About Somatic Therapy

Bodywork for the Body, Mind, Soul, and Spirit

Somatic therapy is a simple and profound approach for a wide range of issues. Done on a massage table, somatic therapy uses informative, respectful touch and collaborative dialogue to help you feel where and how you hold tension and restrict breathing in your body and helps relax those non-conscious, patterned ways of managing stress.  Enhanced awareness promotes ease, unburdening, a fuller sense of self, increased energy, and renewed zest for life.

 You may benefit from this work if you: 

  • want to relax and experience more energy, vitality, and joy;

  • want enhanced self-awareness and personal growth;

  • want to engage more fully in life and enjoy richer relationships;

  • feel empty, flat or 'stuck';

  • experience chronic fatigue, headaches, body aches, stomach aches, back pain, neck pain, hip pain, jaw pain or teeth grinding and have already consulted and/or are under the care of a physician or other competent healthcare provider for those conditions;

  • struggle with chronic or long-term depression or anxiety and have already consulted and/or are working with a physician or psychotherapist for those conditions;

  • have a history of trauma or abuse or suffer from low self-worth or low self-esteem; or

  • are managing chronic or progressive disease in partnership with a physician or other competent healthcare provider.

How Somatic Therapy Works

Muscle tension or holding is the body’s way of trying to insulate us from thoughts, feelings, and emotions around experiences that were too difficult or painful to endure or process fully at the time they occurred. So instead we held them in, forced them down, or tried to push them away.  That was fine in the moment but, over time, the holding becomes automatic and unconscious—we forget we are even doing it or why—and chronic holding that once was a way to protect ourselves can become a rigid, defensive barrier to present experience, full self-expression, and authentic connection, and a source of chronic stress, fatigue, pain, and dis-ease.

My work contacts and makes people aware of their holding, which in turn allows the holding to release and relax. Energy spent protecting can then go back into living. Our expansive nature is restored.

Somatic therapy is a fine complement to psychotherapy and medical or alternative health care and a wonderful stand-alone approach to personal and life enhancement for high-functioning people.  This work is unsuitable for persons suffering from acute physical injury or serious mental disturbances like psychosis or schizophrenia, or active addiction, and is not a means of or substitute for medical or mental health diagnosis and treatment.