What is the Somatic Awareness?

The body holds what the mind can’t always process. Long before we have words, our nervous system learns to store, protect, and respond. This is why so many of our patterns—emotional, energetic, even spiritual—show up physically before we even recognize them mentally.

We’ve all felt it. That sudden flip in your stomach when you receive unexpected news. The tightness in your chest when you’re about to speak your truth. The tension in your shoulders after a long, stressful day. These are signals—ways the body speaks what the mind hasn’t yet said. Most of us are conditioned to ignore these signals or push through them, but when we learn to listen, they can guide us toward healing.

In somatic work, we slow down and tune into the body’s language: sensation, breath, posture, and subtle energy. Sometimes it’s a tightness in the chest, a swirling in the belly, a sense of heaviness or holding. Rather than pushing those sensations away, we learn to stay with them gently, with compassion and curiosity.

This approach was central to my trauma-informed certification through The Center for Healing, where I was trained in embodied processing. I learned how to guide someone back into presence in the body—not through analysis or explanation, but through direct experience. The body doesn’t lie, and when we meet it with respect and permission, it can begin to release what it’s been holding.

My understanding was deepened even further through Inner Alchemy by Zulma Reyo. Her meditations bring attention to the inner body in a way that feels both sacred and grounded. Her teachings on shaking, movement, and vibrational awareness gave me a powerful language for the body's own intelligence and healing capacity. She reminds us that energy must move in order to be transformed, and that this movement often begins as subtle awareness.

In a session, somatic awareness might look like following the breath, noticing a sensation, allowing the body to tremble or sway. There’s no agenda, no force—only presence. We track what’s alive in the moment and listen. Sometimes the most profound healing comes from simply being with what is, without trying to fix it.

This isn’t dramatic work. It’s soft, slow, and respectful. It honors the body’s timeline. And over time, it can bring someone into deeper contact with their own truth, not just mentally or emotionally, but physically and energetically.

Underneath all of this is the same goal: to uncover what’s real. To peel back the layers of protection and adaptation and return to the still, quiet presence of the true self.