🎧🌎 I’m trying something new with this one since it’s a longer piece – I recorded an audio version if you’d rather listen. I truly believe that if more people practiced this kind of work, not just understood it, but lived it. The world would feel like a very different place. 🎧🌎
You’ve been doing the practices.
The breathwork. The nervous system work. The regulation techniques. Maybe therapy, maybe movement, maybe ceremony. You know the language. You understand how the body holds things. You’ve put in real time and real effort.
And something still isn’t shifting.
Not in the ways that actually matter. Not in the moments when it counts – when you’re in a hard conversation, or lying awake at 2am, or back in the same pattern you thought you’d moved through a year ago.
This is one of the most common things I hear from people who find their way to my work. And I want to tell you what I’ve come to understand about why it happens.
It’s not that you’re doing it wrong.
It’s that somewhere along the way, the practices themselves became a way to avoid feeling rather than a way to feel more.
I call this somatic bypassing.
It’s similar to spiritual bypassing (using spiritual ideas to float above difficult emotions), but instead it happens through the body and nervous system. Yes, through the very practices meant to bring us closer to ourselves.
And it’s more common than most people realize. Even among those of us who have been doing this work for years.
What Somatic Bypassing Looks Like
It doesn’t always look dramatic. Often it shows up in very ordinary ways:
- Using breathwork to move away from anger before really feeling it.
- Constantly trying to “regulate” instead of staying curious about what’s dysregulated and why.
- Treating nervous system techniques like a problem-solving kit–something to fix uncomfortable feelings rather than be with them.
- Doing endless practices while still quietly avoiding the emotional truth underneath.
And here’s the one that surprises people most: it can look like being deeply committed to personal growth, while carefully avoiding the feelings that growth would actually require.
I see it in my own profession too. There are practitioners using the words ‘somatic work’, ‘nervous system regulation’, ‘soma.’ The language is right. But the work is still happening at the level of concept. It’s still being explained, not felt.
And the body doesn’t move through explanation. It moves through experience.
We will always have to feel it to move through it.
That is the simplest thing I share with people, and the hardest thing to actually grasp.
Sometimes it takes us half our time together, four or five sessions, before someone really understands what it means to feel something in the body and move through it.
Not to understand it. Feel it.
I see this in plant medicine work, too. People come to ceremony after ceremony looking for the big experience, the breakthrough. But when I ask about integration, about how they’re living with what arose, there’s often very little there. The medicine becomes another way to have an intense experience without the body actually changing. More ceremony. More seeking. But if we can’t be with what is in front of us, we will find a way in whatever form to move around it, avoid it, numb out. And then we just get more of the same.
I see it in my own office too. Here are two examples of what it actually looks like, up close.
“But I Don’t Want to Feel That”
A few sessions in with a client, something shifted in the room.
We’d been working together long enough that she understood the concepts. The techniques. The language of the nervous system. Intellectually, she had a real grasp on all of it.
And then, in the middle of a session, something surfaced, a feeling, a felt sense in the body, and she looked at me and said: “But I don’t want to feel that.”
I paused for a moment. Because I understood exactly what she meant. And I also knew we had arrived somewhere important.
I told her two things.
First: we can work in a way that makes this more digestible. We don’t have to go all at once. The body doesn’t need to be overwhelmed to be transformed.
Second: this is something we can’t get around. If we keep finding ways to manage the feeling without meeting it, we’re just creating more conditions to survive around it. More sophisticated coping. More distance dressed up as healing.
To be truly free – from the past, from what no longer serves us – we have to go all the way through. Eventually, we have to feel what’s there.
She nodded slowly. Not because it was easy to hear. But because some part of her already knew.
Regulated on the Mat, Dysregulated in the World
Another client came in well-practiced. She knew how to regulate. She had her morning routine, her breathwork, her grounding practices. She showed up to sessions already calm, already oriented.
A few sessions in, almost as an afterthought as she was leaving, she said: “I feel so good… until I have to go to work and interact with people.”
Something clicked for me in that moment.
Because that’s the work.
In somatic work, there are really three lines of development: the work we do with ourselves, the work we do in relationships, and the work we do in the world. Most people begin with the first one, learning to regulate, learning to sense themselves, learning how their nervous system works.
But eventually the practice has to move beyond the mat.
Because the truth is, we can only heal relationship trauma in relationship.
In our first sessions, we had been moving through everything she already knew. Her practices were solid. But what they hadn’t yet touched was her capacity to stay connected to herself when life stopped cooperating.
The goal of somatic work isn’t to feel regulated when everything is quiet. It’s to build enough internal ground that you can be in the midst of chaos and still have access to yourself.
The next time she came in, I asked her a question: “Where do you go when other people enter the room?”
She paused. Something shifted in her face. “I leave,” she said quietly. “I didn’t even realize I was doing it.”
That’s where the real work begins.
The Difference Between Regulation and Capacity
This is the part that gets missed.
