Somatic Healing for mental health: Our body gives us the feedback of our experience
The body gives us the feedback of our experience. It’s the tool we have for navigating our life here on earth, it’s our vehicle. Long before our mind can form the right words or our emotions rise to the surface with a feeling, our body has already responded. It’s always listening, always recording and carefully translating, delivering subtle signals to our consciousness about our existence, a tightening in the chest, a softening in the belly or a lump in the throat. These sensations are not random. They are our somatic language of experience.
What is Somatic healing for mental health? We tend to think of life as happening all around us as a stream of external events we must navigate. But the truth is, life happens through us and our body is giving us the feedback. Every conversation, every moment of stillness and every gesture of love, our nervous system takes it in, filters it and responds subconsciously.
The wisdom comes through us
We often override what our body is telling us. We dismiss the feeling of tiredness when our body screams for rest, we push through our aches and pains, putting the cause down to something abstract. We’ve been told that our mind is in control, it’s all-powerful, and we use it to analyse, justify and explain every experience. But the body doesn’t operate in logic, it offers deeper knowing through sensation and feeling.
Somatic healing reminds us that our body holds the traumas of our life, stored in the tissues, muscles and fascia. Our posture can reflect our past. Our breath can reflect our present. Tension in different areas often holds the words we were never allowed to say, the grief we never gave ourselves permission to feel.
To heal, we must learn to feel, recognise and release. Somatic work teaches us how to come back into relationship with our bodies, not as problems to fix, but as landscapes to explore through emotion and feeling.
The practice of listening
What if your body was your guide in this space? What if the tiredness you feel isn’t laziness but a signal to rest? When we begin to listen to our physical sensations with presence, we stop dismissing the feedback and start learning from it.
Somatic healing doesn’t require that we go back to childhood memories. Healing is completing a cycle, don’t get in the way. The gift is presence and honouring each part, bringing awareness to our bodies, our emotions and our spirit. Simply listening with our mind and nothing more, allows the mind to become the observer of our experience and not the director.
Daily embodiment
As with any practice, this isn’t about fixing or reaching a goal, it’s about becoming presence and observing.
A way to begin:
· Place a hand on your heart or belly and ask, “What am I feeling now?”
· Notice your breath, not to change it, just to witness it.
· Listen carefully and notice how your body wants to express itself.
These small acts of tuning in reconnect us to the natural feedback loop of the body. They remind us that healing is found in a subtle shift and a moment of stillness.
What are we doing to our bodies?
We have seen a huge leap in cosmetic surgery and tattoos, people hurting and deforming their bodies, changing to look a certain way or to visually tell a certain story. Anything we do to change or manipulate our body, including exercise and eating, can if we are not careful be driven by the conscious mind showing its dominance. The result is our mind dictating to our body what to do, what to feel and how to perform.
“When I thought about this more deeply, I realised by tattooing, undergoing surgery we are removing or limiting our body’s capability to talk to us clearly.”
Rather than forcing our body to be a certain way, listen, move and hear deeply what your body is telling you. Don’t let your mind tell your body what it thinks your body needs.
Listen to your experience and get out of the way
To listen to our body is to connect to Mother Earth and to live truthfully in alliance with nature. It’s to acknowledge that we are in a relationship with our bodies, and our bodies are having a relationship with our experiences. They are the storytellers and the witnesses of every step we take in life.
Your body does two things really well, so let it get on with them!
Firstly, it is your main tool in giving you feedback about this experience, the experience of this reality in both the seen and the unseen world.
Secondly, and most importantly, it heals and processes. It is constantly processing your experience, your emotion and your thoughts. It is constantly healing. Allow your body to do its job! Listen to the feeling of the world around you and get your mind out of the way so your body can heal.
The invitation is to begin listening more deeply. Let your body become a compass, guiding you through healing and into a more authentic life, one where presence is the priority and feedback isn’t turned away from, but honoured and embraced.
In the end, our bodies reveal more than we could ever know. If we’re willing to listen, it will always speak to us in truth and honestly.
Written by Richard Stuttle