Somatic Health: Understanding the Body’s Role in Healing, Regulation, and Resilience

For decades, health and healing were approached primarily through the mind. Talk therapy, cognitive reframing, and insight-based models dominated wellness culture. While these approaches remain valuable, they are incomplete on their own. The body is not simply a vessel that carries the mind. It is an active participant in how we experience stress, store emotion, and move toward healing.

Somatic therapy places the body at the center of the therapeutic process. It recognizes that health is shaped not only by thoughts and beliefs, but also by sensation, movement, posture, breath, and nervous system state. At Holistique, we approach somatic therapy with clarity and care, grounded in neuroscience, physiology, and evidence-informed practice, while remaining honest about what the research supports and what is experiential.

What Somatic Therapy Means

The term “somatic” comes from the Greek word soma, meaning body. Somatic therapy refers to therapeutic approaches that intentionally include bodily awareness as part of emotional and psychological healing.

Somatic therapies may include practices such as:

• body awareness and interoception (how you perceive what is happening inside your body, rather than around it)

• breathwork and paced breathing

• gentle movement and posture work

• tracking physical sensations

• grounding and orienting exercises

These approaches are used alongside, not instead of, cognitive and relational therapeutic work. Somatic therapy is not about forcing emotional release or reliving experiences through the body. When practiced ethically, it prioritizes safety, choice, and regulation.

Why the Body Matters in Mental and Emotional Health

The body continuously communicates with the brain through the nervous system. Stress, trauma, and chronic overwhelm are not stored only as memories or thoughts. They are encoded through physiological patterns such as muscle tension, breathing habits, heart rate variability, and autonomic responses.

Research in neuroscience and psychophysiology shows that chronic stress alters nervous system functioning, keeping the body in prolonged states of threat activation or shutdown (McEwen, 2017). Over time, this affects mood, cognition, immune function, digestion, and sleep. Somatic therapy addresses these patterns at their source by working directly with the systems that regulate safety and threat.

The Science: How Somatic Therapy Supports Regulation

Nervous System Regulation

The autonomic nervous system governs our stress response. It shifts between states of activation and rest based on perceived safety. When this system becomes dysregulated, people may experience anxiety, emotional numbing, irritability, or chronic fatigue.

Somatic interventions help restore autonomic balance by increasing parasympathetic activity. Practices such as slow breathing, grounding, and gentle movement have been shown to reduce sympathetic overactivation and improve emotional regulation (Porges, 2011).

Interoception and Emotional Awareness

Interoception refers to the ability to sense internal bodily states (how you perceive what is happening inside your body, rather than around it). Strong interoceptive awareness is associated with improved emotional regulation and self-awareness. Somatic therapy strengthens this capacity, helping individuals recognize early signs of stress before they escalate (Farb et al., 2015).

Trauma and the Body

Trauma research consistently demonstrates that traumatic stress is stored not only as narrative memory but also as physiological patterns. Somatic approaches help individuals process these patterns without requiring verbal recounting of traumatic events, which can be reactivating for some people (van der Kolk, 2014).

What Somatic Therapy Is Not

As somatic approaches have gained popularity, misconceptions have followed.

Somatic therapy is not:

• forced emotional catharsis

• unstructured bodywork without psychological training

• a replacement for evidence-based mental health care

• guaranteed to release trauma in a single session

Ethical somatic therapy is gradual, regulated, and grounded in nervous system safety. Any approach that promises instant healing or dramatic release should be approached with caution.

Evidence-Based Benefits of Somatic Approaches

Current research supports somatic therapy as beneficial for:• stress-related disorders• anxiety and depression• trauma and post-traumatic stress symptoms• chronic pain and somatic symptom disorders• emotional regulation difficulties

Systematic reviews suggest that body-oriented therapies can reduce psychological distress and improve quality of life when integrated into broader treatment plans (Payne et al., 2015).

Importantly, somatic therapy works best when combined with relational support, education, and cognitive integration.

Experience Versus Evidence

At Holistique, we are clear about the distinction between what research confirms and what individuals may experience subjectively.

Evidence supports that somatic practices improve regulation, awareness, and resilience. Many people also report feeling more grounded, present, and connected to themselves after somatic work. These experiences are meaningful, but they should not be framed as universal or guaranteed outcomes. Healing is not linear. The value of somatic therapy lies in its ability to support capacity, not force change.

How Somatic Therapy Fits Into a Lifestyle of Wellness

Somatic principles extend beyond therapy sessions. They influence how people move through daily life.

Supportive practices include:

• mindful movement

• breath awareness

• noticing bodily cues of stress or fatigue

• pacing and rest

• respecting physical boundaries

These practices reinforce nervous system health and support long-term resilience.

The Holistique Perspective

Somatic therapy reminds us that health is not only something we think our way into. It is something we feel, sense, and embody. When the body is included in the healing process, people often develop a deeper sense of safety, clarity, and self-trust.

Somatic work is not about fixing the body. It is about listening to it. When approached with scientific integrity and compassionate pacing, somatic therapy becomes a powerful support for whole-person health.

References

Farb, N. A., Segal, Z. V., & Anderson, A. K. (2015). Interoception, contemplative practice, and health. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19(2), 91–98.

McEwen, B. S. (2017). Neurobiological and systemic effects of chronic stress. Chronic Stress, 1, 1–11.

Payne, P., Levine, P. A., & Crane-Godreau, M. A. (2015). Somatic experiencing: Using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 93.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. Norton.

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Penguin Books.