SOMATICS & LISTENING TO THE WHOLE PERSON

SOMATICS & LISTENING TO THE WHOLE PERSON: How sensing, movement, and embodied learning can support deeper change

Many therapists and helping professionals have experienced the limits of insight alone.

Clients may understand their patterns deeply, and yet still feel stuck. Stress responses return. Emotional and physical pain persist. Something shifts in session… but doesn’t always fully carry forward into daily life.

At the same time, approaches that work only with ‘the body’ can also fall short when movement, sensation, and emotional experience aren’t fully integrated.

This experiential workshop offers an introduction to Clinical Somatic Education and related fields as a way of working with the whole person – not simply through thought and reflection, but through sensing, movement, and embodied learning.

Drawing on Hanna Somatics and felt sense work (Focusing and Somatic Experiencing®), we’ll explore how stress and experience shape not only emotions and thoughts, but posture, tension, movement, perception, and patterns of response – often outside conscious awareness.

Through guided experiential practices, reflection, and discussion, you’ll begin to explore how integrating sensing, movement, and embodied learning can support deeper, more lasting change – both personally and professionally.

We’ll also explore why Somatics is about more than simply regulating the nervous system or ‘working with the body’ – and how understanding the whole person as a living, embodied process changes what becomes possible in practice.

Suitable for counsellors, psychotherapists, coaches, bodyworkers, somatic practitioners, and anyone curious about embodied approaches to change.

This work can be especially supportive for persistent stress and tension patterns, chronic pain and discomfort, MUS, trauma, Long Covid, and the ways difficult experiences can continue to shape both clients and practitioners long after the original events have passed.

Samantha Holland, PhD, is a Certified Clinical Somatic Educator, Focusing Practitioner, and Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner. Previously a university lecturer, barrister, and overseas volunteer, she has a Foundation Course & Certificate in Counselling from Academy SPACE in Sheffield. She continued her training and volunteering at Share Psychotherapy and Cruse, with the goal of practising as an existential psychotherapist. Then her life changed: she resolved almost all her long-term chronic pain in a matter of weeks after discovering Hanna Somatics – and all of her chronic pain within a year – and trained in Clinical Somatic Education to share this remarkable work with others. Her interest in counselling & psychotherapy endures. In addition to the various requirements to qualify as an SEP, Samantha studied chronic pain and Long Covid work in-person with Peter Levine for a week in 2024. She works online, in the Scottish Highlands (where she also runs a bookshop), and sometimes in Sheffield. An active member of the US-based Association for Hanna Somatic Education, she has a client practice, teaches group classes for people dealing with Long COVID, and runs a small-group programme for counsellors, therapists and somatic practitioners learn more about how Somatics can help them and their clients.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher The Academy S.P.A.C.E Ltd