Unlike traditional “talk therapy,” which focuses on thoughts and language, Somatic Therapy approaches health and healing through the body. This body-centered practice works with the nervous system by engaging body sensations, unconscious processes, and implicit memory to support safety, grounding, and nervous system regulation.
Somatic Therapy focuses on how the body influences the mind through a “bottom-up” approach. By increasing body awareness and supporting physiological regulation, individuals can release physical tension, stress, and trauma stored in the body.
This integrative practice often includes gentle movements that activate the body’s natural shaking or tremor response, helping to discharge long-held tension and restore balance.
Somatic Therapy offers a gentle, accessible way to heal from stress and trauma, helping you return to a state of ease, balance, and inner safety.
The Experience
The easy and accessible practice includes the fatiguing, lengthening, and relaxation of the leg and psoas muscles, which triggers the body’s natural tremor response. The somatic release is the nervous system’s way of discharging trauma, long-held tension, and unconscious muscle contractions and hold patterns. We focus on body awareness in the present moment, enabling the recognition of choice relating to one’s body, and developing the ability to take effective action based on that knowledge. The experience is most often felt only in the body (not emotionally or cognitively), and typically consists of movement such as swaying, shaking, twitching, and/or vibration that begins in the legs and may work up the spine.
The Benefits
This instinctual shaking, evident in both animals and humans, restores the body to its natural state of balance. Research indicates that some benefits include:
Reduction in physical pain and improvement in health
Increased energy and sense of calm
Greater resilience
Less reliance on unhelpful coping mechanisms
Reduced stress and trauma-related symptoms, including anxiety and depression
Better sleep and rest
Somatic Therapy
Please reach out if you have additional questions about this type of therapy and/or are looking to see if it could be a good fit for you.