Somatic Healing Overview
Somatic healing uses a body-based approach to release suppressed emotion and trauma from the body to support healing chronic dis-ease.
You can use somatic practices to shift out of thinking about healing in your mind to having real experiences in your body.
The Principles of Somatic Healing provide a framework for connecting all of what ails you, mentally, emotionally, and physically.
Heal your whole self, from within.
What is somatic healing?
“Somatic” comes from the Greek word “soma” which means “living body”.
Somatic healing is grounded in the relationship between the mind and the body.
I refer to it as the body-mind because the body and the mind are one entity. You can’t draw a line between one and the other, anything that's happening in the mind is also reflected in the body, and vice versa.
Somatic healing uses the body as the starting point for healing by looking for the root of what lies under dis-ease, whether it be a diagnosis or any lack of ease.
Why choose a body-based approach to your healing?
You experience life through your body's five senses. Your body is your instrument of experience, including perception, thought, emotion, sensation, and action.
Your nervous system registers your responses to life’s events throughout your body systems. Stress, which is stored in your body’s tissues, is responsible for the vast majority of chronic ailments. If you don’t know how to release stress responses from your body, unprocessed stress accumulates and shows up as pain or tension.
If you’re struggling to heal chronic dis-ease of any kind, shifting your focus to somatic healing can open a whole new lens into what is really going on.
The Five Principles of Somatic Healing
In order to practice somatic self-healing tools, you need to understand the five foundational Principles of Somatic Healing.
I want to help you shift your focus out of your mind and into your body but first we need to shift some of your thinking about healing and dis-ease.
1. Mind and body are one.
Any chronic symptoms that are happening in the mind can have a physical expression and any physical symptom can have an emotional component. Healing the entire person requires eliminating the distinction between the mind and the body.
There's no line that separates the mind from the body and no divisions based on systems of medicine. The fact that we have many different kinds of 'ologists' from psychologists to rheumatologists is a man-made distinction.
Everything can affect everything. If you hold stress from tension in your job, it can show up in any part of your body that’s weak. You don't have to injure your back or have weak abdominals to have back pain. For example, if you show up with back pain and you have weak abdominal muscles, you’ll be sent for physiotherapy even if the source of your pain is stress-related. Go ahead and strengthen your abs, it never hurts but when the back pain doesn’t resolve, you need to look at your whole life.
Our back pain is just one example of a physical symptom that can be caused by or affected by a mental or emotional strain. There are countless examples.
While practicing Homeopathy, I’ve seen countless examples of symptoms that are woven between the mind and the body. Some people think that expressing emotional pain physically is a sign of weakness, it’s not. Emotions and thoughts wind themselves into the body every day. It’s just not necessarily as obvious from one person to another.
Watch this Mind and Body Are One video to learn more about this principle.
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There is no separation between the body and the mind.
2. Disease is a sign of underlying imbalance which emerges from our life experience.
Are you ready to shift your thinking from, “What’s wrong with me?” to “Where is the underlying imbalance that’s causing these symptoms?”
Chronic diseases develop over time.
You might think the disease is happening to you but I don’t see it like that.
Most diseases begin as unmet needs, which over time, stress our body-minds and challenge our inner balance. We adapt as best we can but our adaptations can create symptoms too.
Imagine an overly simplistic example. You have to carry a heavy bag on your right shoulder every day, even when your right side gets tired, sore, and inflamed. That simple stressor will cause a cascade of adaptations as the body tries to protect the shoulder. Even once the bag is set down, the body is left with multiple layers of muscles and fascia that have been stressed and pulled. It takes time to unwind and heal all the layers.
Chronic disease is much more complicated because it affects so many aspects of the body and mind’s functioning. In order to cope with any limitations or compromised functioning, the entire body-mind has to adapt.
Everybody adapted to survive their childhood. It sounds extreme but it’s true. There are no perfect parents and everyone has some degree of relational trauma, even in happy, well-adjusted families.
For some people, that trauma is minor and through their growth and healing, they have been able to mature through it. For other people, with more significant trauma and/or less opportunity to heal, the very patterns that served them as children inhibit health as adults.
