Recently after a hands-on somatic session with my mentor Aimee Takaya, my daughter and a few other people asked me an unexpected question.

“Did you lose weight?” I hadn’t. What had changed was the way I was holding myself.

There had been a strong green light reflex pattern held through my low back. It created a subtle contraction that pushed my belly forward and influenced how my whole system was organizing.

But it wasn’t just physical.

The way I was being with that posture was layered. There was a sense of holding everything, carrying responsibility, moving through life like it all rested on me.

As that pattern began to unwind, my posture reorganized and my body felt more spacious. At the same time, something shifted internally. Since then, I’ve been getting better at asking for help and not seeing that as a failure or defect.

The physical shift and the internal shift happened simultaneously.

This is something somatic work reveals again and again. Our posture, breath, thoughts, emotions, and the way we interpret our lives are not separate systems. They are expressions of the same living organism.

In somatic practice, we are working with the soma, the lived experience of being in a body. Not just muscles and structure, but sensation, perception, emotion, and the patterns that shape how we move through the world.

One of the most important principles in somatic work is holism. The body, thoughts, emotions, and inner experience are not separate. They are continuously influencing each other.

Another is self sensing, the ability to feel internal sensation. This is not always available to us at first. In psychology, there is a concept sometimes referred to as amnesic parts, aspects of our experience that are outside of conscious awareness. In the body, we see something similar with sensory motor amnesia, where patterns of tension and holding exist without us being able to feel or sense them clearly.

Through somatic practice, that awareness begins to return.

Along with that is self regulating, the body’s ability to restore balance when awareness and support are brought to the system.

There is also an understanding of perpetual change. The body is always adapting and reorganizing. Nothing is fixed.

And structure and function are deeply connected. The way we organize the body influences how we feel, think, and respond to life.

Patterns exist in composition not isolation. A physical holding pattern can live alongside a way of thinking. A contraction in the body can shape perception. A shift in how we relate to something can allow the body to reorganize. As patterns begin to release and come back into awareness, we often discover we have more choice points in how we move and organize ourselves.

This is where change begins, not through forcing or fixing, but through restoring awareness and allowing the system to reorganize. Over time, what was once outside of awareness becomes available again. Personal growth is an embodied experience, and the nervous system care I offer my clients goes far beyond the physical.

Here’s to living a life with greater awareness and more possibilities for growth and comfort.