“Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies.”
— Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score
The word somatic comes from the Greek word soma, meaning “body.” Somatic healing is an embodied approach to well-being that recognizes that our experiences are not only processed through our thoughts, but are also experienced through the body and nervous system.
Stressful and traumatic experiences can shape how our nervous system responds to the world around us—affecting sensations, emotions, movement, breathing, sleep, attention, and our sense of safety. Even when we consciously know that a threat has passed, our bodies may continue to respond through patterns developed during difficult experiences.
Somatic practices invite us to become curious about these bodily sensations and responses rather than simply trying to think our way through them. Through practices such as mindful movement, breathwork, body awareness, and therapeutic touch, we can begin developing a greater sense of connection with our bodies and learn new ways of responding to stress.
Techniques in Somatic Healing
Several approaches are used in somatic and body-based practices, with the shared intention of helping people develop greater awareness of bodily sensations, regulate stress responses, and reconnect with their bodies in ways that feel safe and supportive.
Somatic Experiencing: Developed by Peter Levine PhD, Somatic Experiencing is a body-oriented approach to working with trauma and stress. The practice invites individuals to gently notice bodily sensations, emotions, and patterns of activation while building greater capacity to remain present with their experience. The aim is to support nervous-system regulation and help people develop a greater sense of safety and resilience in the body.
Somatic Resourcing: Somatic resourcing involves identifying sensations, memories, images, relationships, places, or experiences that evoke a sense of safety, steadiness, or support. By intentionally bringing attention to these “resources,” we can practice noticing what safety and regulation feel like in the body—not only what stress or activation feels like.
Over time, this practice can help expand our capacity to remain present with difficult sensations and emotions without becoming overwhelmed, while strengthening our connection to sources of safety and support.
Body Awareness / Body Scanning: Body-awareness practices invite us to intentionally notice physical sensations—such as warmth, tension, pressure, tingling, breath, heartbeat, or areas of ease—without immediately trying to change them.
Practices such as body scans can help strengthen interoceptive awareness, or our ability to notice and interpret signals arising from within the body. Over time, this kind of attentive presence can help us become more familiar with our own patterns of stress, comfort, activation, and relaxation, creating greater awareness of what our bodies may be communicating.
Breathwork: Breathwork refers to a wide range of practices that intentionally change the rhythm, depth, or pace of breathing. Because breathing interacts with processes involved in physiological arousal, certain breathing practices—particularly slow, comfortable breathing with a longer exhale—may help reduce feelings of stress and support relaxation.
Bringing conscious attention to the breath can also provide an accessible way to notice what is happening in the body, reconnect with the present moment, and explore how changes in breathing affect our physical and emotional experience.
Movement Therapy: Movement-based practices use intentional movement to explore the connection between physical sensations, emotions, and patterns of expression. Practices may include dance, yoga, stretching, shaking, or other forms of mindful movement.
Rather than focusing on how the body should move or perform, these practices can invite curiosity about what feels supportive, expressive, or restorative in the moment. Movement can offer another way to connect with ourselves, process emotional experiences, reduce stress, and cultivate a greater sense of presence in the body.
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT): Often called “tapping,” EFT combines focused attention on difficult thoughts or emotions with gentle tapping on specific points of the body traditionally associated with acupuncture meridians. Some people find the rhythmic, embodied practice helpful for reducing feelings of stress or emotional distress and creating a greater sense of calm.
While EFT originated from theories about the body’s energy system, research continues to explore how and why the practice may be helpful. Rather than thinking of tapping as literally “releasing emotional blockages,” it may be more useful to understand it as one of several body-based practices that can support emotional awareness and regulation.
The Mind-Body-Spirit Connection
The mind-body-spirit connection is central to how we understand holistic healing at Loto. We are not minds carried around by bodies, nor are our spiritual lives separate from our physical experience. Our thoughts, emotions, relationships, bodies, and spiritual lives are deeply interconnected.
During overwhelming or traumatic experiences, dissociation can sometimes serve as a protective response, creating distance from sensations, emotions, or experiences that feel too difficult to remain fully present with. Rather than seeing this response as a failure to inhabit our bodies, we can honor it as one of the ways humans survive what once felt unbearable.
And importantly, disconnection from our bodies does not mean disconnection from the Divine.
Many contemplative and mystical traditions invite us to encounter the Sacred through embodiment—through breath, sensation, movement, stillness, nature, relationship, and presence. From this perspective, somatic practices can become more than tools for managing stress. They can become practices of returning: gently learning to inhabit ourselves again and becoming more attentive to the Divine Presence already within and around us.
Healing, then, is not about becoming worthy of sacred presence. It is about becoming increasingly available to experience what has been here all along.
The Impact of Chronic Stress, Systemic Oppression, and Trauma
Our bodies do not exist separately from the environments, relationships, and systems in which we live. Chronic stress can arise not only from individual experiences, but also from ongoing exposure to instability, discrimination, violence, poverty, marginalization, unsafe relationships, and other conditions that repeatedly demand adaptation.
When stress is persistent or overwhelming, it can influence how we respond to perceived threat and safety. Some people may experience increased vigilance, tension, anxiety, disrupted sleep, or difficulty relaxing; others may experience numbness, exhaustion, withdrawal, or disconnection. These responses are not signs that the body is broken—they can be adaptive ways of responding to difficult circumstances.
Somatic practices may help us notice these patterns and develop greater capacity to respond to stress, but individual regulation is not a substitute for changing harmful environments or unjust systems. Healing is both personal and relational, and our well-being is shaped by the conditions in which we live.
By approaching our bodies with curiosity rather than judgment, we can begin to recognize the ways our experiences have shaped us while cultivating greater choice in how we respond in the present.
Returning to the Body as Sacred
Understanding the connection between body, mind, and spirit invites us into a different relationship with ourselves. Rather than treating the body as something to overcome, control, or simply carry us through life, we can learn to experience it as an integral part of who we are—and as a place through which we encounter Life, relationship, and the Sacred.
It is often said that “we can't heal what we won't feel.” Yet healing does not require forcing ourselves to feel everything at once. When enough safety and support are present, we can gently become more curious about our sensations, emotions, and patterns of response. Somatic practices can support this process by helping us cultivate greater awareness, presence, and compassion toward what we experience in our bodies.
For me, this is also deeply spiritual work. The more fully I learn to inhabit my body, the more available I become to experience the Divine—not because God was ever absent, but because present moment awareness makes me more attentive to what has been here all along.
Perhaps somatic healing is less about fixing what is broken or releasing something trapped within us, and more about returning to relationship with ourselves. Body, mind, and spirit are not separate projects to heal, but interconnected dimensions of our human experience.
When we learn to listen to the body with curiosity rather than judgment, we practice another way of being present—to ourselves, to one another, to Creation, and to the Sacred moving through it all.