The symptoms that show up in your body represent an underlying imbalance. They express what’s happening on a deeper level.
It’s not always so simple to de-code what’s causing the imbalance. We are complex beings and our symptoms are an expression of our body-mind’s capacity to cope with the sum of past and current stressors.
The body is oriented to cope as well as it can. It has sophisticated mechanisms to maintain homeostasis or balance. If there is an imbalance, the symptoms that present are your body’s best attempt to cause as little disruption as possible, given the resources it has and the demands it faces.
This philosophy is hard to believe when you are in pain but this knowing translates into direct therapeutic implications. If you understand that the symptoms that are bothering you are not what’s actually wrong, you can start looking deeper for the imbalance upon which everything else rests.
As I’ve sat with patients, I’ve been struck by the degree to which unmet needs morph into adaptations that become symptoms over time. The child with the angry parent, who was constantly shut down, holds back and fears expressing herself. The child with the disengaged parent who didn’t get much attention keeps trying to prove her worth and pushes herself beyond exhaustion. The child with the overbearing parent is standoffish, and despite feeling lonely, has trouble letting others into her inner world.
The stories are endless. I continue to hear new versions and seek to unravel the web of how each person’s dis-ease was formed. It’s fascinating to see how the body holds on to old pain even once the individual becomes aware of their wounded patterns. Cognitive awareness is a great first step but it often isn’t enough to undo the compensations.
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Think beyond your diagnosis.
3. We are responsible for our well-being.
It sounds simple enough but what’s really involved in taking personal responsibility for your well-being? Committing to eating a clean diet, getting fresh air, enough sleep, and exercise is only the most basic level of self-care.
Most people know when they are hungry or tired, even though they may not always respect their bodies and give themselves the nutrition and rest they need.
Beyond the basics, the way you care for yourself depends a lot on how you’re living.
Here’s a list of self-inquiry questions that support a broader level of self-care in which you’re truly taking responsibility for your well-being.
How well do you know your limits? Can you feel when you’ve worked or given too much and pull back?
Do you trust what you have to say and speak up for yourself?
Do you listen to pain or contraction in your body and feel for what you need to undo it and relax? What’s being held within that tension?
Do you find healthy outlets for anger and frustration so those emotions don’t get suppressed or leak out into your relationships?
Are you being honest with yourself or are there inconvenient truths you are denying?
Are you fulfilled by your work and your relationships? Are you seeking meaning?
The challenge is that most of us tend to live in our heads. We have all kinds of ideas about what we should do in order to be a good mother, wife, employee, daughter or whatever we are.
Unless you can balance your mental values with a felt sense of what’s best for your body in any given moment, you’ll end up doing what you believe is expected of you instead of what you need to thrive.
You may not say what you really feel or do what you really wish to do. You may not ask for the support you need or make time to release all the pressure and stress you have absorbed from other people.
You may pressure or judge yourself. Everyone does these things, nobody’s perfect, but each action that’s not aligned with health takes a toll and ultimately creates unwanted symptoms.
How you feel, care, and relate to yourself has a significant impact on your well-being. Developing your felt-sense and trusting it, can have a major impact on your health.
It can be difficult to believe at first.
When I was sick, I wanted to believe there was something very wrong. I kept going to doctors expecting them to find a tumor or something seriously wrong.
I couldn’t fathom that years of suppressed emotion and adaptations to unmet needs could create an entire disease. But it can. I see it every day.
When you make the shift to believing you are responsible for your own well-being and you can heal yourself, you see the doctors and practitioners as people who are supporting you, not fixing you. They are supporting you in rebuilding yourself.
Commit to Rebuilding Yourself
When you’re committed to rebuilding yourself, you’ll be less drawn to suppressive medications. Instead of taking anti-pills like antidepressants, antianxiety, or pain relief on their own, you’ll see medication as a temporary measure, until you can access and treat the root of your underlying imbalance.
Seeking the root of imbalance requires a major shift in mindset. You need to release the mechanical view of the mind and body.
Your body is not a car that you can take to the shop and seek a diagnosis for what’s wrong. Yes, there are useful diagnostic tools. Use them and then explore what’s causing any symptoms that are diagnosed.
