What Somatic Healing Really Means (and Why It Matters for Women’s Sexual Wellness)
If you’ve ever felt like parts of your body are disconnected, especially those places that hold pleasure, desire, or deep feminine aliveness, you are not alone.
Maybe you’ve experienced…
Numbness or absence of sensation
Discomfort, pain, or tension in your pelvis or pelvic bowl
Shame or self-judgment around your body or sexuality
A sense that your libido is asleep or muted
Emotional heaviness, disconnection, or “stuckness” around your erotic or creative self
These experiences are often dismissed or medicated away, but they’re actually powerful signals from your nervous system which is your body’s way of asking for attention, care, and reconnection.
What “Somatic” Actually Means
The word somatic comes from the Greek soma, meaning “body.” Somatic healing isn’t just massage or movement; it’s about listening to your body and working with it.
Somatic work honors the truth that the body holds memory, emotion, and resilience. Pain, tension, or numbness aren’t signs of failure, they’re the body’s intelligent way of protecting you.
If you want to go deeper into how our bodies store and process experiences, Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score is a wonderful resource.
Why Somatic Healing Matters for Women’s Sexual Wellness & Pelvic Health
For many women, the pelvis is a charged space physically, emotionally, and culturally. It’s where we hold trauma, shame, and tension, but also our greatest capacity for pleasure, creativity, and power.
Here’s how somatic healing supports this reclamation:
1. Regulating the Nervous System
When the nervous system is stuck in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, connection to pleasure can feel impossible. Somatic practices help retrain the body toward safety and responsiveness, expanding your capacity for intimacy and ease.
→ Read more about Polyvagal Theory and how it shapes our sense of safety.
2. Reawakening Sensation & Receptivity
If you’ve lived with disconnection or tension, your body may have gone quiet in certain places. Through breath, awareness, and micro-movement, you can gently reawaken those areas which invites in sensitivity where there was numbness, and curiosity where there was shame.
3. Releasing Stored Tension
The pelvic bowl can hold layers of old emotion, birth trauma, or stress patterns. Somatic work helps unwind this through body-based awareness, fascia release, and nervous system regulation. The Cleveland Clinic offers a clinical look at how pelvic tension can impact women’s health — and why tending to this area matters.
4. Cultivating Body Trust & Pleasure
So much of modern culture treats women’s bodies as functional for productivity, reproduction, or performance. Somatic healing is a reclamation: a return to pleasure as a natural expression of health and vitality.
What Somatic Healing Looks Like in Practice
Each session is unique, but here are some of the modalities and practices I often bring into the space:
Body scanning & awareness: gently noticing sensations, warmth, and subtle shifts
Micro-movements & somatic mapping: exploring where the body wants to move, open, or release
Breathwork & pulsation: engaging the breath to soften patterns of holding
Relational embodiment: dialoguing with the body, listening, and responding
Nervous system regulation tools: grounding, orienting, titration, and safe touch
You can read more about my one-on-one work here and explore the spaces where we might begin together.
Invitation to Begin
Your body is always speaking. The tension, the numbness, the longing, they’re all messages. Somatic healing is the art of listening deeply and responding with compassion.
If you feel ready to explore this work to reconnect with your body, awaken your pleasure, and restore your vitality I invite you to begin your journey:
👉 Learn more about One-on-One Somatic Support
👉 Join a Group Session or Ceremony
Here’s to coming home to your body, your pleasure, and your truth.
With warmth,
Valerie
