What if your body has been trying to tell you something—in a language you’ve never quite learned to speak?
We live in a world that teaches us to analyze our bodies clinically: “My shoulder is tight. My back hurts. My stomach feels off.” But what if your body doesn’t speak in medical terms? What if, instead, it speaks in poetry, metaphor, and imagery—a language that carries deeper truth than any diagnosis ever could?
This is the foundation of somatic healing—the understanding that your body holds wisdom, stories, and messages that go far beyond the physical symptoms you experience. As a somatic therapist and holistic practitioner working with clients in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge, and online across Ireland and internationally, I’ve witnessed countless moments when someone finally hears what their body has been trying to say all along.
In this blog, we’ll explore a unique approach to somatic healing that invites you to listen to your body not as a problem to be fixed, but as a wise companion speaking in its own beautiful language.
The Language Your Body Speaks: Beyond Clinical Descriptions
When did you last truly listen to your body—not to diagnose it, but to understand it?
Most of us have been taught to relate to our bodies through a medical lens. We describe sensations in terms of symptoms: tension, pain, discomfort, tightness. While this language has its place, it misses something essential—the deeper meaning behind what we feel.
Your body doesn’t say, “I’m experiencing muscular tension in the trapezius region.” Your body says, “I’m carrying mountains that aren’t mine.” It doesn’t say, “I have digestive discomfort.” It says, “I’ve been churning worries like stones. I forgot how to be soft.”
This is the language of somatic wisdom—poetic, metaphorical, and profoundly true in ways that clinical language can never quite capture. When we learn to listen to this language, we access a depth of healing that goes beyond symptom management to genuine transformation.
What Is Somatic Healing? Understanding Body-Centered Wisdom
Somatic healing is a holistic approach to wellbeing that recognizes your body as a source of deep wisdom and intelligence. The word “somatic” comes from the Greek “soma,” meaning body—and somatic therapy works with the understanding that your body stores experiences, emotions, and trauma in its tissues, muscles, and nervous system.
Unlike traditional talk therapy, which primarily engages the thinking mind, somatic therapy invites you into a direct relationship with your felt experience. It’s about sensing, feeling, and being present with what’s happening in your body right now—not analyzing it from a distance, but experiencing it from within.
This trauma-informed approach recognizes that healing doesn’t happen through the mind alone. Your nervous system, your tissues, your very cells hold information that your conscious mind may not be aware of. Somatic healing creates space for this deeper knowing to surface and be heard.
How Somatic Healing Works in Practice
In somatic therapy sessions—whether in person at my practice locations in Dublin, Naas, or Newbridge, or through online sessions available across Ireland and internationally—we work with several key principles:
Body Awareness: Learning to notice sensations, feelings, and movements in your body without judgment or the need to change them immediately.
Felt Sense: Developing the capacity to be with your experience as it is—the tightness in your chest, the emptiness in your belly, the ache in your throat—and to listen for what these sensations are communicating.
Nervous System Regulation: Understanding how your body responds to stress and trauma, and learning practices that help you move from fight-flight-freeze states into a place of safety and presence.
Embodied Healing: Working through the body rather than bypassing it—allowing release, movement, and transformation to happen at the somatic level where trauma and tension are actually held.
Where Does Your Body Hold Its Stories? A Somatic Exploration
Different parts of your body hold different types of experiences and emotions. In somatic healing, we often work with specific areas that tend to store particular kinds of information:
Your Feet and Legs: The Ground of Your Being
Your feet and legs carry you through life—literally. They hold information about groundedness, stability, and your relationship with moving forward or feeling stuck. When someone says, “I feel like I can’t take another step,” this isn’t just a metaphor—their legs are speaking about exhaustion, burden, or loss of direction.
In somatic therapy, we might explore: Where have your feet taken you that your heart didn’t want to go? What would your legs say about the journeys they’ve carried you through?
Your Belly: The Center of Gut Knowing
Your belly—your abdomen, your gut—is where we often hold anxiety, fear, and unprocessed emotions. It’s also the seat of your intuition, your “gut feeling” that knows things before your mind does.
From a holistic therapy perspective, when your belly is chronically tight or churning, it’s often holding emotions that feel too big to process—worry, grief, fear, or the accumulated stress of life lived without enough space to digest your experiences.
