The mind-body connection has long been established, but as digital devices have evolved to be able to tell us more about our bodies than ever before, there’s a sense that this can be at the expense of reading the signals from one’s own body. Tapping into the opposite of this idea is somatic wellness, with its focus on paying attention to how the body expresses emotions, experiences, thoughts, and feelings.
Wellness modalities are inviting people to go inward to discover what their bodies—and minds—really need.
Harvard Medical School’s Harvard Health Publishing describes somatic therapy as “treatment focusing on the body and how emotions appear within the body,” explaining that “somatic therapies posit that our body holds and expresses experiences and emotions, and traumatic events or unresolved emotional issues can become ‘trapped’ inside.”
This idea is taking hold, with nearly 18,000 posts for #somatictherapy on TikTok and over 195,000 on Instagram as of September 18. This movement has been on the verge of the mainstream for some time, with many citing the 2014 publication of Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score—which delineated how trauma can be stored in the body—as popularizing somatic therapies and their focus on movement to address trauma.
Another way that listening to one’s body is manifesting is via the practice of intuitive eating, which, the Guardian wrote, “is based on the idea that your body already knows exactly what it needs,” and comes as a riposte to the strictures of diet culture.
One practitioner who is popularizing the somatic wellness movement is Nahid de Belgeonne, an author, somatic movement educator, and breath and yoga teacher, who in 2024 published Soothe: The book your nervous system has been longing for (to be published shortly in the US as Soothe: Restoring your Nervous System from Stress, Anxiety, Burnout, and Trauma). Soothe explores how to bring the body back into balance via movement and breath.
Soothe by Nahid de Belgeonne
Nahid de Belgeonne portrait. Photography by Helena Sandberg
De Belgeonne tells VML Intelligence that she believes people are turning to somatic wellness and therapies as “we’ve sort of tried everything, and it’s not working.”
She explains: “I think most people are trying to approach [well-being] from a cognitive mind, which isn’t all of you… you read things, and you sort of try and apply them to you, so you’re having to use a lot of willpower to change behavior, and that isn’t how behavior changes. Behavior changes when you use your whole self.”
Key to de Belgeonne’s method is the idea of interoception, which she describes as “listening to [the] signals… coming from your body to the brain.” She says that how you interpret those signals “can, over time, help you to manage all of your symptoms, from stress to anxiety… because they’re all learned behaviors.”
And while de Belgeonne says that she’s not against gadgets—“they’re a really good gateway into understanding yourself a bit better”—she notes that “in the information age, we’re really good at collecting content information, we’re just not very good at embodying it. We don’t know what to do with it.”
An awareness of how to calm one’s nervous system can be profound for general health, de Belgeonne points out, given the stress hormone cortisol’s role in inflammation in the body. “When you’re in an alarm state, you have a cortisol peak, which is your stress hormone. [And the] most appropriate thing to do with stress is to move it out of the body.”
The world has changed. And we have to be the gatekeepers of our nervous system.
Nahid de Belgeonne
Author, somatic movement educator, and breath and yoga teacher
And while stress would have once had the purpose of staying in the body to prepare it to run away from danger, says de Belgeonne, now “we generally tend to sit at the laptop and just keep soaking in more and more of these perceived threats without doing anything about it. And that’s when you start to get inflammation in the body.”
De Belgeonne advocates instead introducing “micro practices” throughout the day to tap into one’s body and reduce stress. These could be as simple as “moving yourself away from your desk, closing your eyes and breathing for six seconds in and six seconds out, and then doing something that isn’t as stimulating for your brain,” she says. She adds that in today’s always-on climate of continuous information “the world has changed. And we have to be the gatekeepers of our nervous system.”
Somatic wellness’s growing popularity is the latest expression of the mind-body connection to capture the collective imagination. As we pointed out in 2024’s “The Future 100,” awareness of the vagus nerve and how exercises to stimulate it can encourage the body to relax, was already on the rise. The growing following for these body-based practices illustrates that in an increasingly digital world, consumers are drawn to the idea of tuning into their own intuition.
Image by Elina Fairytale. Courtesy of Pexel
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