You've been to therapy. You've talked. You've understood. You can explain your childhood with clarity, name your patterns with clinical precision, identify the exact origin of your wounds. Your therapist nods. You nod. It all makes sense.
And yet, something is still stuck.
The understanding is there but your body didn't get the memo. You still have the knot in your stomach every time the phone rings a certain way. The tension in your shoulders that won't release no matter how many massages you get. The reactivity that fires before you can think, that automatic response that leaves you wondering why you're still reacting this way if you already "worked on" that issue.
There is a reason why verbal insight doesn't always translate into change. And it's not lack of willpower or therapy. It's that trauma doesn't live only in the mind. It lives in the body. And what lives in the body needs to be healed in the body.
The body keeps the score
Bessel van der Kolk said it with a clarity that transformed the field of traumatology: the body keeps the score. His book by that title, published in 2014 after three decades of research at Harvard and the Trauma Research Foundation, changed the way we understand what trauma is and, more importantly, what it takes to heal it.
The memory that can't be narrated: Van der Kolk demonstrated that trauma is stored in two distinct memory systems. One is explicit memory: the narrative, what you can recount in therapy, the story with sequence and context. The other is implicit memory: patterns of muscular tension, autonomic responses, protective postures, nervous system reactivity that activates before the prefrontal cortex can intervene (van der Kolk, 2014). Talk therapy works with explicit memory. But the body holds the implicit. And the implicit doesn't need your permission to activate: it does so every time something in your environment resembles, even remotely, the original situation.
There is a distinction that changes the entire approach to healing: trauma is not what happened to you. It is what got trapped in your nervous system as a result of what happened to you. Two people can live through the same event and one develops trauma while the other doesn't. The difference isn't in the event but in what the body could or couldn't complete in response. What got frozen. What had no way out.
Indigenous healing traditions always worked with the body. Mesoamerican limpias, ritual massage, ceremonial dances, the use of sound and vibration on specific body zones: all of this was somatic work before the term existed. It wasn't superstition. It was an intuitive, millennial understanding that suffering lodges in tissue as much as in story.
Why talking isn't always enough
I want to be clear: talk therapy is not useless. It is valuable, necessary, and has helped millions of people. But it has concrete neurological limits that are important to understand so we don't confuse understanding with healing.
Polyvagal Theory: Stephen Porges, neuroscientist at Indiana University, revolutionized our understanding of the autonomic nervous system with his Polyvagal Theory. According to Porges, our nervous system operates in three fundamental states: ventral vagal (safety, social connection, the capacity to be present and in relationship), sympathetic (activation, fight or flight, the response to perceived threat), and dorsal vagal (collapse, dissociation, the shutdown when threat is overwhelming). Chronic trauma leaves the nervous system stuck in sympathetic or dorsal. And from those states, the prefrontal cortex, where speech, analysis, and verbal insight occur, has limited access (Porges, 2011). You cannot "talk" your way out of a state that operates below language.
This is the moment every honest therapist recognizes: when someone in your office can explain their pattern perfectly but keeps reacting exactly the same way. They can articulate eloquently why they shut down emotionally, they can identify that it comes from childhood, they can even predict when it will happen. And it still happens. That's not lack of willpower or resistance. It's that the verbal insight didn't reach the nervous system. The understanding lives in the cortex. The pattern lives in the brainstem.
Integrative healing doesn't discard the word. It complements it. At Dynamis we work with cognitive understanding and with the body that needs to embody it. Depth psychology to understand the pattern. Somatic work to find it in the body. Ceremony to give it space for expression and release. Nature to regulate the nervous system. It's not one modality against another. It's a weave where each tool reaches where the others can't.
Where trauma lives in your body
Somatic trauma is not abstract. It is locatable. If you pay attention, you can begin to feel where yours lives.
The jaw you clench at night and sometimes during the day: that's where contained rage lives, the words you didn't say, the screams you swallowed. The shoulders carrying chronic tension that no massage truly resolves: excessive responsibility, hypervigilance, the habit of always being on alert. The chest that closes, that breathes shallow, that protects a heart that learned opening was dangerous: unprocessed grief, losses that had no space. The stomach contracted into a permanent knot that medical exams can't explain: chronic fear, anticipatory anxiety, something your body knows before your mind does. The throat that tightens when you need to speak: repressed expression, the voice that learned it was safer to stay quiet.
The incomplete discharge: Peter Levine, creator of Somatic Experiencing and author of Waking the Tiger, observed something revealing in nature: wild animals experience constant threats but rarely develop trauma. The difference is that after each threatening event, their body completes the stress cycle through trembling, shaking, and spontaneous movement, a natural discharge of survival energy. Humans, through social conditioning, inhibit these discharges. "Don't cry." "Calm down." "Don't make a scene." And the trauma gets frozen in the tissue, waiting for an opportunity to complete itself (Levine, 1997). Somatic healing works precisely with that incomplete discharge.
