What Is Somatic Yoga? How Somatics, Mindfulness & Yoga Therapy Come Together

By Maile Wicklander, MA, C-IAYT®, Qualified MBSR Teacher

The word somatic seems to be everywhere right now. We hear about somatic yoga, somatic movement, somatic therapy, Somatic Experiencing®, nervous system regulation, and embodied practices.

These approaches may share an interest in our lived experience of the body, but they are not all the same thing.

Somatic yoga is not a particular sequence of poses or a standardized style of yoga. At its heart, it represents a shift in how we practice: away from primarily observing and directing the body from the outside, and toward learning to experience the body from within.

Instead of asking, What should this pose look like? we might ask, What do I notice as I move?

Instead of asking, How far can I stretch? we might become curious about where effort begins, where we brace, what happens to our breath, or what changes when we slow down.

This seemingly simple shift, from performing movement to experiencing movement, is at the heart of somatic practice.

Why This Practice Became Personal for Me

My interest in this way of practicing is not only professional. It is deeply personal.

I am a survivor of childhood trauma, and I have lived with the effects of those early experiences throughout my life.

I have also practiced yoga for decades. For many years, my practice was primarily vinyasa yoga, and I have no doubt that yoga helped me. It gave me movement, structure, community, strength, and a way of connecting with my body.

But I understand that practice very differently now.

For much of my life, I thought of myself as a calm person. It wasn't until I began studying SomaYoga and somatics, along with developing a consistent mindfulness meditation practice, that I began to recognize that what I had sometimes understood as calm was actually disconnection.

I had become very good at moving away from uncomfortable sensations and emotions. I could function. I could accomplish things. I could take a yoga class. I could appear calm.

But that wasn't necessarily the same thing as being present.

Somatic practice and meditation began teaching me something different:

how to stay.

I began noticing tension before it became pain. I became curious about effort instead of automatically pushing through it. I started recognizing when I was bracing, holding my breath, or disconnecting from sensation. Slowly, I developed a greater capacity to remain present with what was happening in my body without immediately needing to change it, escape it, or judge it.

The physical changes have been tangible. I used to wake regularly with a cricked neck or an aching back. That rarely happens anymore. This does not mean my body never hurts. I still get sore muscles when I challenge myself. Bodies have aches, injuries, and changes.

What has changed is my relationship with those sensations and how I respond to them.

And becoming more internally aware has not made me less physically active. Quite the opposite.

In addition to yoga, I swim laps and lift weights. A trainer I worked with recently commented on the way I lifted: slow, steady, and controlled. I realized that much of what he was observing came directly from what SomaYoga had taught me, to feel movement from within, pay attention to effort, and move with awareness rather than simply completing a repetition.

My yoga practice today might look “simple” to someone watching from the outside. But simple does not necessarily mean easy.

Staying present can be challenging. Moving slowly enough to actually feel what I am doing can be challenging. Noticing the impulse to push harder, move farther, compare, avoid, or disconnect and choosing instead to remain curious can be a profound practice.

For me, these changes have extended far beyond movement.

Through years of somatic practice and mindfulness meditation, I have developed a different relationship with difficult emotions and experiences from my past. Rather than automatically moving away from discomfort, I practice turning toward what is here with greater curiosity and compassion.

Sometimes that has meant grieving things I didn't even realize I had lost—or perhaps grieving things I never had in the first place. Sometimes it has meant recognizing patterns that once protected me but no longer serve me. It has helped me become more discerning about my boundaries, my relationships, and how I want to move through my life.

None of this means I have arrived at some permanently peaceful or regulated state. I haven't.

It remains a daily practice.

But I know peace differently now.

For me, peace is no longer the absence of difficult feelings or the ability to remain unaffected by them. It is a growing capacity to stay connected to myself while they are here, to listen, discern what I need, and respond with greater choice and awareness.

That is perhaps the most important thing somatic yoga and mindfulness have taught me:

The practice isn't about becoming better at overriding our experience. It is about becoming more capable of being with it.

What Does “Somatic” Mean?

The word soma refers to the living body as experienced from within.

In somatic practice, the body is not simply an object that we stretch, strengthen, align, or improve. It is something we inhabit and learn from.

The modern field of somatics was significantly shaped by philosopher and educator Thomas Hanna, whose work emphasized internal sensory awareness and sensory-motor learning.

One of Hanna's central ideas was that habitual patterns of muscular contraction and movement can become so familiar that we gradually stop consciously noticing them. He referred to this as sensory-motor amnesia.

