Why your body is important in healing - somatic inner work

You probably know the feeling: you have a difficult conversation and you feel yourself getting warm, or you are sad and your stomach hurts.

Your body speaks. 

In self-healing, we turn to our inner world: our thoughts and what we feel in and around our bodies.

Throughout our lives, we all go through difficult things that we can't process at the time - for example because there is no support available. Imagine you had a critical father who often pointed out what you were doing wrong. Now, as an adult, you have internalized that way of seeing things and have become overly critical of yourself and others.

Difficult or traumatic experiences - and the patterns that arise from them - leave imprints in our bodies and nervous system. They often surface in daily life, for instance, when we meet someone who reminds us of a critical parent, and we suddenly start to feel small. The young, vulnerable parts of ourselves are touched: our inner child comes forward. 

Emotions we were unable to process earlier in life never reached completion, and they are stored in the body. This is an intelligent mechanism: parts of ourselves are split off and frozen in time, so that we can continue with our lives. The downside is that we carry a lot with us, which gets triggered in specific situations in our adult lives. It is like a TV endlessly replaying the same soap opera from the eighties, tiring.

With somatic inner work, we go to the root of old patterns and unprocessed emotions in our bodies and psyche. We connect with these often unconscious parts of ourselves through the sensations in and around our bodies. When they are met with attention, they can gradually integrate and find more rest. Our bodies are intelligent and know the way back to greater freedom and lightness.

April 2026

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