EMBODY SOMATICS

A practitioner programme that begins with your own soma

If you're here, you've probably noticed that the conversation about 'the body' in therapy has grown significantly, and fast.

Somatic approaches, nervous system regulation, embodied trauma work, polyvagal theory — it's everywhere. And if you're a counsellor or psychotherapist trained primarily in relational or talk-based approaches, you may have started to wonder: is there something here I'm missing? Something that could add another dimension to what I already offer?

Not because your work isn't good. It is. The relational depth, the careful attention, the quality of presence you bring — that matters enormously, and should not be dismissed or undermined.

But there's something in that wondering that's worth following.

Because the answer isn't simply to add a somatic technique or take a nervous system course. It's to develop a genuinely different way of understanding what a person is — and what that opens up in how you listen, and what you can offer.

That's what EMBODY Somatics is for.

And it begins not with your clients — but with your own soma.

EMBODY Somatics is a small-group, depth-oriented programme for counsellors and psychotherapists who want to explore what a genuinely somatic understanding of the person adds to their work — beginning with their own embodied experience, and carrying that living knowledge into their practice with others.

It's particularly well-suited to practitioners trained in person-centred, psychodynamic, integrative, humanistic, or relational approaches — who bring real clinical depth and are genuinely curious about what embodied work might add, without wanting to abandon the relational foundation that grounds what they already do.

Bodyworkers, coaches, and movement practitioners who bring a comparable depth of relational or clinical experience are also very welcome.

Many thoughtful therapists reach a point where they sense that something in the body-focused conversation is important — and also find that much of what's available doesn't quite fit. It's either too technique-focused, too detached from the relational depth they're used to, too dismissive of talk therpay and the insight it offers, or it assumes a level of somatic training they don't have.

EMBODY is designed to meet you where you are.

It doesn't assume somatic fluency. It builds genuine somatic understanding — philosophically grounded, practically embodied, and integrated with the relational skills you've already developed.

The nervous system is part of the soma — but the soma is more than the nervous system.

The soma is not an object we work on, but a living process through which experience, movement, and meaning continuously form.

This programme explores that territory — beginning with your own living experience of it.

Grounded in Clinical Somatic Education and informed by neuroscience and the original felt sense work of Focusing, EMBODY doesn't offer an add-on training or a toolbox of techniques to bolt onto your practice. It's a way of working with the soma as a living, learning system — so change becomes fluid, resilient, and ultimately self-sustaining.

Depth requires space. EMBODY runs as a small group, with 4 to 8 practitioners in each cohort, so the work remains personal, responsive, and genuinely relational.

THE PROBLEM

You're a skilled, thoughtful therapist. Your clients experience real shifts in your work together.

And yet — patterns can persist in ways that are hard to account for.

Insight lands, but doesn't always carry forward into how someone moves through their life. The emotional work is real and important — and yet the same patterns seem to keep showing up. The same tension. The same bracing under stress. The same sense that something hasn't quite landed somewhere deeper.

You've started to wonder whether there's something the body-focused conversation might add here. Whether working more somatically could help those shifts carry forward more fully — beyond the session, into the lived experience of the people you work with.

That wondering is what’s worth following.

And — if you're honest — something similar might be present in your own soma too.

The accumulated tension of clinical work. A pattern of holding or bracing you've learned to live around. A sense that your own body carries more than you've yet found a way to work with.

This is a big part of why EMBODY begins with you. Not because you need to fix yourself before you can help others — but because the quality of understanding that comes from genuinely living this process is irreplaceable. It cannot be taught theoretically. It has to be discovered from the inside.

Much of what gets called 'somatic work' in contemporary training centres on sensing, tracking, and regulation — helping clients notice and shift their nervous system states. And these approaches are valuable.

But when the body is treated as something to work on, rather than the soma understood as a living, learning process, the orientation subtly narrows — even in careful, well-intentioned work.

Somatic work is not about managing a body. It is about engaging a soma, a whole person — a living, sensing, moving, learning system.

And that requires more than techniques. It requires thinking somatically.

Lasting change rarely comes from regulation alone. It comes from somatic learning — a process that involves not just the nervous system, but the neuromuscular system, movement, and the whole person, the soma.

Without that understanding, somatic work can remain technique-led rather than philosophy-led. And certain dimensions of what the soma needs in order to genuinely change too often become sidelined or completely overlooked.

That's the gap EMBODY addresses. In you first.

And from there, in your work with others.

THE SOLUTION

EMBODY Somatics is built on three interdependent foundations.

These are not techniques layered onto each other, but dimensions of somatic work that function together to create lasting change.

And all three are encountered first in your own soma.

1. Pandiculation as Neuromuscular Learning

When somatic work is understood philosophically as engaging the soma – not managing the ‘body’ – the neuromuscular dimension naturally comes back into view.