Somatic practice isn’t about getting rid of difficult sensations. It’s about building the capacity to stay with them. Not forcing. Not flooding the system. But also not immediately escaping the moment something uncomfortable surfaces.
The more we can be with those sensations, the emotions, the felt senses, the things we’d rather not feel, the more tolerance we build. And when we do this on purpose, in a safe way, we become more equipped for when life throws things at us without warning.
When we reach for a somatic practice the second things get hard, we never actually meet what the body is trying to show us. We get very good at calming ourselves down. And we stay completely safe from the thing that wanted our attention.
Staying looks different. It’s the catch in your throat you let be there instead of swallowing it back down. The heat rising in your chest that you breathe with rather than through. The tremble in your hands you let complete itself. The grief that you let sit in the room with you, just for a moment, before you do anything else with it. It isn’t dramatic. It’s quiet. And it changes something.
But here’s something I want to name, because it matters: all of this requires vital energy.
Vital energy is the life force available to us in any given moment, the internal resource that makes observation, presence, and choice even possible. It’s not a metaphor. When we’re running low on it, our nervous system goes off line – starting with the more sophisticated parts. Curiosity goes. Spaciousness goes. The capacity to witness ourselves goes.
Let’s say you wake up from a poor night of sleep. Skip a meal because the schedule is too full. Push yourself to the edge of what you can hold. And suddenly, those old patterns, the ones you’ve worked so hard to see around, are just running. Not because you’re failing. Because you didn’t have the energy to do anything else.
I know this from my own body. I spent a whole Sunday recently doing nothing but watching Netflix. Not because I chose rest, but because I had nothing left to choose with. That is the nervous system. That is what shutdown looks like when it’s mine.
Just like it’s hard to long for something when we’re stuck in survival mode, it is genuinely hard to pay attention to ourselves when we’re coming from a place of depletion. This isn’t a willpower problem. It’s a resource problem.
And here’s the part that keeps me committed to this work: when we stop trying to fix what’s there and get curious about it instead, we actually create the conditions for more energy to move through us. We start to dissolve the stuck places rather than armor around them. That thing that felt so large, so permanent, it doesn’t have to be a part of your present experience just because it was a part of your past. It can take time to move through those layers. But eventually, you get ahead of it enough that it’s no longer the loudest conversation in your system.
That’s when practice really comes alive. When centering, grounding, boundaries, and mutual connection become the conditions in which we stay with ourselves, not just in sessions, but in the middle of real life. So that when pressure comes, things can dissolve in the moment instead of getting lodged in the tissues.
Identity Work
Here’s what makes somatic bypassing so tenacious: it’s not just habit. It’s protection.
Our identity, the story we carry about who we are, what we can handle, and what we need to survive, works incredibly hard to prevent us from seeing or feeling what’s underneath it. Not because we’re broken. Because that identity was built, piece by piece, to keep us safe. It learned what to avoid. It learned what to move around. And it is very good at its job.
This is why the bypassing isn’t always conscious. The nervous system isn’t being difficult. It’s being loyal to an older version of you that needed those conditions to survive.
Here’s a simple example. If you identify as a kind person, and something happens where you’re perceived as unkind, that older version of you will move in fast to protect, defend, or cover over what’s actually there. What really wants to be seen. Because the identity doesn’t want to be wrong about itself.
That’s not weakness. That’s just how identity works. But by being honest with what is actually present in the moment, we can start to dismantle those older ways of being.
Easier said than done. And worth doing.
That moment of seeing, oh, that’s what I’ve been protecting, is where something begins to shift. Not because we forced it. Because it was finally allowed to be seen.
The beautiful thing is that we are capable of being a witness to our own experience. Somatic practice, over time, develops exactly that: the ability to notice what’s happening without immediately reacting to it or running from it. And sometimes, having someone hold the container with you makes it easier to see. Not because you can’t do it alone, but because another presence can help illuminate what our own system keeps moving around. That’s the role I play – not to tell you what’s there, but to be in the room while you find it yourself.
Disruption Is the Data
This is the part of somatic work that most people misunderstand, and that most bypassing is designed to avoid.
Those moments of agitation. The activation. The places where you suddenly feel off, reactive, dysregulated. We tend to treat those as problems to solve, things to regulate away as quickly as possible.
But those disruptions are the gold.
They are body cues. Signals. The nervous system’s way of communicating that something is out of alignment, that something underneath the surface wants attention. Not management. Attention.
The body speaks in whispers before it speaks in symptoms. A tightness here. An irritation that doesn’t quite make sense. A sudden flatness or withdrawal. These are not inconveniences. They are information, the body sharing what is happening in its world, in real time.
But in order to hear those whispers, we have to be paying attention. We have to be willing to be awake to them instead of immediately calming them down.
That’s the practice. Not performing regulation. Actual listening.
And that listening requires something most of us haven’t been taught: the willingness to be honest about what we find.
