Somatic Healing: Why I'm bringing hands-on bodywork back into my work
Because some things need more than words,
another breakthrough or the next online session.
There is something about my business that many women who found me in the last few years probably don’t know. I started this work with my hand on women’s bodies.
Long before so much of my business happened through online programs, Masterminds, audio transmissions, WhatsApp conversations and Zoom rooms, I worked hands-on with women.
Women’s bodies have always felt like pianos under my hands. I was always amazed by how energy moved under my hands. I learned how to feel, wait and most of all listen to the stories that were ready to be uncovered.
I have always worked with women’s hearts, sexuality, desire, healing and the deeper places underneath the stories they tell themselves. But there is a difference between talking about the body and having a body underneath your hands.
And as my business became more successful, I slowly moved further away from that part of my work. Partly because online work grew. It reached more women, it was easier to scale and I could create powerful experiences without someone needing to travel to me.
But there was another reason too. I could feel that not every woman who wanted to work with me was necessarily ready for what my hands were capable of opening.
Hands-on work asks for something different. There is nowhere to hide quite as easily inside an intellectual insight. Your body speaks and sometimes what she says isn’t what the mind expected.
So although my work never stopped being body-focused…through sexual healing, pleasure, opening the heart, embodiment and all of the body-oriented work woven into my programs…it wasn’t the same.
And my own grief journey made that impossible for me to ignore.
My own body brought me back to somatic healing
After losing Anna Sophia, becoming pregnant with Luca not long after, giving birth again and then travelling with my family…I started working with my own body in a way I never had before.
During our travels through Europe I couldn’t book a session with the woman I trusted my body and energy with. It was time to listen to what my body wanted to reveal all along. New ways of working with her while going through the exact processes myself.
My own hands, time, stillness, different places, countries and energies. And lots and lots of stillness and softness.
I massaged, I listened and I felt deeper into tissue. I stayed with certain areas rather than trying to immediately change them. I used my fingers to notice where something felt hard, disconnected or numb. I worked with my belly, my pelvis, and my jaw.
The places in my body that had carried it all. Pregnancies, grief, sexual abuse, fear, birth, pleasure and survival.
And what began to change my understanding wasn’t one dramatic breakthrough. It was the amount of time.
My deep body healing needs time
This may be one of the most important things I have learned about hands-on healing. Your body often needs more time than even our healing culture wants to give her.
We love the breakthrough, the release, the ninety-minute session where everything changes, a retreat that cracks you open, the activation, the next level…but what if your body doesn’t want to be cracked open?
What if she has spent decades protecting you precisely because opening too quickly once wasn’t safe?
What my body needed was not intensity. She needed to know I wasn’t leaving. That I had time. That I wasn’t touching her to force her somewhere. That I didn’t need a result before our time together ended.
Sometimes I returned to the same place again and again and slowly, something that had been hard began to soften. Something that had felt numb began to wake up. Something I couldn’t reach through words began to become available in a different way.
My body needed time, touch and a safe container to open.
That sentence has become one of the foundations of how I understand this work now.
Why hands-on bodywork is different from online healing
I love online work. I have watched women transform through a conversation, a voice message or an audio. I would never dismiss the power of those things…and I also no longer want to pretend they are the same as touch.
They are not.
Something happens when I place my hands on a woman’s body and neither of us has to rush. When I can feel her breathing shift underneath my fingers. When I can feel where tissue softens and where the body feels safe to reveal what she no longer needs to carry. When there is no screen between us, she doesn’t have to explain herself perfectly.
When the intelligence of her body gets to become part of the conversation. Also because there is healing where talking about it only slows down or even harms the transformation. And mostly because the mind that forms your words, will always intervene with the energy that can be read without ever needing a word.
I am interested in what lives deeper than the story
The more deeply I worked with my own body, the more interested I became in the layers underneath what we usually call healing. Fascia, tissue, bones, blood, breath, and the sensation.