In particular, one of the things a genuinely somatic understanding makes visible is that the neuromuscular system is a crucial and often overlooked part of the nervous system. And that working with it is essential for change to carry forward.

Pandiculation is what enables change at the neuromuscular level of the nervous system.

In EMBODY, you'll experience what pandiculation actually is — in your own body first. Pandiculation is the voluntary, conscious engagement of full-body muscular patterns, followed by a slow, deliberate release, then complete rest. (Spoiler: it's not stretching. And that difference matters enormously.)

What pandiculation makes possible is a direct conversation between the cortical brain and the neuromuscular system — a felt, learning experience that helps the soma update its habitual stress patterns. Not through force or correction. Through the soma's own capacity for learning and change.

This work also addresses the accumulated tensions of clinical life — the bracing, the held attention, the fatigue of long days in the chair. The personal and professional dimensions of this work are not separate. They're the same journey.

As you experience this in your own soma, you develop the embodied reference point that allows you to guide clients with confidence and somatic discernment — knowing exactly what you're inviting them towards, because you've lived it.

Movement becomes learning, not intervention. You become a guide within a learning process – your own, as well as ultimately your clients’ – instead of someone applying techniques to something treated as distinct from the whole person.

2. Felt Sense as Self-Learning

If you've encountered Focusing or approaches such as SE that rely heavily on Focusing’s concept of the felt sense, you'll already have a sense of this territory.

EMBODY locates felt sense work within a broader somatic framework — understanding it as a crucial component of structured self-learning, not just about sensation.

You — and, ultimately, your clients — are not simply asked to notice what is happening. You are supported to learn from it, in ways that respect timing, capacity, and agency.

You'll explore this in your own soma first — learning to recognise full-body stress patterns and somatic dynamics that can prevent an experience from resolving, and how those same patterns, once understood, can guide the process forward.

Agency develops. Regulation deepens. Change carries forward between and beyond sessions.

From that lived understanding, you develop a quality of presence that allows you to support clients in the same process — moving from passive observers of their sensations to active participants in their own learning and regulation.

3. Integration in Live Practice

Somatic work is not sensing plus movement plus reflection.

It is the ongoing interweaving of self-sensing, self-moving, and self-learning within the living system of the soma.

Inside EMBODY, this process is explored through live case discussion, experiential sessions in your own soma, and careful, thoughtful integration with your existing way of working — guided by your clinical judgement, never imposed as a formula.

This is not about replacing your relational, talk-based foundation. It is about giving it a foundation in Somatic — so that the depth you already bring works with the whole, emboided person. You have ‘more’ to work with.

THE RESULTS

In your own soma:

• Chronic tension, discomfort, or patterns of bracing you've been living around begin to shift — not as a side effect of this work, but as a central, foundational element of it

• You feel more grounded, at ease, and present in your own body — especially across long days of client work

• You develop a felt, living understanding of what somatic change actually is — from the inside, not just as a concept

• The accumulated tension of clinical life — the held attention, the careful containment, the physical cost of deep relational work — has somewhere to go

• You begin to inhabit your own soma more fully: moving differently, holding yourself differently, living differently

In your work with clients:

• You bring a quality of somatic presence to sessions that talk-based training rarely develops — not a technique, but a different way of being in the room

• You have a coherent, philosophically grounded framework for understanding what 'the body' actually is, and what ‘the whole person’ is — and what it needs in order to change

• You can recognise what's happening somatically in a session, and know how to work with it — not by abandoning your relational foundation, but by widening it to attend to the whole person, the soma

• Client shifts begin to carry forward more reliably — beyond the session, into how people actually live

• The often-elusive sense of 'completion' in a session becomes more practical and more embodied

The bottom line:

This work changes you first. And from that change — the way you listen, the way you're present, the quality of understanding you bring — your clients have access to something they couldn't reach before.

Not because you've added a technique. Because you've explored your own soma

HOW WE’LL WORK TOGETHER

For four months, we’ll work together in live sessions within a small group, focusing on the ‘28 Somatic Steps’, and how to deepen your personal practice. You’ll have 12 months’ access to all recorded materials, and monthly live Q&A calls that focus more on client work and professional practice — so your learning can continue to settle and integrate long after our initial live sessions together as a cohort.

Months One, Two & Three: Your Own Soma First

EMBODY begins with the 28 Somatic Steps, and develops your own somatic practice from there.

Before we turn to clients, clinical application, or course material — we start here. With you. With your own embodied experience of this work.

The 28 Somatic Steps is a foundational somatic sensing and movement practice. Through it, you'll develop a direct, felt understanding of stress reflex patterns, neuromuscular learning, and what somatic change actually feels like from the inside — not as theory, but as lived process.

This is not preparation for the "real" content. It is the real content — at least to begin with. Everything else in EMBODY is built on this foundation.

