What is Somatic Bodywork?

Somatic Bodywork addresses what is called body armoring and how one’s history lives in the body. Character armoring, a term coined by Wilhem Reich, MD, forms when we’re very young as a way to get love, attention, and survive in our particular surroundings.

People are also shaped by sudden or repeated trauma at any age. (see Embodied Learning) Bodywork helps clients, especially those with chronic pain or trauma, come home to and re-inhabit their body in a new way, transforming what has been a house of pain on many levels to one of comfort, energy, strength, and peace. The “new shape” allows for more choice in our actions and responses rather than the automatic reactions to which we’re accustomed.

We can make contact and shift our armoring through body-centered awareness and the felt sense of what it’s like to live in our body in any given moment. We can use whatever challenges we have as ground to experience the sensations connected to our life, body, and feelings. Our armoring lives in the fascia that surrounds our muscle cells, bundles, and fibers, and holds our bodily systems and organs in place. It responds to stress, tension, heat, cold, and holds our trauma and embodied patterns.

Somatic Bodywork helps the living body awaken to itself. It blends techniques from myofascial release, deep tissue massage, polarity therapy, energy work, breathing, language, voice, sound, and sensory awareness. I use them intuitively during the session to help address, unwind, and reshape the client’s essential armoring or structure. Clients wear comfortable workout or dance wear during somatic bodywork sessions.