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(If podcasts aren’t your thing, you can find a digest of the podcast below. Alternatively if videos are your thing, you can watch the recording of the podcast here.)
What are Somatics and Embodiment?
In this episode, we decided to tackle the two words we toss around constantly: somatics and embodiment. What is the difference between somatics and embodiment? Or maybe more foundationally, what even are they, and why should anyone care?
We hear these words thrown around in wellness, therapy, and spiritual spaces, but even people who practice this work (hi, us) struggle to define them clearly. So we decided to sit down and actually talk it through — from our own lived experiences.
What unfolds is part breakdown, part rant, and part love letter to the frameworks that changed our lives.
Embodiment: Being it, not just saying it.
We started with embodiment, because that’s usually the easier entry point when explaining this work to people.
Ana starts with how she explains embodiment to friends. It’s the difference between saying I value peace and actually embodying peace. You know when you meet someone and their presence is peace? That’s embodiment. It’s the lived, felt, and often wordless expression of something.
That’s the transmission of embodiment: how what’s alive in us affects the people around us. When your presence speaks louder than your words. It’s when you don’t just think something — you are it and others can feel it. And it’s often undervalued in facilitator spaces, even though it’s happening all the time, whether we’re conscious of it or not.
And it’s more than that.
Embodiment is also about integration. It’s the act of bringing your full experience — emotions, sensations, energy, intuition — into the body. It’s not just about showing something outwardly; it’s about living through it, from the inside out.
It’s being attuned to what’s happening in your body and around you. It’s sensing energy, feeling emotions, and processing them through your physicality instead of just analyzing them with your mind. It’s how you experience life not just as someone with a body, but as a body.
“It’s moving beyond just living in the head, and into every dimension of your being, including the ones you can’t explain.” — Leona Waller
Embodiment includes processing emotion, accessing intuition, transmitting energy, and inhabiting your unique way of being. It’s different for everyone… and that’s not a flaw, it’s the point. Embodiment is personal. It’s experiential. It doesn’t have a singular path or rigid structure. There is no one right way to do it, and that’s part of the beauty.
It’s deeply personal, sometimes undefinable, but unmistakably felt.
We shared a few definitions (including one we asked AI to generate), but kept coming back to this:
Embodiment is the full expression of your inner experience — through your body, without needing words. It’s personal, intuitive, and unique to each person. You don’t just talk about peace — you are peace. You don’t explain your creativity — you move with it. Embodiment isn’t one thing, it’s how your whole being communicates what matters most in that moment, often without ever saying a word.
Somatics gives us structure.
If embodiment is the full, living, felt expression of what’s alive in you, then somatics is one of the pathways to get there — especially for people who’ve spent most of their lives in their heads.
Somatics offers structure. A framework. A way in. It’s a system of practices and awareness-building tools that help you notice what’s happening inside your body, often for the first time.
Ana described it like this:
“Somatics paints a picture for you — and gives you a table and a list where the dots all connect.” — Ana Ally
For someone who’s used to thinking in concepts, plans, and problem-solving (like Ana, who has a degree in mechanical engineering), embodiment can sound like gibberish. “Let it move you” might as well be a foreign language.
That’s where somatics comes in. It meets you where you are and says: Here’s how to begin.
Somatics helps build awareness of your inner world.
In somatic practice, we begin with questions like:
What physical sensations are present in your body right now?
What emotions are you aware of?
Can you name them without needing to explain them?
That’s it. No interpretation. No analysis. No story. Just noticing.
This is the muscle we build with somatic practices: the capacity to become aware of our internal experience, and to stay with it. And for many of us, that awareness was never modeled or encouraged growing up.
The root of the word somatics help us understand the concept even more deeply.
Ana shared that the word soma is Greek, and yes, it translates to “body”, but not in the Western, body-vs-mind way we often assume.
