“Somatic” has become one of those words that is everywhere at the moment: somatic healing, somatic breathwork, somatic release. It is used so often, and so loosely, that it seems easy to lose sight of what it actually describes, or what it takes to do somatic work well.
I want to offer something simpler: a look at what somatic practitioners are actually trained to do, why that training matters, and (because I think it is important to be clear about this) where I sit in relation to that work myself. I am not a somatic practitioner, I work embodied. Those are related but different things, and I think the distinction is genuinely useful for anyone trying to find the right kind of support.
What Somatic Practitioners Actually Do
At it’s core, “somatic” simply means “of the body.” Somatic practice is built on a well-evidenced idea: that the nervous system holds and expresses experience (including difficult or overwhelming experience) not just as memory or thought, but as sensation, posture, movement, breath, impulse, and pattern. Trained somatic practitioners (in modalities like Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, or somatic-based trauma therapy) work directly with that layer.
What that looks like in skilled somatic hands is often much quieter than people expect. It is rarely dramatic. A somatic practitioner is trained to:
- Track the nervous system in real time: noticing subtle shifts in breath, colour, tension, stillness, or restlessness, and responding to them moment by moment.
- Titrate. This is one of the central skills of the work: introducing small, manageable amounts of activation, then pausing to let the body settle and integrate before going further. The pacing is deliberately slow, because the nervous system needs small doses to actually learn safety, rather than being flooded.
- Recognise states like freeze, collapse, or dissociation and know how to gently support someone back into a state where they can stay present, rather than pushing through it.
- Build capacity before content. Good somatic work often spends real time helping someone develop resources – by grounding, orientation, a felt sense of safety – before ever approaching what is difficult.
- Hold the container after the session too, thinking about how someone will return to daily life once the work is done for that day.
This is genuinely skilled, specialised work, and it takes real training to do responsibly. It is also, done well, quite undramatic. The nervous system regulating rarely looks like a big cathartic release: it often looks like someone’s breath slowing, their shoulders dropping, a long exhale, a sense of settling. Healing is more often incremental than explosive.
Where I Sit: Embodied, Not Somatic
I don’t call myself a somatic practitioner, and I think it matters to be precise about that. What I do is work embodied which means the body is present and welcome in the room, and I draw on some tools and sensibilities from somatic practice, but it isn’t the organising centre of what I do the way it is for a somatic specialist.
In practice, at The Felt Space, that looks like:
- Using Focusing, an experiential, body-centred process that evolved from the work of Eugene Gendlin. It bridges the gap between thoughts and physical sensations, recognizing that the body holds deep wisdom about our life situations.
- Drawing on elements of family constellation work, another embodied approach, when it is relevant to what’s emerging for a client.
- Bringing in some somatic interventions: noticing sensation, breath, posture, movement impulses, or bodily responses alongside the talking work – when it is appropriate to where a client is.
The difference isn’t really about which tools are used. It is about how central and structured the somatic dimension is, and how much specialised tracking and titration training sits underneath it. For a somatic practitioner, the body is the primary channel of the work. For me, it is one thread woven through a broader, more integrative process. It is used carefully, and only when it serves the client in front of me, at the pace they can actually meet.
Why This Distinction Is Worth Knowing
If you are looking for support and you come across the word “somatic,” it’s worth asking what is actually behind it. Is the person trained in a recognised somatic modality, with the tracking and titration skills that involves? Or is “somatic” being used more loosely, to describe an interest in the body rather than a specialised clinical skill set?
Neither is wrong but they are different things, suited to different needs. Sometimes what someone needs is exactly that specialised, body-centred process, and a somatic practitioner is the right fit. Other times, what is needed is a broader therapeutic relationship where the body has a seat at the table, but isn’t the whole conversation – which is closer to how I work.
Either way, the same question is worth asking wherever you go: is this pace being set by someone who is actually tracking me, or is the pace being set by something else entirely? That is the thread that runs through all good embodied work, whatever label it is working under.
You can find out more about how I work as a therapist and what embodied therapy is. If you have further questions, please do get in touch.