What is body-based (somatic) therapy?
More than just talking
If you've done talk therapy before, you already know the shape of it. You sit, you talk, you think out loud, and hopefully you leave with a little more clarity than you walked in with. Somatic therapy includes that, but it doesn't stop there. It also pays attention to what's happening underneath the words, in your breath, your posture, the tightness in your chest when a memory comes up, the way your shoulders creep toward your ears before you even notice you're doing it.
Your body has been keeping track of things this whole time, often long before your mind had language for them. Somatic work is about learning to listen to that.
Your body already knows more than you think
There's a quiet wisdom in the body that most of us were never taught to trust. A subtle sense that something is off before you can explain why. A flutter of relief when you finally say the true thing out loud. In our sessions, we'll slow down enough to notice that kind of signal, not rush past it to get to the next insight.
Sometimes that looks like pausing mid-conversation and simply asking, what does this feel like in your body right now. Not to analyze it, just to notice it, gently and without judgment. Over time, that noticing becomes its own kind of clarity, one that comes from sensation and felt experience rather than only from thinking your way through something.
Working with what's actually here
We might breathe together. We might notice how your body wants to move, or doesn't want to move at all, and follow that instead of overriding it. We might work with stillness, with grounding, with the simple experience of feeling your feet on the floor when everything else feels like too much. None of this requires flexibility, athleticism, or any particular relationship to exercise. It's less about doing something to your body and more about being with it. And sometimes it’s important to begin with building a sense of safety with your body, before we can do any other somatic work.
This isn't separate from the world you live in
The tension you carry didn't come out of nowhere. It might be personal history, or what it costs to move through a world that wasn't built with your body, your identity, or your pain in mind. Somatic work makes room for all of you and your authentic experience. We're not just working with your nervous system in isolation, we're working with a nervous system that has had to adapt to real conditions, real harm, and real systems that asked you be different.
Slow, safe, and always at your pace
None of this happens all at once. We build capacity gradually, staying close enough to what's difficult to learn from it, without overwhelming you. Your body gets to set the pace, rather than a protocol, or some idea of how healing is supposed to look.
If any of this sounds like a different way of understanding what therapy can be, that's exactly the point. Sometimes the way forward isn't through more thinking. It's through finally letting your body be part of the conversation.