What is Somatic Wellness?

Backstory + intro to how you can create space for body centered healing, pleasure + play.

The body is a home for love.

self portrait, January 2024

a little backstory. content note: below mentions childhood trauma, domestic abuse, CPTSD, sexual assault, masking, disassociation

This is a phrase I stumbled across a few years ago on instagram and it really hit me. It felt invasive in the way that invites you to find and create more space for vulnerable and radical honesty, exploration, and change. I have spent my whole life looking for and trying to create a sense of home outside of me. And I have spent pockets of my life feeling into a sense of settlement within my soul. But feeling comfort, ease, peace, pleasure, and joy in my own body has been an evolutionary journey. One that has been guided mostly by lots of pain - physically, mentally, and emotionally.

I learned to mask (conceal my true emotions, feelings, and beliefs) and disassociate (disconnect from reality) before I learned to ride a bike. It helped me survive in the turbulence, instability + harm that existed in my actual home. It gave me a way to show up in any situation and not take up too much space. And it allowed me to blend into rooms that I couldn’t find a sense of belonging.

Masking + disassociating taught me to override my intuition and held me contracted inside my mind. It took me out of my body and made sensations and the ways in which it responded to my everyday life and gave me feedback for what wasn’t right for us. About 4 years into living in California, my body started getting really loud and my ability to override and ignore its messages became almost impossible. I was living with so much anxiety that I was skinny, my digestive system was a wreck, my pelvic floor was constantly on fire, and my nervous system was fried.

This is a story of many. So many that I spent years telling myself that I wasn’t special in my problems. Listened to medical doctors who didn’t know much about mind-body-connection give me pill after pill and tell me the same quick-fix-drill every time my system we hay wire and had a flare up. I spent so much of my life so exhausted I wanted to die. And reached for the things that were familiar that taught me how to mask so early on to numb my discomfort with existing in my body.

Yoga was the first time I connected to the exploration of being well. I had a friend who was in a teacher training and I went to his first hot yoga class to support. It was hard and it challenged me to be more present and in my body than I had ever been in my entire life. I was scared. Inspired. Committed. I went to that studio - to his class and others for months. In yoga I heard mantras and affirmations. I received validation and softness. Words of encouragement to exist in all the parts of who I was. In that moment I was about 2.5 years into an emotionally + mentally abusive relationship with a partner and had a teacher say “everything is fleeting.” She told me to “breathe through it.” And this gave me the strength and support make a shift externally so I could open space inside of me to start to learn and practice making MY body a home for love.

I’ve been with the breath consciously since. Informally. Inconsistently. But it has been my refuge over and over again when nothing else made sense. Over time, I have adopted a collection of modalities that have helped me find healing in the many layers of my past, present + deeply embedded challenges. And since this, I have stayed committed to making this body of mine a home that I could find, feel + share love. I expanded into learning many types of somatic practices and it has been beneficial for me as a person who navigates the world through the lens of CPTSD and lives with embodied stories created from domestic abuse and sexual assault. Somatics can often be helpful for those who have had a harder time living in their body for a variety of reasons, but everyone who navigates daily life within our systems and societal expectations can benefit from learning to incorporate committed somatic practices.

I share stories about what I have experienced and the layers of life I have lived to give visibility to where so much of my commitment to study, learning, and expertise lives within. I am not an expert of any topic, but rather a student in mastery of my own body. The ways in which I share, hold, and explore space as a practitioner + facilitator are guided from this lens. To move individuals into greater presence, agency, and confidence to feel so that we can all have connection to more pleasure-centered lives.

What is Somatic?

Here are a few ways to describe somatic that may help create a better understanding of body-mind connection in healing.

Somatic means “body-oriented.” Somatic Psychological approaches are methods of healing that allows one to experience their body in the present moment. Healing happens in the here and now. We access this through awareness of sensation, embodied emotion, and physical movement.
- Abi Blakeslee, SEP, CMT, MFT, PhD (from the PESI Somatic Trauma Therapy Certification Course)

Somatic therapy explores how the body expresses deeply painful experiences, applying mind-body healing to aid with trauma recovery.
-Harvard Health Publishing

“Somatic therapy is designed to help individuals clear their minds and connect to their bodies, and it is helpful because it combines mindfulness, grounding techniques, and traditional talk therapy.”
- Talkspace therapist Cynthia Catchings, LCSW-S, LCSW-C, CMHIMP, EMDR from Talk Space

A few ways that I describe and understand somatics is:

• Somatics is body-centered.

• Somatics brings us into presence. It helps us get out of our head and drop into deeper connection with the body.

• Somatics guides us into the ability to increase our capacity to feel sensations + discomfort, surface and release grief + anger, and hold space for pleasure + play.

• Somatics helps us regulate when we are overstimulated, disassociated, stressed, or feeling harmed.

• Somatics teaches us how to trust our body’s language and how to be in compassionate collaboration rather than opposition to the messages that it holds.

• Somatics uses patterns, techniques, mindfulness, ritual, and a variety of modalities to bring presence, awareness and aliveness into the body and create sensation, activate memory, stimulate release, expand creativity, and move stagnant + blocked energy.

In therapy, somatic is often paired with healing. And I have been exploring how the ways in which I use and guide this is beyond just activating healing. It’s a committed practice to living well. It’s the path to agency and liberation in this life. It’s something that is very much so about the doing and is sometimes hard to explain. But for the thinking mind, and the ones who navigate the daily world through the lens of trauma (in the past or currently moving through it) - time, space, and understanding are important building blocks that allow one to find a sense of safety that allows us to rewrite deeply embedded survival stories, patterns, and reactions and helps to carve out openness and courage to feel into the body over + over again.

So much of this work and practice is guided in person - this is how I integrate it best on my own and where I feel powerful shifts with my clients + in community. But for those who may be new to this - or looking for new ways to deepen their practices in mind-body connections for whole body wellness beyond just healing, I want to commit time and words to introduce techniques in a digitally accessible way for how I commonly use somatics and modalities I incorporate to create openness, expansion, presence, release, and play within the body.

There are so many ways that you can do these on your own or through the guidance of a professional. Inside the Self Study Lab, we have created a foundation for connection from a somatic approach that teach you how to be, do, and become so that you can create whawt works best for you moment to moment.

Some ways I guide somatic connection for healing + wellness are:

• Breath + Body work
• Reiki + Energy Healing
• Therapeutic talk + touch
• Movement
• Sensory Play
• Principles of Kink, BDSM, Rope Bondage + Fire Play
• Foundations of Tantra
• Clinical Somatic Practices
• Artistic Expression
• Photography or Videography
• Guided Meditation

If this is your first time hearing some of these words or being introduced to these techniques, it may bring a sense of nervousness or overwhelm of where to start. Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting to the Articles on the site about each of the modalities above and the Self Study framework that uses somatics for wellness and moving us from healing into deeper embodied pleasures.

If any of this connects for you and you want to explore in real time, book a session, join us at an event/workshop or a connection call to help you get started.

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