you carry tension that never fully releases, if you're disconnected from your body or running on stress you can't seem to shake, somatic approaches may be the missing piece.

This is the heart of our Embody & Heal path. We integrate somatic work with acupuncture, Chinese medicine, and depth approaches to help you heal at the level of the nervous system. Whether you're navigating fertility, perimenopause, or simply ready to feel different in your body, we can help.

Contact us at 212.432.1110 or info@fafwellness.com.