The body speaks in the only language it knows.
Somatic therapy uses sensory awareness to explore emotions and memories stored in the body.
Because the body holds trauma and it also holds wisdom.
When talking alone isn’t enough, somatic psychotherapy can help you integrate what the body already knows but the mind cannot bear.
Somatic therapy works by helping you slow down to listen to what your body has been holding — often long before you had words for it — and find tools to resource yourself through grounding, orienting, and pacing strategies that honor your need for safety and containment.
This work is grounded in the understanding that your body has a natural capacity for healing.
Learn to process unresolved experiences by integrating mindfulness with somatic wisdom, so you can carry forward meaning rather than burden.
Somatic therapy is a gentle and effective approach to expressing and releasing painful memories that are outside of your conscious awareness and restoring an integrated sense of personal wholeness using effective tools to transform from within.
Visit Somatic Trauma Therapy for more focused information on trauma healing through a somatic lens.
Learn to feel safe in your body.
A Journey to Inner Wisdom that Transcends Language
Somatic therapy invites you to access the innate intelligence within you, exploring the deep connection between your mind and body through physical sensations and emotions to facilitate organic healing and transformation.
Guided by your body’s natural capacity for healing, this intuitive therapeutic process helps you:
Using your felt sense as a guiding principle, body-based therapy gently supports you to discover your inner wisdom and allows healing to unfold organically in a relational field of loving presence and attunement.
Balance and ease, one breath at a time, for those overwhelmed by emotion or blocked by reason
Somatic therapy can be especially resonant for those whose understanding of themselves is rooted in felt experience, as well as for those who tend to live in their heads and are seeking balance or relief from thought spirals.
For highly sensitive people who notice subtle shifts in emotion, energy, and body sensation, somatic therapy is a particularly valuable complement to insight-oriented work.
Somatic therapy is an important method within my work as a depth psychotherapist for its ability to bypass the impulse for rationalization and help individuals connect to their present-moment experience.
Alongside psychodynamic psychotherapy, which accesses the psyche primarily through the mind, somatic therapy is an approach to integrative healing that uses the body as a direct source of information.
Through somatic resourcing with breath, awareness, and movement, emotions that have become frozen or inaccessible can begin to shift. To put energy in motion is to transform emotion.
Like my work with empaths, artists, and those recovering from addiction, the somatic work I offer in my practice emerges from lived experience rather than theory alone.
My training as a somatic therapist originated in my yoga practice fifteen years ago in Brooklyn, and deeped with teacher trainings in Vancouver Island, San Francisco and Bali.
Over time, I studied with many teachers who helped me understand — in my bones — what it means to be an embodied presence in the room, and how emotional regulation can emerge through breath matched to movement.
More recently, my training in Hakomi therapy brought this work full circle, integrating somatic awareness directly into the therapeutic process.
There are phrases I will never unhear, teachings that continue to orient me in both practice and presence as a model for connecting from a place of humility and grounded wisdom. In my work, somatic awareness is less about technique and more about listening to what the body is already communicating — often long before words arrive.
Grounding and Orienting for Emotional Resilience
Somatic therapy in San Francisco
Coping skills and self-soothing strategies are opportunities to downregulate your nervous system in moments of anxious escalation and upregulate your nervous system in times of depression or dissociation.
Somatic resources use breath and body awareness to help you ground in the present moment or recall physical experiences of strength and resilience.
Imaginal resources might involve the recollection of a memory, fantasy, or image of a place where you feel safe and content.
Psychological resources include recalling moments of insight, the ability to connect to your inner witness and shifts in perspective.
Practicing these skills will help you to return to balance with a regulated central nervous system — and arrive in a stable place where you can begin to embody new beliefs and integrate emergent experiences.
Depending on your abilities and inclinations, personal resourcing in your daily life might include a meditation practice, movement through dance, yoga or sport, journaling, art making, practicing healthy boundaries or simply making time to pause and reflect.
Healing Principles of Somatic Therapy
The belief in your innate capacity for healing is at the core of somatic psychotherapy. Through a process of growing mindful awareness, a somatic therapist can help you connect to your inner intelligence, which naturally moves toward
Somatic therapy uses reflections and gentle invitations to explore your present-moment experience from a place of openness and curiosity. These inquiries bring awareness to what is ready to unfold while somatic resourcing encourages nervous system healing.
Inviting your present-moment awareness to travel between body, heart, soul, and spirit allows a deeper experiential knowing that transcends intellect and allows new relationships to emerge.
A somatic therapist engages the fluid interplay between:
Integrating knowledge across multiple dimensions, somatic therapy creates the conditions for realizations to grow from insight to embodied wisdom.
Somatic therapy makes room for all parts of you to co-exist while providing specific tools to access the depth of your inner world, creating the conditions for relational safety and attachment repair in the therapeutic space.
Respecting your body’s wisdom includes honoring your natural defenses. Rather than adversaries, your defenses are seen as protectors and allies that intuitively guide therapy at a pace aligned with your needs in a gentle, non-invasive process.
Honoring your defenses enables you to follow the body’s wisdom in a safe and natural progression. This approach ensures that each aspect of your being is met with care and understanding.
In somatic therapy, holding opposing experiences — ecstasy and terror, light and shadow, life and death — is an opportunity to reveal nuance, exception, and dimension in your world.
Growth occurs in the movement between polarities, using the dance of opposites to create meaningful change. By embodying both sides of a polarity, the wisdom embedded in the dialectic is revealed.
Navigating the shadows involves taking a brave look at the parts of ourselves that we would rather not acknowledge — repressed desires, emotions and experiences that have been exiled to the unconscious.
Confronting hidden or avoided parts of yourself holds the medicine for deep healing. When intense emotions arise, somatic therapy helps you stay present and grounded with mindful awareness and somatic resources to foster:
You don’t have to hold this alone. Reach out to connect with a somatic therapist in San Francisco.
Being with the full range of emotional experience.
Somatic therapy is an invitation to come home to yourself with curiosity, presence & love.
Take a moment to notice what’s coming up for you. If it feels right, request an appointment.
Body as memory.
Relational field as healing ground.
In person sessions with a somatic therapist in the Mission District, San Francisco near Bernal Heights and Noe Valley. Online somatic therapy throughout the Bay Area and all of California.
Somatic therapy invites you to connect with your felt sense and natural inclination towards healing.
Learn to soften old protective patterns and reconnect with your body’s innate intelligence from the inside out.
If something in you is ready to shift, reach out to learn more or schedule a session.
Somatic Therapy in the Mission District near Noe Valley, Potrero Hill and Bernal Heights.
