People use the word somatic the way they use the word holistic — as a vibe. As a signal that something is gentle and probably involves breathing.
It isn't a vibe. It's a technical field with a hundred years behind it, and the training I did has specific components with specific names. I want to lay them out plainly, because I would rather you know exactly what I was taught than assume it's incense and good intentions.
Here is what the Phoenix Path Advanced Somatic Facilitator Training actually covered. I did it twice.
Somatic Trauma Resolution
The body is the site of the work, not the mind. This means moving through something somatically rather than explaining it, analysing it, or achieving insight about it.
The reason is simple, and most people learn it the hard way: understanding why you flinch does not stop you flinching. You can know the entire origin story of your fear and remain exactly as afraid. Insight is not the same as change, and the body did not learn its patterns through argument, so it does not unlearn them through argument either.
A necessary honesty: this is where the language of my field gets slippery. "Resolution" is a word that belongs, properly, to clinical treatment. What I am trained to do is meet trauma-related material as it arises and work with it in the body, safely, at the pace your system allows. I am not a licensed therapist. This is not therapy. It can be profoundly therapeutic, and those are different sentences.
Energetic Tracking
Precise attention to what is moving in a session, where it is held, and where it stops.
I know how that sounds. But strip the word "energetic" of its incense and what remains is observable and specific: the breath that goes shallow one sentence before someone cries. The hand that opens when the shoulders finally drop. The exact moment a body decides it is not safe to continue, which arrives long before the person has any idea they've decided it.
You can call that energy, or attention, or attunement. What it means practically is that I am watching you very carefully, and I am watching the parts of you that do not speak.
Shadow & Parts Work
The premise, which comes out of depth psychology and out of parts-based clinical models both, is that you are not one self. You are a committee.
There is a part of you that wants the thing and a part that sabotages it. A part that is furious and a part that has spent thirty years making sure nobody ever sees the fury. These are not symptoms to be eliminated. They are strategies — every one of them was, at some point, an intelligent response to a real situation.
The work is not to defeat the parts you dislike. It is to meet them, find out what they are protecting, and stop being at war with yourself.
Nervous System Regulation
The most concrete and least mystical of the six, and arguably the foundation under all the others.
Your nervous system has states. Roughly: settled (you can think, feel, and connect), mobilised (fight or flight — racing, bracing, urgent), and shut down (collapse, numbness, the lights going out). None of these are chosen. None are a character flaw.
Most people who have been through something difficult are not broken. They are stuck in a state — permanently braced, or permanently absent — because at some point that state kept them alive and their system never got the memo that the emergency ended.
The work is building the capacity to move between states again. Not to be calm all the time; that's not health, that's sedation. To be flexible. To be able to come back.
Emotional De-Repression
Feeling what was too dangerous to feel at the time.
Repression is not weakness or avoidance — it is a competence. If you are six years old and the grief would drown you, and there is no one to hold you while you drown, then not-feeling-it is the correct decision and it may be the reason you are still here. The body files it away and gets on with survival.
But it does not delete it. It waits. And it will keep waiting, patiently, for decades, until the conditions are finally safe enough to open the file.
That is what this work makes: the conditions. Not the catharsis — you cannot schedule catharsis, and anyone selling it is selling a performance. Only the conditions, and then the patience to let your system choose its own timing.
Psychological Frameworks
Developmental psychology. Psychological defence systems. Cognitive and behavioural technique.
The map. Because a felt sense of what is happening in the room is necessary and it is not sufficient — you also need to understand what a defence is for, why a person formed one at four years old, and what happens if you take it away before they have anything to replace it with.
This is the part of the training that keeps intuition honest. Without it, you are just a person with good instincts, improvising, on someone else's nervous system.
And what it isn't
I have laid these out in detail because I think you deserve to know what you would be walking into, and because the wellness industry has made a habit of vagueness that I do not want any part of.
So, plainly: I am not a licensed therapist. This is not psychotherapy. I do not diagnose or treat mental-health conditions, and I do not promise outcomes. I am trained so that trauma-related material can be met and worked with as it arises. This work can be deeply therapeutic without being therapy — and when something needs licensed clinical care, I will tell you, and I will help you find it.
That is not a disclaimer at the bottom of the page. It is the shape of the practice, and I would rather say it first than have you discover it later.