“In Greek culture, soma referred to the integrated whole — mind, body, and spirit as one unified being.” — Ana Ally
So when we say somatics, we’re not just talking about noticing your shoulder tension or taking deep breaths. We’re talking about practices that support integration. Practices that help you return to the wholeness you already are, but may have become disconnected from.
Somatics isn’t the end point—it’s a beginning.
Somatic work is incredibly powerful, but it’s not the destination. For us, it’s the gateway to embodiment. It lays the foundation — teaching you how to notice, feel, and stay with yourself — so that you can eventually express, move, and integrate what you find.
“Somatics gives you the tools and language to get back in touch with your body, and then embodiment invites you to let those tools go and follow what’s real.” — Ana Ally
Ana noted this as the difference between building neural pathways and walking the open terrain. Somatics helps you pave the path. Embodiment helps you run free on it.
Why do these two modalities matter so much to us?
Because this work changed our lives. Like, really changed them.
Leona shares how embodiment helped her go from constant anxiety and trying everything from neuroscience to ice baths to finally feeling freedom — freedom to ride the waves of emotion instead of being ruled by them.
Ana opens up about her journey with chronic illness and Lyme disease, and how she moved from skepticism to awe when she began healing through somatic practices — experiencing real, physical changes by allowing emotion and sensation to move through her body.
In short, we both gained freedom.
Freedom from patterns and illnesses that did not serve us.
Freedom to feel what we felt, rather than just run from it.
Freedom to connect with all dimensions of our beings and our lives.
Freedom to be who we are, without constantly self-editing, trying to fit it, or trying to do it “right”.
Tangent-rant: “It’s not magic. It’s just a different way of knowing.” — Leona Waller
We both get frustrated with how intuitive knowing and healing is sometimes framed as “magical.”
We were all born with exquisitely attuned systems: nervous systems designed to detect subtle shifts in our environment, to track safety and threat, to respond to energy, to feel. Our ancestors relied on this sensitivity to survive. It’s not new-age. It’s not woo. It’s not a “gift.” It’s how the human animal evolved.
So when we sense that something is off in a room… when we feel emotion rising before a thought can explain it… when we know something in our gut, even if we can’t yet say why… that’s not mystical. That’s your body doing exactly what it was built to do.
Therefore, we don’t think embodiment is necessarily mystical or for those who consider themselves to be “spiritual.” We believe it’s human. We evolved to sense, to feel, to intuit, to heal, even when we don’t have the words for how or why. And while it might look miraculous from the outside, what we see over and over again is that when people are given safe spaces and tools to process what’s held in their bodies, they can’t help but heal old wounds and patterns that nothing else seemed to help.
The point of this work is beyond personal wellbeing.
It’s easy to commit to something when you have a clear reason why. Like we said, we are committed to somatics and embodiment for the sake of freedom. For ourselves, but also for others.
“This isn’t just about self-improvement. This is about collective liberation.” — Leona Waller
Imagine it with us: if even just 100 people learned to trust themselves more, speak more truth, cultivate more connection, and move through hard conversations with presence… the world would suddenly have 100 more powerful people working to make positive change. The mere presence of a person standing in truth, clarity, and openness has an impact on those around them. Times that by 100.
Because the system only exists because we uphold it. When we change how we show up — more compassionate, more honest, more courageous, more embodied — the system can’t help but shift.
When we’re no longer stuck in protection mode, we can show up the way we want to show up. Suddenly, we aren’t so afraid to speak the uncomfortable truth, to stand up to power, to take accountability, and share vulnerably. And the system changes from the inside out.
Soma Check-In (want to try it?)
We closed this episode with a simple somatic practice we use every week. It’s short, structured, and powerful.
You just say:
“In my body, I’m noticing…” [name a sensation]
“And I’m experiencing…” [name an emotion]
That’s it. No explanation, no “because.” Just noticing and naming. Give it a try.
Thanks for listening to The Body Knows.
Every week, we share somatic tools, real-life conversations, and embodied stories to help you come home to yourself… and maybe change the world while you’re at it ;).
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