Through slow, voluntary movement and practices such as pandiculation, in which muscles are intentionally contracted and gradually released, we can bring these patterns back into conscious awareness.

The purpose is not simply greater flexibility. It is sensory-motor learning: becoming more aware of how we organize movement and muscular effort, and exploring whether different possibilities become available once those patterns enter awareness.

This is why somatic practice is not synonymous with simply moving slowly or practicing gentle yoga.

It is about how we are paying attention while we move.

A movement can be very small and not particularly somatic if we are simply following instructions mechanically. Conversely, a familiar yoga posture, or even a challenging movement, can become deeply somatic when we approach it with curiosity, choice, and sustained attention to our internal experience.

Interoception: Learning to Listen From Within

One capacity we can cultivate through somatic and mindfulness practices is interoceptive awareness—our ability to perceive signals arising from within the body.

We experience interoception when we notice hunger, thirst, temperature, heartbeat, breathing, fatigue, muscular effort, or other internal sensations.

These signals are always present, but that does not mean we are always listening to them.

Yoga offers us an opportunity to practice this intentionally.

Instead of automatically moving to our maximum range of motion, we can notice what arises along the way. Instead of waiting until we are exhausted before resting, we can become curious about earlier signs of fatigue. Instead of assuming that greater intensity always means greater benefit, we can begin to distinguish different levels of effort and understand how they actually feel.

Over time, the practice becomes less about trying to inhabit the body we think we should have and more about developing a relationship with the body we are actually living in.

What Does the Nervous System Have to Do With Somatic Yoga?

The nervous system has become another popular phrase in wellness spaces, particularly the idea of “regulating the nervous system.”

It is worth clarifying that nervous system regulation does not simply mean becoming calm.

Our nervous systems are designed to respond to changing circumstances. We need activation as well as rest. Energy, alertness, mobilization, recovery, and quiet all have important roles.

The goal of an embodied practice is not to remain in one perfectly calm state.

Instead, somatic and mindfulness practices can help us become more aware of our changing internal states and how we respond to them.

We may begin to notice what activation feels like before it becomes overwhelming. We may recognize habitual bracing or unnecessary muscular effort. We may notice how our breathing changes when we are under stress. We may also begin to recognize disconnection, numbness, or the impulse to move away from an experience.

Awareness creates the possibility of choice.

To me, that is a much more useful way of understanding regulation than simply trying to make ourselves calm.

This is also why movement, breath practices, restorative yoga, and meditation can complement one another so beautifully. Each gives us another way to notice, explore, and respond to our experience.

So What Is Somatic Yoga?

Somatic yoga is not a single standardized method, and different teachers may use the term differently.

In my teaching, it describes the integration of somatic education with the broader practice of yoga, including movement, breath, mindfulness, interoception, and yoga philosophy.

Sometimes we practice recognizable yoga postures. Sometimes we explore smaller movements influenced by Hanna Somatics. Sometimes we work primarily with the breath. Sometimes we meditate. Sometimes we rest and notice.

And sometimes a physically challenging posture or movement becomes itself a somatic practice because we remain attentive to our internal experience while we are doing it.

In a more conventional Hatha or vinyasa class, we may begin with the movement the teacher is asking us to perform:

Where should my foot go?

How deeply should I bend my knee?

Can I reach the floor?

What does this pose look like?

In a somatic approach, the posture becomes an opportunity for inquiry:

What do I notice as I move?

Where does this movement begin?

What happens to my breath?

Am I using more effort than I need?

What changes if I slow down?

What happens if I don't move as far?

We might notice the contact between the body and the floor. We might explore the same movement several times and discover that it feels different on the fifth repetition than it did on the first. We might pause after a movement and simply notice what remains when we become still.

The distinction is not necessarily what we are doing. It is how we are relating to ourselves while we do it.

Somatic yoga is also distinct from somatic therapy and Somatic Experiencing®. While all three may involve attention to bodily sensation and present-moment experience, somatic therapy and Somatic Experiencing are therapeutic approaches with their own training, frameworks, and scope; somatic yoga remains rooted in yoga practice and is not psychotherapy.

Who Might Be Drawn to Somatic Yoga?

Somatic yoga may resonate particularly with people who have become less interested in what their yoga practice looks like and more interested in what they experience through practice.