Instead of looking exclusively at physical body functions, broaden your thinking to include how you’re living and how you’ve coped with a lifetime of stressors, whatever they may be for you.
It’s up to each of us to untangle the web of symptoms that have accumulated into whatever dis-eases we’ve been labeled with. Most of us can’t untangle that web on our own because we lack objectivity about ourselves.
I’ve certainly spent a lot of time in medical offices in my life. Some practitioners helped me tremendously and others not at all. The results depended on many factors. The most significant of which was who held the responsibility. The practitioners whose help I valued most offered their skill and experience and used it to support me in helping myself.
Seek support for whatever you are trying to heal but remember that it’s you that is ultimately responsible and capable of healing yourself.
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Looking to take more personal responsibility for your health.
4. Wholeness exists within. The body-mind can reclaim balance.
Within you there’s balance but it’s obscured by layers of imbalance that are causing dis-ease of one kind or another.
Given that disease is a form of imbalance and it accumulates layer by layer with one adaptation after another, as you start to heal one adaptation and then the next (like peeling back layers of an onion), you gradually find yourself in better balance and more vibrant health.
You are not broken. Within you, there is a wholeness that may seem unbelievable if you’ve been sick for a long time.
Your body has a tremendous capacity for homeostasis or balance. When you remove the adaptations that are inhibiting you from attaining balance, you can see the remarkable capacity for your body-mind to heal.
When you support yourself in new ways and enable the inherent balancing mechanism to do what it knows how to do, you can achieve a level of health that wouldn’t seem possible based on your diagnosis.
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Have unwavering faith that wholeness lies within each of us.
Cultivate faith in your wholeness.
5. To heal, we must believe it’s possible.
Most people who have been struggling for a long time doubt that they can ever be fully well.
There’s a paradox in healing.
You can't access healing beyond what you believe is possible but it’s hard to believe it’s possible when you’ve been struggling for a long time.
It can even feel injurious to have faith in your capacity to heal if you’ve been disappointed many times before.
I know this conundrum, I lived in it for many years.
Here’s what I learned.
Healing happens through tolerating a certain degree of unknown.
In order to be in a space where you stretch yourself beyond the statistics, beyond the probability, you have to be willing to enter a no man's land, a zone with quite a bit of uncertainty.
The unknown can be an uncomfortable place because most people aren't willing to hope unless it's attached to proof that it worked for someone else or a medical authority tells you it’s possible.
Let me tell you about the people in the LTI community who are each healing beyond their own expectations. There’s a process that each person goes through, as they learn to adopt a healing mindset.
To cultivate a healing mindset you need to:
Challenge your thinking about dis-ease and life obstacles.
Study some philosophy of chronic disease to expand your understanding of how you got to this point in life and your health right now.
Learn how to take personal responsibility for your self-care including learning self-inquiry and embodied practices which will give you confidence in the places you may have doubt.
Seek support to help you navigate through the obstacles without getting disheartened or wanting to give up.
Learn to create a harmonious two-way relationship with your body-mind.
This shift is possible. I know because I’ve done it myself, not just when I was sick at the age of 21, but again when I was 40 and had a major concussion that wouldn’t heal. I’ve supported people through many kinds of challenges and I firmly believe that anyone who commits to the process can become exceptional at healing.
When you have an overarching framework and a community of people who have succeeded using it, it feels like a smaller leap to believe you can heal too.
You’ll need mentorship and camaraderie with people who’ve doven deep into their inner world, dis-ease and beliefs, and have come out the other end feeling stronger, healthier and more aligned with who they want to be.
The beginning can feel overwhelming.
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Victim thinking has its place.
More is possible.
When you’ve been struggling for a long time, it’s hard to be objective about where you are in the healing process. It can seem like you’re just caught in a rut.
I offer you this complimentary guide to the Essential 1st Step In Healing which will teach you to:
Release resistance to where you are in your life, to free up energy currently being consumed by self-judgment.
Come to terms with how life has unfolded, to access inner relaxation and ease.
Allow what has happened to be as it is so you can stop fighting yourself.
