What Is Somatic Healing? How Your Body Holds (and Releases) Stress

There’s a phrase that changed everything for me: “The body keeps the score.” I first encountered it as the title of Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s groundbreaking book, and something about those five words bypassed my intellect entirely and landed somewhere deep in my chest. Of course it does, I thought. Of course the body keeps the score. I could feel the evidence of it every day — in the knot between my shoulder blades that no massage could permanently undo, in the shallow breathing that had become so habitual I barely noticed it, in the way my stomach would tighten at certain tones of voice that reminded me of old hurts.

Somatic healing is the practice of working with these body-held patterns — not by analyzing them intellectually, but by meeting them where they live: in muscle and breath and sensation. It’s a fundamentally different approach to wellness, one that honors the body’s intelligence and trusts its capacity to heal when given the right conditions.

What Is Somatic Healing?

Somatic healing is a broad term encompassing various therapeutic approaches that use body awareness, sensation, and movement as primary pathways to emotional and psychological healing. The word “somatic” comes from the Greek soma, meaning the living, experienced body — as opposed to the body viewed from the outside as an object to be measured and fixed.

Where conventional talk therapy primarily engages the thinking mind — analyzing patterns, reframing narratives, developing coping strategies — somatic approaches work through the body’s own language of sensation, posture, movement, and breath. The premise is that many of our emotional and psychological struggles aren’t just stored in our memories. They’re stored in our tissues, our movement patterns, our nervous system responses.

According to Healthline, somatic healing practices have shown promising results for conditions including PTSD, chronic pain, anxiety, depression, and stress-related disorders — particularly when traditional approaches alone haven’t provided full relief.

How Your Body Holds Stress and Trauma

To understand somatic healing, you need to understand how the body processes — or fails to process — overwhelming experiences.

When you encounter a threatening situation, your autonomic nervous system launches a survival response: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. In an ideal scenario, you take the necessary action (running, defending, escaping), and then your body completes the cycle by discharging the mobilized energy — perhaps through shaking, crying, deep breathing, or physical exertion. Once the energy is released, your nervous system returns to baseline.

But what happens when the survival response gets interrupted? When you can’t fight or flee? When the situation is ongoing or happens during childhood when you have no agency? The energy that was mobilized for survival gets stuck. Your nervous system, unable to complete its natural cycle, holds that activation energy in the body indefinitely.

Dr. Peter Levine, the creator of Somatic Experiencing and author of Waking the Tiger, observed this pattern clearly in the animal kingdom. A gazelle that narrowly escapes a predator will literally shake and tremor for several minutes afterward, discharging the survival energy, then return to normal grazing. Humans, who tend to suppress tremoring because it feels vulnerable, often skip this critical discharge phase. The result is a nervous system stuck in partial activation — chronically braced, chronically alert, chronically exhausted.

Over time, this shows up as chronic muscle tension, restricted breathing, digestive disturbance, sleep disruption, emotional reactivity, and a pervasive sense of being unsafe in your own body. These aren’t psychological problems in the traditional sense. They’re physiological ones — and they respond best to physiological approaches.

“Trauma is not what happens to you. It’s what happens inside your body as a result of what happens to you — and somatic healing is about completing the story your body never got to finish.”

The Pioneers: Peter Levine and Bessel van der Kolk

Two names tower over the field of somatic healing, and understanding their contributions provides a foundation for everything else.

Dr. Peter Levine developed Somatic Experiencing (SE) in the 1970s after decades of studying how animals in the wild recover from life-threatening experiences. SE is a gentle, titrated approach that helps people gradually reconnect with the physical sensations associated with stored trauma — not by reliving the experience, but by building the body’s capacity to complete the interrupted survival responses. The work happens slowly, in small doses, so the nervous system isn’t overwhelmed. Levine called this process “pendulation” — the natural oscillation between contraction and expansion, tension and release.

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a psychiatrist and researcher at the Boston University School of Medicine, spent decades studying how trauma affects the brain and body. His landmark book The Body Keeps the Score synthesized decades of research showing that trauma physically rewires the brain — shrinking the prefrontal cortex (responsible for rational thinking), enlarging the amygdala (the threat detection center), and disrupting the insula (which processes body sensations). According to a study van der Kolk co-authored, body-based interventions like yoga showed significant improvements in PTSD symptoms, supporting the case for somatic approaches.

Van der Kolk’s work demonstrated that because trauma lives in the body, healing must include the body. Talk therapy alone, while valuable, often can’t reach the subcortical, preverbal places where trauma is stored.

Major Somatic Healing Modalities

Somatic healing isn’t a single technique — it’s a family of related approaches, each with its own emphasis and methodology.