The invitation in somatic healing is to bring gentle awareness to your belly and ask: What have you been holding that I haven’t acknowledged? What truth do you know that I’ve been ignoring?
Your Chest and Heart: The Container of Emotion
Your chest—your heart space—holds grief, love, longing, and heartbreak. It’s where we feel the ache of loss, the heaviness of unprocessed sorrow, or the constriction that comes from protecting ourselves against hurt.
In body-centered therapy, working with the chest often means creating space for emotions that have been locked away. Sometimes the heart literally feels heavy or hollow—and these aren’t just poetic descriptions. Your body is telling you: “I’m carrying grief.” “I’m holding love that has nowhere to go.” “I’m protecting myself from more hurt.”
Your Throat: The Passage of Expression
Your throat is the bridge between what you feel and what you express. It’s where words get stuck, where truth gets swallowed, where screams get silenced.
Chronic throat tightness or the feeling of a “lump in your throat” often speaks to unexpressed emotion—things you needed to say but couldn’t, feelings you wanted to release but held back. In somatic healing practices, we work gently with the throat to create space for expression and voice to return.
Your Shoulders and Back: The Burden Bearers
Your shoulders and back literally hold you upright—and metaphorically, they carry the weight of responsibility, duty, and burdens that may or may not be yours to carry.
When someone’s shoulders are constantly tight or raised, or their back aches with chronic pain, the body is often communicating about overwhelm, excessive responsibility, or the exhaustion of holding everything together. Somatic work with these areas involves not just physical release, but also exploring: What am I carrying that I could put down? What burdens have I taken on that aren’t mine?
The Practice: How to Listen When Your Body Speaks
So how do you actually practice listening to your body’s wisdom? Here are some foundational approaches from integrative somatic therapy:
1. Shift from Analyzing to Feeling
Most of us live in our heads, constantly analyzing, thinking, and figuring things out. Somatic healing invites you to drop down from your thinking mind into your felt experience.
Instead of asking, “Why am I feeling this way?” try asking, “Where am I feeling this in my body?” Instead of immediately trying to understand or fix, simply notice: What sensations are present? What’s the quality of this feeling—heavy, tight, empty, buzzing?
2. Ask Your Body Questions
Your body responds to inquiry when you approach it with genuine curiosity rather than judgment. Try asking:
“Body, what are you trying to tell me right now?”
“If this sensation in my chest/belly/throat could speak, what would it say?”
“What do you need from me that you’re not getting?”
Don’t force answers. Simply create space and see what emerges—often in images, metaphors, or felt senses rather than clear verbal responses.
3. Honor What Comes Without Fixing
This is perhaps the most challenging aspect of somatic healing for many people: learning to be present with uncomfortable sensations or emotions without immediately trying to make them go away.
When your body speaks—when you feel the ache in your chest, the tightness in your throat, the hollowness in your belly—the practice is to stay present. To breathe. To say, “I hear you. I feel you. You’re not alone—I’m here with you.”
This is embodied self-compassion. Not rescuing yourself from difficult feelings, but being with yourself in them. That presence, that companionship with your own experience, is profoundly healing.
4. Use Movement and Breath
Your body speaks not just through sensations but through impulses to move. In somatic therapy sessions, we often work with spontaneous movement—allowing your body to express what it needs to express through gesture, stretching, shaking, or releasing.
Breath is also a powerful tool for somatic healing. When you’re feeling disconnected from your body, simply bringing your awareness to your breath—feeling the rise and fall of your chest and belly—brings you back into embodied presence.
Why Body Wisdom Matters: The Science Behind Somatic Healing
While the language of “body wisdom” might sound purely esoteric, somatic healing is deeply grounded in neuroscience and an understanding of how trauma and stress affect the nervous system.
When you experience stress, trauma, or overwhelming emotion, your nervous system responds with fight, flight, or freeze responses. If these responses don’t complete—if the threat doesn’t resolve or the emotion doesn’t fully process—the activation remains stored in your body.
This is why you can have chronic tension years after a stressful period has ended. It’s why your body might react to present situations as if they’re still dangerous, even when logically you know you’re safe. The nervous system holds memory at a level deeper than conscious thought.
Somatic healing works by:
Completing Stress Responses: Allowing your body to finish the fight, flight, or freeze response that got interrupted, releasing the stored activation.
