Working with your body
We honour the innate wisdom of your body as a powerful tool for healing. Through practices such as yoga, T.R.E. (Tension & Trauma Release Exercises), somatic therapy, meditation, and mindful movement, you’ll be gently guided back into connection with yourself. These practices help release stored tension, regulate the nervous system, and open the door to deep, lasting healing from within.
What is Somatics?
Somatics is the practice of tuning into the body from the inside out. Rather than focusing on how a movement looks, somatics is about how it feels. It helps you reconnect with your body’s natural wisdom, release stored tension, and move with more freedom. By slowing down and paying attention to sensation, somatic practices support nervous system regulation, reduce stress, and create lasting change in both body and mind.
“The practices were gentle but powerful. They helped me release emotions I didn’t know I was holding and reconnect with my body in ways I had forgotten.”
Top-Down vs Bottom-Up Healing
There are two main approaches to healing: top-down and bottom-up.
A top-down approach begins with the mind:
Through talking, thinking, and understanding, it creates change by making sense of our experiences. This can be hugely beneficial, but it’s only part of the picture. On its own, it doesn’t always reach the deeper layers where stress, tension, and trauma are stored in the body.
When we experience trauma, the mind and body often respond differently. Top-down approaches, such as talking therapies, help us tell the story, understand what happened, and bring clarity. Yet many people find that even after years of insight, their body still holds on to the “charge” of the experience, the tension, frozen energy, and incomplete stress responses that never had the chance to resolve.
This is where somatic, bottom-up work becomes essential. By focusing directly on the body’s sensations and rhythms, it creates a safe space for release. Through breath, movement, tremors, or gentle awareness, the body can finally complete those unfinished cycles, no longer living as if the past is still happening.
By moving the charge out of the body, somatic practices help people feel lighter, calmer, and more connected—not because they’ve talked it through, but because their whole system has finally let go.
A bottom-up approach starts with the body:
Rather than trying to think our way into healing, it uses sensation, movement, and nervous system regulation to restore balance. By helping the body feel safe and calm first, the mind naturally follows, allowing old patterns and stored tension to gently release.
“Somatic therapies posit that our body holds and expresses experiences and emotions, and traumatic events or unresolved emotional issues can become 'trapped' inside."
- Amanda Baker, director of the Center for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Disorders
“Talking can be an important part of healing, but you as a whole organism do not truly change until your body comes to life and comes out of danger mode.” - Peter Levine
Why Somatic Work Matters
We root a lot of our work in the work of trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk. In his book “The Body Keeps the Score”, Kolk explores how our bodies hold on to the imprints of stress and trauma long after the mind believes it has “moved on.” This is why we can logically understand our past, talk about it, or even reframe it (top-down), and still feel anxiety, tension, or disconnection in daily life.
Van der Kolk highlights that true healing requires engaging the body, not just the mind. Somatic practices give us a way to do this. By moving, sensing, and releasing at the body’s pace, we can complete stress cycles, calm the nervous system, and restore a deeper sense of safety and presence.
At our retreat, this is the heart of the work, supporting the body to let go, so that mind and spirit can find lasting ease.
Your Nervous System
Your nervous system is designed to keep you safe. It helps you respond to challenges by moving into stress mode, fight, flight, or freeze, and then, once the danger has passed, it naturally brings you back into balance. In a healthy cycle, the body releases the charge of stress (sometimes through shaking, movement, crying, or deep rest) and settles back into calm.
But, in modern life, many of us rarely complete this cycle. Constant pressures from work, family, screens, finances, overstimulation, keep us switched “on.” Instead of releasing stress, we can store it in the body and our nervous systems become stuck in survival mode.. Over time, this can show up as tight muscles, anxiety, poor sleep, digestive issues, chronic pain, menstrual and fertility challenges, or a deep sense of disconnection from ourselves.
Somatic practices help unwind this. By slowing down, finding safety, tuning into sensation, and allowing the body to move, shake, and soften, the nervous system is guided back into its natural rhythm. Stress cycles can finally complete, restoring balance, resilience, and a felt sense of ease in both body and mind.