The Body Never Lies: Reading Your Somatic Signals
You know that feeling when you are watching a tense scene in a film and you notice your heart beating a little faster, your shoulders creeping toward your ears, your stomach closing off? That is a somatic signal. Your body registering a stress response before your mind has caught up. So what does somatic actually mean? Put simply, a somatic signal is a physical, bodily sensation that links your physical state to your mental and emotional one. A change in heart rate, a knot in the stomach, muscle tension rising, or even that warm expansive feeling of deep connection. It is the language your body and mind use to speak to each other. And for many of us, that language has become harder to hear.
What Are Somatic Signals and Why Do They Matter?
This body-mind communication is not new. It has been evolving through our nervous system for millennia and is one of our oldest sensory systems, designed to tell us what is safe, what is nourishing, and what requires our attention.
Somatic signals travel as a two-way conversation. Sensory signals move inward, carrying input from the world through our five senses into the central nervous system. Motor signals move outward, sending instructions from the brain through the nervous system to the muscles, skin, and sensory organs. This operates both consciously and through the subtle channels of the subconscious via thought, emotion, and stored memory.
The body holds memory. Particularly following experiences of stress, trauma, or deep connection. That warmth and lightness through the chest after something meaningful. The tightening that arrives before something that once hurt you. These are not random. They are the body's record of what it has lived through.
What Symptoms Might Someone Be Experiencing?
You do not need to have experienced significant trauma to benefit from learning to read your somatic signals. This kind of self-inquiry is for anyone seeking greater balance, harmony, and connection to themselves.
That said, somatic work is particularly valuable for those living with the effects of stored stress or unprocessed experience. You may recognise this in intrusive thoughts, emotional reactivity, fight, flight or freeze responses to everyday situations, difficulty relaxing, a persistent sense of disconnection from your own body, or a deep tiredness that rest alone does not seem to touch. These are the nervous system speaking in the only language it knows.
How Does Somatic Hypnotherapy Help You Read and Rewrite These Patterns?
A session with Margot invites you to explore this territory. To begin mapping your own unique somatic language and through Somatic Hypnotherapy to gently shift the patterns that are no longer serving you. Not by overriding what the body holds, but by working with it at the level where those patterns actually live. Below the thinking mind, where real change becomes possible.
The result is a richer, more embodied experience of yourself. Greater ease, clearer self-understanding, and a deeper capacity to live from choice rather than from habit.
Margot Lees
Margot is a Clinical Hypnotherapist and bodywork practitioner trained in NLP, KaHuna Bodywork and CranioSacral Therapy. Her approach has also been shaped by years spent learning across different healing traditions and working alongside Indigenous healers.
At House of Shemana, Margot brings this experience to the Vasara ritual and her somatic hypnotherapy sessions, working with the connection between the body, nervous system and subconscious mind. Her treatments create space to move beyond habitual thought patterns, process what may be held in the body and support meaningful, lasting change.
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