Regulating Your Nervous System: Teaching your body that it’s safe to relax, to be present, to come out of constant vigilance or shutdown.
Creating New Neural Pathways: Through repeated practice of being present with your body in a different way, you literally rewire your nervous system’s habitual responses.
Restoring Body-Mind Connection: Bringing awareness back to parts of yourself that have been numbed, dissociated from, or habitually ignored.
Somatic Healing Across Ireland: In-Person and Online Sessions
Whether you’re in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge, elsewhere in Kildare, or anywhere across Ireland, somatic healing is accessible to you. I offer both in-person sessions at my practice locations and online sessions that allow you to experience this work from the comfort of your own space.
Online somatic therapy has proven remarkably effective, as the core of this work—your relationship with your own felt experience—is something you can access wherever you are. Through video sessions, I guide you into body awareness practices, help you track sensations and responses, and support you in developing your capacity to listen to your body’s wisdom.
For clients outside Ireland seeking holistic healing approaches that honor the body-mind-spirit connection, my online practice extends internationally, offering the same trauma-informed, gentle, and effective somatic work regardless of location.
When to Seek Somatic Therapy: Is This Approach Right for You?
Somatic healing may be particularly valuable if you:
• Feel disconnected from your body or like you’re “living in your head”
• Experience chronic tension, pain, or physical symptoms without clear medical cause
• Have tried talk therapy but feel like something’s missing or not quite landing
• Carry trauma or difficult experiences that your body seems to remember even when your mind has “moved on”
• Want to develop a deeper relationship with your body beyond just managing symptoms
• Feel emotions intensely in your body but struggle to understand or work with them
• Are drawn to holistic approaches that honor your whole being—body, mind, emotions, and spirit
As a non-clinical practitioner focused on holistic healing, I work with the understanding that you are the expert on your own experience. My role is to create space, offer guidance, and support you in developing your own capacity to listen to and trust your body’s wisdom.
The Ongoing Practice: Living in Dialogue with Your Body
Learning to hear what your body is saying isn’t a one-time revelation—it’s an ongoing practice, a developing relationship. Like learning any language, it takes time, patience, and repeated exposure.
Some days, your body will speak clearly, and you’ll receive insights that feel profound and life-changing. Other days, it might be quiet, or you might not understand what it’s trying to communicate. That’s all part of the process.
What matters is that you keep showing up. Keep bringing awareness to your sensations. Keep asking, “What are you trying to tell me?” Keep being present with whatever arises, even when it’s uncomfortable or confusing.
Over time, something shifts. Your body becomes not just something you live in or manage, but someone—something—you’re in relationship with. A companion. A source of wisdom. A guide who’s been with you your whole life and will continue with you until your last breath.
Conclusion: Your Body Is Speaking—Are You Listening?
Your body has been speaking to you your entire life. In sensations. In tensions. In aches and expansions. In impulses to move and urges to rest. In metaphors and feelings that carry meaning deeper than words.
The question isn’t whether your body is communicating—it is, constantly. The question is: Are you listening? And not just listening to fix or diagnose, but listening to understand, to honor, to be in relationship with this remarkable vessel that carries you through your life.
Somatic healing offers a path back to this listening, this relationship, this embodied wisdom. Whether you’re in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge, elsewhere in Ireland, or connecting from anywhere in the world, this work is available to you.
Your body is not your enemy. It’s not a problem to be solved or a machine to be maintained. It’s your most constant companion, your wisest teacher, your deepest source of truth.
What if you started listening?
About the Author:Abi Beri is an IPHM-accredited Integrative Holistic Therapist and Family Constellation Facilitator offering somatic therapy, energy healing, and holistic wellness services in Dublin, Naas, and Newbridge, as well as online sessions across Ireland and internationally. With training in integrative somatic therapy, family constellation work, and multiple energy healing modalities, Abi provides trauma-informed, body-centered healing for emotional wellbeing, nervous system regulation, and deep personal transformation. Currently pursuing an MSc in Counselling and Psychotherapy, Abi maintains a purely holistic, non-clinical practice focused on empowering clients to connect with their body’s innate wisdom. Learn more at blissfulevolution.com, somatictherapyireland.com, and familyconstellationseurope.com