It may appeal to longtime yoga practitioners who are ready for something different, as well as people who have never felt particularly comfortable in conventional yoga classes.

It may also be a supportive practice for people experiencing persistent muscular tension, stress or difficulty relaxing, changing mobility or physical capacity, or those who want to move more thoughtfully with persistent pain or following an injury, alongside appropriate medical care when needed.

But you don't need to have a particular concern to practice somatically.

Somatic practice is equally relevant to someone who simply wants to know themselves more deeply.

Many of us have become remarkably skilled at overriding our own experience. We ignore fatigue. We push through discomfort. We hold our breath. We compare ourselves to the person beside us. We treat the body as a project that constantly needs improvement.

Somatic practice offers another possibility:

We can begin to listen.

How Somatics, Mindfulness & Yoga Therapy Come Together: My Approach

Somatic practices are often slow, but somatic does not necessarily mean gentle. And somatic yoga is not necessarily yoga therapy.

These distinctions are important because they point toward something larger about how I understand this work.

Somatic awareness does not require us to avoid effort, strength, challenge, or physical activity. You can lift weights somatically. You can swim somatically. You can walk, run, garden, practice a standing yoga sequence, or move through a physically challenging practice while maintaining attention to your internal experience.

The question isn't simply, How hard am I working?

It is also:

Can I remain in relationship with myself while I am working?

Can I notice when effort becomes strain? Can I feel my breath? Can I recognize fatigue? Can I distinguish productive challenge from something that feels harmful? Can I choose to continue and can I choose to stop?

Somatic awareness doesn't necessarily make our world smaller. It can give us more choice in how we participate in it.

A SomaYoga or somatically informed yoga class may also feel deeply therapeutic. Someone may experience greater ease, awareness, mobility, relaxation, or a different relationship with long-held patterns of tension.

But experiencing a practice as therapeutic is different from participating in yoga therapy.

Yoga therapy is individualized.

Just as two psychotherapists may share the same professional designation while approaching their work through very different theoretical orientations, yoga therapists bring different training, backgrounds, frameworks, and areas of emphasis to their work.

My own approach grows directly out of the way I understand somatics, mindfulness, yoga, and the whole person in front of me.

Somatics helps us notice. Mindfulness helps us stay with what we notice with curiosity and less immediate judgment. Yoga gives that awareness a larger framework for self-study, discernment, non-harming, and how we live. Yoga therapy allows me to bring all of these practices together and individualize them for the whole person in front of me.

Beginning With the Whole Person

Yoga has never viewed us as simply muscles and bones.

One traditional framework for understanding this is the five koshas, which describe interconnected dimensions of human experience: the physical body, the energetic or breath dimension, the mental-emotional dimension, wisdom and discernment, and a deeper dimension of ease or connection.

The koshas give us a traditional yogic framework for something that feels quite intuitive in practice: we experience ourselves as whole people.

The quality of our breath can influence how we feel. Our mental and emotional state can influence muscular tension. Physical discomfort can influence mood, sleep, and attention. Our ability to pause and discern can change how we respond to all of these experiences.

This whole-person understanding is fundamental to the way I practice yoga therapy.

Someone may come to me because their back hurts. But their experience of that pain may also include fear of movement, disrupted sleep, stress, changes in breathing, frustration, grief, or uncertainty about what their body can safely do.

I don't necessarily see those as separate problems requiring separate fixes.

I see a person.

And this is perhaps the most important principle underlying my approach:

I do not see the person in front of me as something that needs to be fixed. You are already a whole person.

You may be living with pain, tension, stress, grief, anxiety, changes in mobility, illness, fatigue, or circumstances that make parts of life more difficult. There may be places where yoga therapy can support greater comfort, ease, awareness, mobility, resilience, or choice, physically, mentally, or emotionally.

But I do not begin from the assumption that those experiences mean there is something fundamentally wrong with you.

I don't begin with a diagnosis and assign a series of yoga practices intended to correct it.

I begin with curiosity.

What are you experiencing?

What matters to you?

What feels difficult right now?

What feels supportive?

How are you breathing, moving, resting, and responding to stress?

What would you like to feel more capable of doing, experiencing, or being with?

From there, we explore together.

Movement may be part of that exploration. So may breath, meditation, mindfulness, rest, somatic practices, or yoga philosophy. Sometimes the work is quite physical. Sometimes it is quiet and reflective. Often it changes over time as a person develops greater awareness of their own experience.