Somatic Experiencing (SE): Developed by Peter Levine, SE focuses on tracking body sensations (what practitioners call “felt sense”) to help the nervous system complete interrupted survival responses. Sessions are gentle and go at the client’s pace. The therapist helps the client pendulate between states of activation and calm, gradually expanding the window of tolerance. SE doesn’t require reliving traumatic events — the work happens primarily through body awareness.

Hakomi: Created by Ron Kurtz, Hakomi is a mindfulness-based somatic psychotherapy that combines gentle body techniques with present-moment awareness. The therapist might notice a client’s posture, gesture, or movement pattern and invite them to explore the meaning and emotion held in that pattern. Hakomi works at the intersection of body and belief — helping people discover and update the unconscious core beliefs that organize their physical and emotional patterns.

Feldenkrais Method: Developed by physicist and judo master Moshe Feldenkrais, this approach uses gentle, exploratory movement to reorganize the brain-body connection. Through small, novel movements performed with exquisite attention, the nervous system discovers new, more efficient patterns of movement and posture. While not explicitly a trauma therapy, Feldenkrais can be profoundly healing because it addresses the physical movement restrictions that stress and trauma create.

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Developed by Pat Ogden, this approach integrates body-centered techniques with cognitive and emotional processing. It’s particularly focused on the movement impulses that arise during traumatic experiences — the urge to push away, run, or protect — and helps clients complete these movements in a safe therapeutic context.

Self-Practice: Bringing Somatic Awareness into Daily Life

While deeper somatic healing work is best done with a trained practitioner, there are many ways to begin incorporating somatic awareness into your daily life.

Body check-ins: Set a gentle reminder to pause three times a day and simply notice what you feel in your body. Not what you think about it — what you feel. Where is there tension? Ease? Warmth? Numbness? This practice of interoception builds the foundational awareness that all somatic work depends on.

Pendulation practice: When you notice a sensation of discomfort or tension in your body, don’t immediately try to fix it. Instead, find an area that feels neutral or pleasant. Let your attention move slowly back and forth between the two — the discomfort and the resource. This natural oscillation teaches your nervous system that it can hold difficulty without being consumed by it.

Completing the stress cycle: After stressful events, give your body a chance to discharge the activated energy. Shake your hands vigorously for thirty seconds. Do a few jumping jacks. Let out a long, audible sigh. Run in place for a minute. Cry if tears come. These aren’t indulgences — they’re neurobiological necessities.

Restorative postures: Supported child’s pose, legs up the wall, or simply lying on your back with knees bent and feet flat. These positions signal safety to the nervous system and create space for your body to process and release without conscious effort.

Gentle self-touch: Placing a hand on your heart, cupping your face in your hands, or wrapping your arms around yourself. These simple gestures activate the same neural pathways that are engaged during comforting physical contact with another person. They’re a form of self co-regulation.

What to Expect from Somatic Healing

Somatic healing doesn’t follow the linear trajectory that our minds prefer. It’s not a straight line from “broken” to “fixed.” Instead, it’s more like a spiral — you may revisit similar themes or sensations multiple times, each time with a little more capacity, a little more awareness, a little more choice in how you respond.

Common experiences during somatic work include spontaneous tremoring or shaking, unexpected waves of emotion, a temporary increase in body awareness (which can feel uncomfortable at first), changes in sleep patterns, and moments of profound, full-body relaxation that may feel unfamiliar if your system has been chronically activated.

It’s also common to experience what practitioners call “healing crises” — periods where symptoms temporarily intensify before improving. This happens because your body is accessing and processing material that has been locked away, and the process of releasing it can stir things up before they settle.

Finding a Somatic Practitioner

If you’re drawn to explore somatic healing more deeply, working with a trained practitioner can accelerate and deepen the process significantly. When searching, look for credentials in Somatic Experiencing (SE), Hakomi, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, or another recognized somatic modality. Many practitioners work via telehealth, making sessions accessible regardless of your location.

A good somatic practitioner will move at your pace, never push you beyond your window of tolerance, and help you build internal resources before addressing more activated material. Trust your instincts about the therapeutic relationship — feeling safe with your practitioner is not just a nice-to-have, it’s a neurobiological prerequisite for the work.

Honoring the Body’s Timeline

Perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned from somatic healing is patience with my own body’s process. We live in a culture that wants quick fixes, clear timelines, and measurable outcomes. The body doesn’t work that way. It heals in its own time, at its own pace, in its own order. Sometimes the most profound shifts happen during periods that feel like nothing is happening at all.

Your body has been keeping the score for a long time — faithfully recording every experience, holding every unfinished response, protecting you in the only ways it knew how. Somatic healing is the practice of turning toward that faithful record with compassion, and gently letting your body know that it’s safe to begin writing a new chapter.

It won’t happen all at once. But it will happen. Your body has always known how to heal — it’s just been waiting for permission.