This connects directly with something we explored in another article: each Enneagram type tends to store tension in specific body zones. Type 1 in the jaw and back. Type 2 in the chest and arms. Type 5 in the solar plexus. This isn't coincidence. It is the character armor that Wilhelm Reich described decades ago, mapped with the precision of the Enneagram. Knowing where to look is the first step toward releasing what we find.
The path back to the body
If trauma lives in the body, healing needs to include the body. Not as an optional complement but as the central territory of the work. The good news is that there are multiple paths in, backed by research, and not all of them require reliving the pain.
Breathwork, conscious breathing, is perhaps the most direct path. Breathing is the only physiological process that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary: you can control it consciously, but it directly affects the autonomic nervous system. It is the bridge between conscious and unconscious. Specific breathing patterns can activate vagal tone, pull the nervous system out of its chronic state of alert, and allow emotions and body memories that were blocked to emerge.
Bodywork includes a broad spectrum: from movement therapy to myofascial release practices, from trauma-informed therapeutic touch to TRE (Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises) that activate the natural neurogenic tremor our social conditioning inhibited. Each of these modalities works with the body's implicit memory in ways that words cannot.
Ceremony functions as deep somatic work. In the ceremonial context, the body has permission to express what it represses in everyday life. Crying without explaining why. Trembling without controlling it. Moving without choreography. Making sounds without words. All of this is somatic discharge, the completion of cycles that got frozen, in a space where someone holds you professionally while your body does what it needs to do.
And nature is not aesthetic backdrop: it is a nervous system regulator. Research in ecopsychology shows that immersion in natural environments activates vagal tone and facilitates the transition to the ventral vagal state, the state of safety and connection, which is exactly where you need to be for somatic healing to occur.
At Dynamis, somatic healing is not an isolated session. It is a thread woven through the entire process. Depth psychology sessions include constant attention to the body. Breathwork is an integral part of the work. Ceremony in La Maloca works directly with body memory. And the 7 acres of dry tropical forest in Guanacaste are the space where your nervous system can finally find the safety it needs to release what it has been carrying.
Coming home to your body
The goal of somatic trauma work is not just to "process" what happened. It's something more fundamental: to feel again that your body is a safe place to live.
Many people who have lived through trauma operate in a chronic state of subtle dissociation. It's not that they "don't feel." It's that they learned, probably very early, that not feeling was safer than feeling. The body became enemy territory, a source of pain, of vulnerability, of sensations that threatened to overwhelm everything. Disconnecting was a brilliant survival strategy. But what protected you then now keeps you isolated from your own experience.
Somatic work doesn't force you to feel. It accompanies you, with professionalism and care, so that feeling can become safe again. It's not about opening floodgates or reliving pain. It's about teaching your nervous system, gradually, that it can feel without falling apart. That it can vibrate without breaking. That it can open without being destroyed.
Viktor Frankl said that suffering without meaning is unbearable, but suffering with meaning can be transformative. Somatic trauma work doesn't seek to eliminate pain. It seeks to complete what was left incomplete so that the trapped energy can flow again. It's not about forgetting what happened. It's about what happened no longer living in your body as if it were still happening.
If you've been to therapy and feel that "something is missing," it's not that therapy failed. It's that there are dimensions of trauma that words don't reach. Your body keeps the score. And your body needs to be part of the process. The body is not an obstacle to healing. It is the territory where healing happens.
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Frequently asked questions
Do I need a trauma diagnosis to benefit from somatic work?
No. Somatic work benefits anyone who experiences chronic tension, disconnection from their body, emotional reactivity, or the feeling that "something is missing" in their therapeutic process. You don't need a diagnostic label to recognize that your body holds things your mind has tried to process without success. Many people discover during somatic work that they carry more than they consciously knew.
Can bodywork be retraumatizing?
It can be if not conducted with proper training and a professional framework. That's why at Dynamis, somatic work is held by clinical psychologists with trauma training. The approach is not about "opening floodgates" but about creating the safety conditions for the nervous system to process gradually. We work with the principle of titration: small doses of activation followed by regulation, always respecting your nervous system's rhythm.
What kind of somatic work do you offer at Dynamis?
We integrate multiple modalities based on each person's needs: breathwork (conscious breathing), trauma-informed bodywork, nervous system regulation practices, free movement, and ceremonial work with a somatic component. All within an integrative psychology framework that also includes the Enneagram, logotherapy, and ecopsychology. We don't apply a single technique: we weave a personalized approach.
Can I combine somatic work with my current therapy?
Yes, and in fact we recommend it. Somatic work doesn't replace talk therapy; it complements it. Many people find that after an integrative retreat experience, their regular therapeutic process deepens significantly because they now have access to material that was previously blocked in the body. We suggest communicating to your therapist that you're exploring this path.
Is breathwork safe for everyone?
Breathwork is generally safe, but contraindications exist for certain conditions: pregnancy, epilepsy, severe cardiovascular conditions, and some unstabilized psychiatric disorders. That's why prior assessment is an essential part of our process. If there's a contraindication, we guide you toward other somatic modalities that are appropriate for you.
References:
Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. New York: W. W. Norton.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking.