Somatic Practice Is Not About Self-Improvement
It’s about being honest with yourself. Not comfortable-honest. Not curated-honest. Actually honest, in the moment, about what is present in the body right now.
Because if we can hear the signal, but won’t name what it’s pointing to, we’re still bypassing. Just at a more sophisticated level.
One of the things I come back to often in this work: Somatic practice is not about self-improvement. It’s about self-honesty.
And those are very different paths.
Self-improvement asks: How do I become better?
Self-honesty asks: What is actually true right now?
That second question can be uncomfortable. It doesn’t always have a clean answer. But it’s where transformation actually lives.
And I want to name something that makes this harder than it should be: we live in a culture of toxic positivity. A culture that rewards focus on where you’re going and treats attention to where you actually are as a kind of weakness. As dwelling. As getting ‘stuck.’
So people bypass not just because it’s uncomfortable, but because they’ve been taught that naming what’s hard means inviting it to stay.
It doesn’t work that way.
Naming what’s present doesn’t mean you’re going to get stuck there. It means you’re giving it the opportunity to be witnessed. And what gets witnessed can move. What gets bypassed just goes underground and waits.
The feeling you’re afraid to name is not the thing keeping you stuck. The not-naming is.
Here’s something I’ve noticed about the people who find their way to my space: they are highly intelligent, deeply intuitive human beings. And that is genuinely a gift. But it also means they are very, very good at talking or thinking their way out of something.
They can name the pattern. They can trace it back to its origin. They can explain exactly what’s happening and why. And still, still, not actually feel it.
Because understanding is not the same as metabolizing. The tissues don’t care how articulate you are about what happened. The body needs something different from insight. It needs to be met, not analyzed.
This is the real reason people work with me. Not to learn more tools. Not to understand themselves better on a conceptual level. But to be supported in actually feeling themselves, to sense what’s in the tissues, to be with the body in a way that lets it metabolize and dissolve what it’s been carrying.
If we are not willing to be honest with ourselves, to name what is actually true in the moment, we will never move past the thing that stands between us and what matters most. That’s the hard truth I have to tell myself. Every day. For myself, and when I’m with clients.
How We Actually Move Through It
So what does it look like to get past the bypassing? It doesn’t happen all at once. It moves in layers.
It begins with somatic awareness – simply becoming able to notice what is actually happening in the body. Not interpreting it. Not fixing it. Just attending to it. Because if we can’t see or feel the thing that’s going on, how would we even know how to meet it? Awareness comes first. Everything else builds from there.
From that awareness, something begins to open. I call this the somatic opening, the moment where it feels like you’re straddling two worlds. One foot in the old, familiar way of being. One foot in something that doesn’t quite have a name yet. It can feel disorienting. Like leaving something behind before you’re sure what you’re stepping into.
This is often the moment people want to reach for a tool and make it stop. But this threshold is not the problem. It’s the passage.
Somatic practice was originally designed for exactly this – not just to help us feel better, but to support integration. To help us build on what the opening reveals. To make the new ground stable enough to stand on.
But if we skip the awareness… If we bypass the opening… If we try to build on a foundation we haven’t actually felt, we end up constructing something on top of what we haven’t yet met. And eventually, what’s underneath will make itself known. It might look different, but we just get more of the same.
You can’t build lasting change on top of unmet experience. The body won’t allow it.
This is the long game of somatic work. Not a protocol. Not a program. A living, cumulative process of waking up to yourself, layer by layer, season by season, until the things that used to run you in the background are no longer the loudest voice in the room.
A Question Worth Sitting With
The next time you reach for a nervous system regulation technique, breathwork, grounding, movement, pause for just a moment and ask: Am I using this to support what I’m feeling, or to move away from it?
Both can happen. Neither makes you bad at this work. Learning to tell the difference is part of the practice. In the beginning, the noticing is almost more important than the practice itself.
And sometimes, the most somatic thing you can do is nothing.
Just stay.
Stay long enough to feel what the body has been trying to show you all along.
This Is Why I Built What I Built
Even in my own office, with people who have chosen to show up and do this work, I still see the avoidance happen. I still catch it in myself. We are all human beings here, and the nervous system will protect itself until it learns that feeling is safe.
I didn’t want to just put tools into the world. There are already so many somatic practitioners, bodyworkers, and therapists supplying that material, and it’s valuable. What I wanted was to move through it with you, inside a container where the body actually has room to be honest.
Because there’s something that happens when we witness this work together that can’t happen alone on a mat with a video playing. When another person is in the room with what’s real in you – not managing it, not fixing it, just staying with it – something in the system starts to trust that it’s safe to be seen.
That’s what Befriending Your Body and The Evolving Body are built for. Not self-improvement. Self-honesty. The slow, patient, deeply worthwhile process of learning to be with yourself, so that life doesn’t have to knock you sideways to get your attention.
If that’s what you’re looking for, I’d love to have you.