In Month One, your live calls will focus primarily on the 28 Somatic Steps — exploring what's arising in your own soma, sitting with questions, and beginning to develop the embodied reference point that will ground everything that follows.

The recorded course material is available to you from day one if you're curious to explore further — but the invitation in the first month is simply to be in your own body. To notice. To learn from the inside.

In Months Two and Three, you’ll stay focused on learning about your own soma — and we’ll start integrating aspects of how that self-understanding shapes your professional practice, considering practical questions of when, whether and what to integrate (and how), and also starting to look at some of the course materials to widen our discussion of what a soma is and how ‘Somatics’ relates to various practices, approaches and understandings of ‘the person’.

Ongoing: Live Calls, Movement Sessions & More

Weekly Group Calls (3 per month)

After Month Two, these calls open out into the fuller scope of the programme — course material, live clinical questions, case consultation, and practical problem-solving within a small, responsive group. The 28 Somatic Steps can continue to be brought here whenever it's alive for you — it doesn't disappear.

Somatic Education Movement Sessions (monthly)

Experiential sessions in your own soma throughout the programme. These build and deepen your embodied understanding of stress reflex patterns and learning-based movement — and remain a consistent thread across all four months and beyond.

1:1 Support

Two individual 30-minute sessions — one in your first two months, one in your final month — alongside group call support and individual written feedback to milestone reflections.

Recorded Course

Concise video and audio lessons covering core somatic philosophy, neuromuscular learning, felt sense work, and clinical integration — available from day one. Interactive elements and milestone reflections allow you to translate learning directly into practice, with personalised written feedback.

Ongoing Monthly Calls (from Month Four)

Towards the end of your cohort-based programme, you have access to ongoing monthly group calls — a continuing space for case consultation, practice questions, integration support, and community with other EMBODY practitioners. This means the work doesn't stop; it deepens.

Annotated Bibliography

Optional readings across Clinical Somatic Education, felt sense work, neuroscience, philosophy, and related embodied therapies — for those who want to ground their practice more deeply in the literature.

This is for you if:

• You're a counsellor, psychotherapist, bodyworker, coach, or movement practitioner — trained in any modality — who is genuinely curious about what a somatic understanding of the whole person adds to your work

• You’re actively seeing clients (or are in training to do so)

• You’re confident in your model and see its benefits in your clients, but want those benefits to last longer, rather than stay temporary

• You’ve done multiple trainings and courses but haven’t found the personalised approach you need to make sense of your practice, somatically

• You’re willing to do somatic work in your own soma as part of this learning

• You’re ready to go deeper than techniques to develop true embodied understanding

• You may be an SEP or other somatic practitioner who wishes to widen your understanding of what the nervous system is, and what the soma is — and to deepend your capacity to think somatically

This is NOT for you if:

• You’re looking for a quick-fix certification, another modality, or another ‘tool’ for your toolbox

• You’re not willing to experience this work in your own body first, and continue to have a personal Somatics practice

• You don’t currently work with clients (or aren’t in training to do so) 

Investment

EMBODY is an investment in how you experience yourself, think somatically, and understand what ‘the whole person’ means to you — and in the depth and durability of the change your clients experience.

• $1,750 or £1,200 for 4 months of live cohort-based calls and 1:1 support, 9 months of live Q&A, and one year of access to all recorded materials. (This is the investment as I run the programme in its new format; the investment will increase in the last quarter of 2026.)

How EMBODY Fits With Your Existing Training

EMBODY Somatics is not a replacement for the modalities you’ve trained in.

It offers a philosophical and practical foundation for understanding how those modalities function within a truly somatic framework.

Grounded in the practical philosophy of Clinical Somatic Education as developed by Thomas Hanna, EMBODY integrates contemporary neuroscience, stress physiology, felt sense work (including aspects of Peter Levine’s SE, and Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing), and elements of current trauma-informed approaches into a coherent orientation.

Rather than simply adding another technique (though for many, pandiculation of full-body patterns will constitute a new technique), EMBODY clarifies how to think somatically about the whole person – so your existing skills become more integrated, intentional, and sustainable in their impact.

This is what makes EMBODY different from trainings that combine modalities or offer somatic ‘add-ons’.

It helps you understand and contextualise what you are already doing – more fully, and from your own lived experience.

From that clarity, your work can deepen.

A Note on Commitment

I’ve invested many years in both Clinical Somatic Education, Focusing, and Somatic Experiencing® certification and trainings, alongside ongoing supervision, consultation, and philosophical study.

What matters most to me in EMBODY is not your accumulation of information, but the quality of engagement.

You will not be expected to learn passively by observation alone.
You will be invited into active exploration, reflection, and integration within your own practice.

If, after completing the 28 Somatic Steps, and participating in the live calls during your first month, you feel that EMBODY is not the right fit for you, let me know. You can request a 50% refund.

Because this work depends on alignment.