Episode 9: Somatics: The Body’s Path to Healing
Episode Summary
Nervous system regulation is the foundation of somatic healing and holistic mental health, whether you’re the one in the therapist’s chair or the client’s. Your nervous system is constantly reading the room, deciding whether you’re safe, long before your conscious mind catches up. In this teaching episode, LeNaya Smith Crawford breaks down the difference between a regulated and a dysregulated nervous system, the fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses, and why body-based work belongs at the center of trauma-informed care.
LeNaya opens with a personal story about ignoring her body’s warning signs around a friend and business partner, and realizing only in hindsight that she’d spent months fawning rather than facing the discomfort head on. From there she explains the vagus nerve and why roughly 80 percent of its signaling travels from body to brain, then moves into somatics, interoception, and somatic experiencing, showing how therapists can start bringing the body into sessions through breathwork, yoga, grounding techniques, or a simple check-in on what a client is noticing physically right now.
This is a strong entry point if you’re newer to trauma-informed therapy or integrative therapy, and a good reminder that this work isn’t a trend. Bringing the body into healing is ancestral, rooted in African and Indigenous traditions long before it had a clinical name.
What Is a Dysregulated Nervous System?
A regulated nervous system can meet stress and return to baseline. A dysregulated one drops into survival mode, fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, often before you’ve consciously registered what’s happening.
Fawning looks like appeasing or people-pleasing to avoid conflict, and it’s usually the hardest of the four trauma responses to catch in yourself, even when you know the theory cold.
The Vagus Nerve and Body-to-Brain Signaling
About 80 percent of the vagus nerve’s signaling runs from body to brain, not the other way around. That’s the biological reason your gut can pick up on danger before your mind has the words for it.
What Is Somatics?
Somatics simply means centering the body as it’s experienced from within: sensation, breath, posture, movement, tension, impulse.
Interoception is the skill of actually sensing and interpreting those internal signals, hunger, thirst, a racing heart, tight shoulders, rather than overriding them.
What Is Somatic Experiencing?
Somatic experiencing, the framework developed by trauma therapist Peter A. Levine, gives that awareness a clinical structure for working with trauma and stress in the body.
Feeling unsafe or disconnected inside your own body is a hallmark of trauma and chronic stress, which is exactly why body-based work belongs in trauma-informed care, not as an add-on but as a foundation.
Bringing Somatic Work Into the Therapy Room
You don’t need a full somatic training to start. Grounding through the feet, noticing shoulder or jaw tension, or simply asking a client what they’re noticing in their body are all accessible entry points.
Somatic work still requires real training and staying within your scope of practice. LeNaya is direct about this: listen, get curious, then go get certified before you integrate it into client sessions.
None of this is new. African and Indigenous traditions have used movement, breath, dance, and community as healing tools for generations, well before somatics had a clinical name.
Resources Mentioned
Somatic Experiencing framework developed by Peter A. Levine
LeNaya Smith Crawford’s trainings and courses on nervous system regulation and somatics for holistic therapists
The Second Annual Holistic Therapist Conference, featuring sessions on breathwork, yoga, and polyvagal theory
Join Us: The Second Annual Holistic Therapist Conference
Ready to take your holistic practice deeper and experience this work in community? The Second Annual Holistic Therapist Conference is happening October 1st through 4th, 2026, at the Art of Living Retreat Center in Boone, North Carolina. We’ve opened virtual tickets, so you can join us and experience the sessions from wherever you are.
Join us for the conference. Save $100 when you register by September 18th to celebrate my birthday.
Register here: https://lenaya-crawford.mykajabi.com/holistic-therapist-conference
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