The places where my own body seemed to carry history in ways coaching alone could never reach. I don't mean that every emotion is literally stored in one specific piece of tissue or that every physical symptom is evidence of unresolved trauma. Bodies are more complex than a spiritual slogan. But my own experience has taught me that there are places where I can understand something completely and still feel my body responding as if the story is current.
This is what I always experienced while working with a woman’s body and this experienced myself in a whole new way. When approached with integrity and respect (for all the energies in the room), healing touch is pure magic.
Healing touch isn’t forcing the body open
This is also why I have become increasingly cautious around healing spaces that celebrate opening for the sake of opening. The bigger release, the stronger activation and the “instant awakening”.
I am not interested in forcing a woman’s body into her next expansion.
A body that has learned survival doesn’t need somebody else overriding her boundaries in the name of healing. She needs discernment, the possibility of a no, and she needs time.
There are things I can perceive through conversation, by how your Soul has left your eyes on a photo or through language that reveals where you already abandoned yourself. Where you perform or keep asking for permission…and then there’s another form of listening that happens through my hands.
It’s subtle. I’m not trying to decide what it means or impose a story on her. I just listen and set and guard the space.
The purpose is never the quantum leap or the next Instagram spectacle. Sometimes my fingers are drawn somewhere. Sometimes the body becomes warmer. Sometimes there is shaking, tears, or laughter.
And sometimes it seems as if absolutely nothing dramatic happens, but we both know that taking the time and staying present together…opened the door no Zoom call would ever be able to do.
Why I’m returning to hands-on bodywork
For years, part of me knew this work was still mine. I could feel it underneath everything else I created. But there is a vulnerability in claiming it. In a way it’s easier in some ways to say:
I mentor powerful women. I work with leadership. I help women open their hearts.
Those things are true…but so is this: my hands provide a healing energy that provides a transformation that nothing else ever can do.
My ability to sit beside a woman’s body, to listen and stay as long as needed (and this one is HUGE), is part of my work. And I don't want to keep making that smaller simply because it’s more difficult to explain online.
Perhaps this is part of my own “re-coming out of the closet” with my body of work. Not by creating something entirely new. Remembering something I knew before the success, the online business and all the ways my work expanded.
I started with the body and I am coming back to her differently now.
With everything love, grief and motherhood taught me.
Everything I have learned through spending thousands of hours being with and listening to intuitive women.
Everything my own body showed me when I finally stopped trying to heal her quickly.
You can begin with your own hands
I don't believe everybody needs to come to me for bodywork. One of the most beautiful things a woman can learn is how to place her own hands on her body and listen.
That is why I am creating practices you can use at home.
Not because an audio can replace hands-on work, but because your relationship with your own body should never depend entirely on another practitioner. Your hands and presence matters. And most of all, your ability to recognize your own yes and no matters.
You can begin there and for many women, that may be exactly enough for where they are.
And some women will know they need more
There are other women who will read this and already know.
You don’t want another audio. You don’t need somebody to explain your pattern to you. You can feel that your body is asking to be included more deeply.
For you, I am bringing hands-on body healing back into my private in-person work. Not as a quick fix or because I believe I know your body better than you do. But as a space with enough time, touch and presence for your body to welcome you home to yourself and anchored deeper within your own truth.
We don't have to rush her or force her open.We listen and we see what becomes possible when your body finally knows there is enough time.
Explore private hands-on bodywork with me →
Continue your journey back to your body
Haven't read part one yet? This is part two of my series on returning to the body. In part one, Your womb remembers what your mind learned to survive, I take you with me on my own journey with my body and how grief always opens you up for more love.
Or begin with your own hands. If something in this article speaks to you, I want you to know that you don't have to wait until you book a session, attend a retreat or find someone to work with your body.
You can begin right where you are.
I've created a free Womb Healing Audio to help you slow down, reconnect with your womb and begin listening to your body in a different way.
No forcing. No chasing another breakthrough. Just you, your body and the willingness to give her some of your time.
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