Reconnecting with Your Body and Finding Joy
Healing Depression Through Somatic Therapy by Reconnecting Body and Mind
Depression feels like a heavy fog, clouding the mind and making the body heavy and lethargic.
By reconnecting with the physical self and releasing emotional blockages, you can find a renewed sense of aliveness. Supporting you to ease depression in a holistic, transformative way.
The Mind-Body Connection in Depression
Depression is not just a mental state. It shows up physically through fatigue, sluggishness, and pain. These sensations arise when trauma, chronic stress, and unresolved emotions get stored in the nervous system. These feelings of numbness, disassociation, and emotional shutdown often deepen when the body remains disconnected from these buried experiences.
The mind and body are inextricably linked. Healing must involve both. When you’re feeling depressed, like you’ve lost your spark for life, it is important to explore your thoughts or feelings. It is natural to want to know why you are feeling this way. Perhaps you have gone through a recent change that has had a profound impact on you. Rather than blame yourself for not feeling better already, getting curious about what is happening, and gently allowing yourself time to recover, is vital to your long term wellbeing.
It’s also helpful to tune into bodily sensations, breathing patterns, and how your muscles and joints feel. This reconnective process can bring awareness of how depression shows up in your body, helping you be more compassionate to yourself.
Releasing Emotional Blockages
Emotional blockages are physical manifestations of suppressed feelings, like grief, anger, or fear, that have not been fully processed or allowed to be felt, seen, and passed through your body.
These feelings can create tension and charge in the body which restrict movement, energy flow, and emotional expression.
Shutting off from our emotions may feel good in the short term, but in the long term you are more likely to fall into states of nervous system shutdown as the dorsal vagal branch of the parasympathetic nervous system takes hold. This is essentially what depression is - a long term defence mechanism of shut down in an attempt to keep you safe and more or less functional.
Techniques like mindful breathing, gentle movement, and body scanning to locate and release these trapped energies can help you self-soothe.
By safely accessing these blocked emotions stored in the nervous system and musculature, you can begin to discharge long-held stress and trauma. This release can leads to a significant reduction in depressive sensations as the body’s nervous system moves from a state of defensive shutdown into one of relaxation and restoration.
The Sense of Aliveness
Depression is so hard to live with because of the pervasive, all-encompassing sense of numbness and disconnection. From yourself, others, and life itself. It is filled with a desire to hide away. That it is somehow shameful to feel this low and it is only safe to shut yourself off.
Restoring a sense of aliveness begins when you engage your senses and listen to your body’s signals. Essentially, you are reconnecting with the present moment and becoming more embodied. This can allow you to see little glimmers of joy - in the sun shining through a cloud, the sound of birdsong, the laughter of your child, a beautiful flower, the flow of water through a stream or river. Little things.
This embodied presence, of noticing something that brings you even a fleeting moment of joy, can anchor you and help your nervous system reconnect with safety. cultivates greater resilience, self-awareness, and joy. Over time, these tiny shifts build an internal foundation of wellbeing that counters the pervasive lethargy of depression.
Why Somatic Connection Works for Depression
Working somatically, with the body, helps us to access non-verbal, bodily-held experiences when words are not enough. This can be especially powerful for those who find it difficult to interpret their emotions, or have felt disconnected from their bodies for years. Combining somatic techniques with psychotherapeutic models like Internal Family Systems enhances healing by addressing both internal parts and how they show up physically every day.
In essence, somatic therapy supports:
Reconnection: Bridging mind and body to reclaim a sense of wholeness
Release: Letting go of physical and emotional tension stored within the body
Renewal: Vitality, joy, and presence in everyday life
For many women struggling with chronic depression, this body-centred approach provides a new language of healing. One that honours the wisdom of the body and invites the mind to follow where words often cannot go.
