somatic Experiencing

‘The body is the most reliable truth meter’

Adyashanti

Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body-based approach to healing trauma and nervous system dysregulation. It works directly with physical sensation, awareness, and the body's own intelligence to resolve what talk therapy alone sometimes cannot reach. Available in person in Thornbury, Melbourne.

what is somatic experiencing

I often say that SE is not a modality — it's a lens.

Gestalt psychotherapy is my foundation. Somatic Experiencing is the way I bring the body's story into the room. Because the body always has a story. And it is often a very different story to the one the mind has been telling.

In practice this might look like slowing down. Paying attention to what's happening in your body as you speak. Noticing sensations — tightness, warmth, heaviness, aliveness. Following those sensations rather than the narrative. Letting the body lead.

Who comes to me for somatic work?

Usually people who have already done therapy. Who understand themselves intellectually. Who have talked about what happened — possibly many times — and still feel stuck.

Sometimes there are physical symptoms that don't have a clear medical explanation. Sometimes there's a sense of being too much in the head and not enough in the body. Sometimes it's simply that something hasn't shifted, and they know it needs to.

These are the people SE is for.

What does Somatic Experiencing actually do?

SE helps you become aware of sensation in your body — where you hold tension, where you feel numb, where something is trying to move but can't quite get there.

It builds your capacity to regulate your own nervous system. To come out of the freeze, the hypervigilance, the chronic activation that trauma leaves behind.

And it brings awareness to where trauma is held in the body — not to relive it, but to help the body finally complete what it never got to finish.