Somatic therapy in Nelson, BC
A Somatic Experiencing® approach integrated with counselling and craniosacral therapy
Many people find their way to somatic therapy after realizing that understanding their patterns hasn't been enough to change them. They've done good therapy and can speak articulately about what's happening in their lives. And yet the same loops repeat. The same familiar body tension keeps coming back. They get swept up in the emotional weather and can't keep their feet on the ground.
Somatic work meets these patterns where they actually live: in the felt body and the nervous system, where understanding alone often can't reach them. In my practice, we are still interested in insight, but intellectual understanding is no longer the only doorway. This is the key insight in psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk's seminal book, The Body Keeps the Score: trauma is held in the body in ways that words alone cannot reach, and lasting change often happens by speaking the body's language.
What does 'somatic' mean?
The word somatic comes from the Greek soma, meaning the living body. Philosopher Thomas Hanna popularized 'somatics' to draw a distinction between the body as observed from outside, in the way a physician or a mirror sees it, and the body as experienced from within. Somatic therapy is interested in the second kind: the body as we actually live it.
Somatic therapy is a broad family of approaches that brings this inside-the-body experience into the therapeutic process. A session might pause to notice what the body is expressing in any given moment, paying attention to sensation, breath, or the way the nervous system has responded to a memory or an emotion. The body is treated not as a problem to solve but as a participant in the work, with intelligence and memory of its own.
Sometimes embodied memory is the only way to reach what we can't otherwise access: experiences we've repressed, experiences whose details we've forgotten or never consciously knew, or experiences that happened before we had language. The body carries these even when the thinking mind cannot.
For a deeper exploration of the theory, history, and main approaches, you can read my article What is somatic therapy and how does it work?
The Somatic Experiencing® lens
The somatic approach I rely on most is Somatic Experiencing® (SE), developed by Dr. Peter Levine. SE pays close attention to the nervous system, and especially to what happens when survival responses are interrupted and prevented from completing. When stress or trauma overwhelms our capacity to respond fully in the moment, the unfinished response is remembered in the body, our system telling us that we still need to defend against danger. It can resurface later as anxiety, as chronic tension or fatigue, or as a quiet feeling of being cut off from yourself.
Rather than working with difficult material head-on, SE invites a careful pacing. Together we move between charged sensations and what's called "resourcing," which is the practice of locating felt experiences of safety, however small. This oscillating approach lets the nervous system process what it couldn't process at the time, gradually and without overwhelming the system. Emerging research shows promising outcomes for SE in treating PTSD and related symptoms.
Somatic Experiencing® is an internationally recognized professional training and one of the foremost approaches to somatic therapy. I am completing my three-year SE Professional Training in 2026.
How I bring somatic awareness into sessions
Because Somatic Experiencing® is a lens rather than a separate service, you can encounter it in either of my offerings.
In counselling
A counselling session often begins as a conversation about what has been happening for you and where the stuck places are. As we talk, I'm also attending to what's happening in your body. Sometimes that's a change in breath or posture, sometimes a sensation that suddenly rises into awareness. When we come across an issue that has charge to it, we may slow down and turn toward it directly.
In a seated session, I guide the work with awareness cues, helping you follow the thread of sensation, imagery, emotion, or movement, and suggesting small experiments. In other sessions, touch becomes part of the work as well. Touch can include working on the treatment table, which facilitates certain kinds of somatic processes. Any use of touch is always discussed in advance and held by your consent. The shape of a session is guided by what is most useful for your process.
If you've been around your patterns intellectually for years, somatic work offers a way to reach them at a felt level, where deeper and more lasting change becomes possible. Many clients say it's a relief to finally feel what they implicitly knew was there. That experience often opens up new possibilities.
In craniosacral therapy
A pure craniosacral session is largely silent and deeply receptive. With somatic awareness woven in, sessions become a little more dialogical, with verbal cues or gentle invitations to track sensation while you receive touch. Spontaneous movement is also more welcomed in an SE-influenced session than in a pure craniosacral one, which means letting the body move as it needs to rather than directing the movement from the mind. Together, these shifts can help you stay present with what's arising rather than drifting away from it, and they can support more conscious integration of what your system is processing. Some clients prefer near-silent sessions; others want more somatic dialogue. We work out what fits as we go.
In either modality, the work moves at your pace and within your sense of what's safe and helpful.
Who somatic therapy can help
Somatic approaches can be especially useful for people working with:
A sense of disconnection from the body, or numbness
Physical symptoms with a stress or trauma component
Persistent patterns that haven't shifted through insight alone
Somatic work also suits people drawn to a slower and more embodied kind of therapeutic conversation, one that values presence over problem-solving.
What a first session looks like
In our first session, I'll ask about what's bringing you in and what you're hoping for. We'll talk about your background and the kind of support you've had so far. From there, we begin gently. There's no pressure to dive into difficult material right away. We move at the pace your nervous system actually needs, which is often slower than the pace we expect. You can pause at any point or take the work in a different direction.
Working together
If this holistic approach to somatic therapy feels like the right next step for you, I offer a free 20-minute consultation by phone or video. It's a no-pressure way to ask questions and get a sense of whether we might work well together. I see clients in person at my office in downtown Nelson, and I offer online sessions for clients elsewhere in British Columbia.
You can also learn more about my counselling and craniosacral therapy services, or visit getting started for practical details on what to expect.