Somatic practices are used therapeutically to address trauma, stress, anxiety, depression, and chronic pain. They are also powerful tools for general health and wellness, enhancing posture, flexibility, body awareness, and the ability to self-regulate. Beyond health, somatic spiritual practices recognize the body as a vehicle for growth and transformation. By incorporating embodied awareness into spiritual life, individuals can access deeper compassion, insight, and connection—with themselves, with others, and with the natural world.

Many wisdom traditions teach that the body is a gateway to innate compassion and wisdom. In classical Buddhist yogic practices, yoga-asana, breathwork, dance, qi gong, martial arts, and even everyday experiences like mindful walking or mothering, the body becomes a doorway to presence and awakening.

In modern psychology, pioneers such as Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk, and Pat Ogden have shown how unresolved trauma lives in the body and nervous system long after the mind believes it has “moved on.” Recent advances like Polyvagal Theory, developed by Stephen Porges and brought into therapeutic practice by Deb Dana, affirm what contemplative traditions have long known: our nervous system is central to how safe, connected, or threatened we feel, and learning to regulate it can transform our experience of life.

As an integrative somatic practitioner, I bring together these different streams of knowledge—Western somatic psychology, polyvagal-informed tools, and Eastern contemplative traditions. My own path has been deeply influenced by teachers such as Reggie Ray, Thomas Hanna, Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk, Pat Ogden, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Eugene Gendlin, and Moshe Feldenkrais. Their teachings, along with decades of my own practice and retreat experience, have shown me the common threads that unite diverse somatic traditions.

Through somatic healing, we learn to listen to the wisdom of the body, restore a sense of safety and vitality, and rediscover our innate capacity for healing, compassion, and wholeness.