What is somatic healing?

Somatic healing, or somatic therapy is a process of learning to safely sit with thoughts and feelings so they can stop getting stuck, and instead naturally come and go. Prepare to ease anxiety, depression, people pleasing, reactivity and overwhelm! I am living proof somatic healing works; back in 2019 this simple, yet nuanced practice brought profound healing to me and my life, dissolving my 20-year bout of depression.

Healing means to return to wholeness. Rather than shying away from the parts of yourself or your life that you once suppressed or repressed, somatic healing helps you meet them in a safe and gentle way. With your presence, care and compassion, you learn to tend to these difficult parts like they are small children – hold them, listen to them and be with them. Somatic, meaning body, builds on interoception, the capacity to feel sensations in the body. This somatic process brings transformation, alchemy and integration. Discomfort becomes comfort and greater insight or wisdom about your life’s events is felt.

It sounds counterintuitive; we want the thoughts and feelings to go away, but when we safely go towards them, they feel loved, heard, seen and witnessed, their job is done (leading you back to a sense of wholeness) and they leave. When we meet the trauma in the body, one step at a time, the trauma resolves, it completes, it leaves the body and the nervous system learns to connect and open to safety, trust, and a friendly world, inside and out.

Talking about what happened can keep our nervous system stuck in protective trauma responses, such as anxiety, depression, people pleasing and aggressive reactivity. While there is great benefit to talking it out, sometimes it doesn’t get to the root! Trauma can inhibit our capacity to find language to explain what happened or describe it authentically, whereas somatic healing, bypasses the need to talk about it and goes direct to heal from the root.

For profound and lasting behaviour change, somatic practices are an essential ingredient to achieve wellbeing goals. As much as our modern-day world tells us that the body and mind are separate, they are intricately connected and work as one. When we want to heal the mind, we need to heal the body too.

Different to talk-based therapy, a somatic healing session is less talking about what happened and more of an inward experience where you build essential skills to navigate your internal landscape (including thoughts, people, beliefs, memories and sensations in the body).

Here are the key parts to a somatic healing session:

1. First, you connect with your facilitator and choose your intention for the session, the issue or challenge you would like to address and your vision, what you are working towards.
2. Second, you are guided through a basic mindfulness practice to relax your mind and body, regulate your nervous system and find safety in the body.
3. Then you build your connection to your source of safety (perhaps this is the stable feeling you get from the ground, maybe it’s your spiritual connection with the light of your heart, or it could be the non-threatening space you are seated in). This becomes your resource (like your floatation aid if you were learning how to swim), that you can come back to at any time.
4. Next, you are invited to welcome the trigger you intended to look at for the session.
5. Then you are guided through the three steps to meet, greet and treat your triggering thoughts and feelings like friends so they can naturally come and go. Within the three steps (meet, greet, treat) you are shown how to use up to 20 healing strategies.
6. Finally, you notice how it feels to have safely sat with your thoughts and feelings. Typically, people feel calmer, lighter, clearer, more open and free.

We can fear going towards the fear. Our thoughts about our pain, loss, grief, anxiety, depression and trauma can feel so big, we don’t want to go towards it, feel it and heal it. It feels too terrifying. What we do in this case (which was most certainly my case), is we focus on safety first. We build a foundation of trust. Your somatic facilitator is not there to drag you into the deep end, but to sit with you, by your side, providing invitations, guidance and steps to help you meet what is arising, including the fear about the fear.

Learning to feel is like learning to swim. Do we teach kids to swim by throwing them in the deep end? No, they would drown. We teach kids to swim, by first, building a safe and friendly relationship with the water and their teacher, by dipping their toes in, playing and splashing, and only submerging into deeper water when it feels safe. It’s the same with somatic healing. If you were asked to jump into the deep end of your pain, you would drown or become flooded with emotion. In somatic healing, you gradually build a safe and friendly relationship with your facilitator, your surroundings, your body and your mind.

You are like layers of an onion. Each time you say ‘yes’ to finding safety and sitting with uncomfortable thoughts and feelings you clear another layer of emotional baggage. One session is not a forever thing; more, somatic healing is a life-changing discovery and practice of implementing emotional intelligence tools that you could have benefited from, from a much earlier age! There’s no need for finger pointing, you are right where you need to be. Now, with this information, you are invited to come and safely feel, and heal.

It can feel scary to try something new. I know I was scared that if somatic healing didn’t work me, it felt like I would be doomed, with depression forever. It turned out to be the answer to being a highly-sensitive, deeply feeling, empathic human. Perhaps somatic healing, or somatic therapy is your answer too, waiting to be found.

It’s hard to keep up with the positive comments I hear from people about somatic healing, but here are a few:

I’m not scared of my feelings anymore. I’m excited to feel more. This is the first thing I would consider a cure for anxiety. I cope with sadness better. I don’t suppress anymore. I am calmer. This diffuses difficult situations quickly. I no longer feel like there’s something wrong with me.

May you find your answer to healing. It comes in many forms. If you would like to try a somatic healing with me, Bronte Spicer, please enjoy this 33% discount code, 33OFF, when you book an IN-PERSON SOMATIC HEALING or ONLINE SOMATIC HEALING. If you would prefer to work with someone else, I can highly recommend Angela Macleod, Kylie Reavley and Amanda Goodfellow.

If you are a nurse, mental health practitioner, psychologist, counsellor, spiritual care practitioner, spiritual healer, alternative therapist or parent wanting to guide others how to safely address and release trauma from the body, the next round of SOMATIC HEALER starts 3rd November 2025.