Yoga therapy, as I practice it, is not something I do to you. It is something we explore together, with your lived experience as an essential source of information.

Sometimes that exploration may help change something, a movement pattern, a habitual response, the way you breathe, or the way you relate to discomfort.

Sometimes it may help you move with more confidence, rest more fully, or respond to stress differently.

Sometimes it may help you recognize choices you didn't realize were available.

And sometimes the most meaningful shift may not be changing the experience itself, but changing your relationship with it.

Embodying the Practice of Yoga

This is ultimately where SomaYoga has become so meaningful to me.

Somatics gives us practical tools for noticing. Mindfulness teaches us how to stay with what we notice. And yoga asks us to bring that awareness into the way we relate to ourselves and, ultimately, the way we live.

The ethical teachings of yoga, the yamas and niyamas, are a beautiful example of this. Rather than remaining philosophical ideas that we study intellectually, they can become something we actually experience and practice.

The very first yama is ahimsa, often translated as non-harming.

Ahimsa can become extraordinarily tangible on a yoga mat.

Do I force myself farther because I believe more is always better?

Do I override pain?

Do I punish my body for not being able to do what it once could?

Do I continue simply because everyone around me is continuing?

Or can I remain present enough to make another choice?

This offers a very different orientation from the “no pain, no gain” mentality that is so deeply embedded in our culture.

Ahimsa does not mean never working hard or avoiding discomfort. Challenge can be part of a meaningful practice. But challenge does not require us to abandon curiosity, discernment, or care.

The same is true of svadhyaya, or self-study.

When we notice our habits without immediately judging them, we are practicing self-study. When we recognize our tendency to push harder, compare ourselves, hold our breath, disconnect, or give up, the practice has given us something far more valuable than a better yoga pose.

It has shown us something about ourselves.

Aparigraha, or non-grasping, might arise when we let go of needing our body to perform as it once did or needing a posture to look a certain way before we believe it has value.

And the practices of concentration and meditation invite us to stay with what is actually happening in the present moment.

This is why I don't see somatic yoga as a departure from traditional yoga.

In many ways, I see somatics and mindfulness as offering us practical tools to embody what yoga has been asking practitioners to do all along.

To pay attention.

To study ourselves.

To practice non-harming.

To discern.

To become less preoccupied with what we think we should be experiencing and more capable of meeting what is actually here.

And this brings me back to the way I practice yoga therapy.

The starting point is not:

What is wrong with you, and how do we fix it?

The starting point is:

You are a whole person. What might help you experience greater ease, awareness, agency, and connection within the body and life you are already living?

Sometimes the practice helps something change. Sometimes it helps us recognize that we have more choices. Sometimes it teaches us how to stay. And sometimes it allows us to meet ourselves with a little more compassion, curiosity, and clarity.

Rather than asking the body to achieve a predetermined shape, we use movement as an opportunity to listen and learn.

Rather than treating the body as an object to improve, we practice being in relationship with it.

And rather than measuring the value of practice by how difficult it looks from the outside, we begin asking a different question:

What am I learning about myself through the way I practice?

For me, that is where somatics, mindfulness, yoga, and yoga therapy ultimately come together.

The practice is not about fixing ourselves. It is about learning to inhabit ourselves more fully and allowing that awareness to shape how we move through the rest of our lives.

Experiencing This Approach at Tula

At Tula Yoga Studio in Logan Square, Chicago, this approach informs the way I teach somatic yoga, mindfulness, meditation, and yoga therapy.

If you are interested in exploring these practices in community, Embodied Practice offers an opportunity to experience yoga through mindful movement, breath, stillness, and somatic inquiry. You don't need to keep up or achieve a particular posture. The invitation is to notice, experiment, and learn from your own experience.

If you are navigating something more specific, perhaps persistent pain or tension, stress, grief, changing mobility, difficulty resting, or simply a desire for more individualized support, one-on-one yoga therapy gives us the opportunity to explore what might be most useful for you. Our work may include movement, breath, mindfulness, meditation, rest, somatic practices, or yoga philosophy, depending on your needs and interests.

And if your interest is primarily in cultivating attention and learning to relate differently to thoughts, emotions, and experience, you may be drawn to mindfulness meditation or MBSR.

These practices are different, but they share a common orientation.

You don't need to become someone different before you begin.

You don't need to be flexible.

You don't need to be experienced in yoga.

And you don't need to know what you are supposed to feel.

You simply begin by noticing.

That, in many ways, is the practice.