Somatic Exercises: A Body Map and Five Gentle Practices

About this tool

Somatic exercises are body-based practices drawn from somatic approaches to therapy, which start from sensation rather than from thought or narrative. The premise is that stress and trauma show up as a pattern in the body, a braced jaw, a held breath, a flat numbness, and that noticing and gently altering that pattern can change how a person feels. The best known of these approaches is Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing, covered on Somatic Experiencing, alongside sensorimotor psychotherapy and other body-oriented methods. The exercises on this page are the common building blocks those approaches share, written so you can try them on your own.

Five moves do most of the work. Grounding means putting attention into the contact between your body and what is holding it: feet on the floor, weight through the chair. Orienting means letting your eyes move around the room and taking in where you actually are, which is what the nervous system does when it checks for safety. A body scan walks attention slowly through the body without trying to fix anything. Pendulation means moving attention back and forth between a place that feels tight and a place that feels settled. Movement means letting a small shake, stretch or push happen rather than holding still.

Titration is the sixth idea and the one that keeps the rest safe. In Levine's framing it means working in the smallest useful dose: a few seconds of contact with a difficult sensation, then back to something neutral, rather than staying in the hardest place as long as possible. Payne, Levine and Crane-Godreau set out the theory behind this in 2015, arguing that interoception, the sense of the body's internal state, and proprioception, the sense of position and movement, are the active ingredients. That is a reasoned proposal rather than a settled finding, and it is worth holding it as such.

On evidence, the honest position is that somatic approaches have a small trial base. Brom and colleagues published a randomized controlled study of Somatic Experiencing for post-traumatic stress in 2017 with encouraging results, and Kuhfuss and colleagues reviewed the field in a 2021 scoping review, concluding that the available studies point in a positive direction while differing widely in quality, size and method. That is a long way from the evidence behind cognitive processing therapy, prolonged exposure and trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy, which the American Psychological Association's guideline identifies as the best-supported treatments for post-traumatic stress.

The parts of this page with the broadest support are the parts that overlap with mindfulness and with standard clinical practice. The body scan has been studied for decades as a component of mindfulness-based stress reduction, described in Jon Kabat-Zinn's Full Catastrophe Living and tested in many trials of that program. Orienting and sensory grounding appear in trauma-informed guidance from services including the National Center for PTSD, whose coping page tells readers to keep their eyes open, look around and remind themselves where and when they are. So the sensible way to read this page is as a set of coping and settling skills with reasonable support, some of which come from a specific therapy whose own trial base is still thin.

These exercises are for noticing and settling. They are not trauma processing, and that distinction matters more than any technique here. Processing a traumatic memory is specific work with a trained therapist who can keep you oriented while you do it. Doing it alone, with no plan for the hour afterward, tends to leave people flooded rather than relieved. If a sensation starts pulling a memory with it, that is the signal to stop the exercise, open your eyes, orient to the room, and save the material for a session rather than pushing on.

A few rules keep body work from backfiring. Keep your eyes open if closing them makes things worse. Work in small doses with pauses, and end on something neutral rather than on the hardest sensation. Do not chase catharsis: the shaking and emotional release some methods aim for can tip into flooding, and more intensity is not more progress. Watch the direction of travel rather than the absolute number, because a rating that climbs steadily across the exercise means stop, whatever you expected to happen. And if numbness is where you start, orienting and movement usually suit better than a long inward scan.

The body map on this sheet asks three questions, in this order: where do you feel it, what does it feel like, and what does it want to do. The first is location, as precisely as you can manage. The second is quality: temperature, texture, weight, movement, size, and whether it is still or shifting. The third is impulse, which is the part people skip and the part that often carries the most information: a wish to push, to curl, to run, to cover your face, to rest. You are naming the impulse, not acting on it.

Arousal has two directions, and the right exercise depends on which one you are in. Window of Tolerance is the standard map for this. Above the window, keyed up and racing, slow and settling practices help: long exhales, weight through the feet, pressure, orienting. Below it, numb, heavy, far away, those same practices can deepen the shutdown, and gentle movement, standing up, cooler water on the hands or naming objects out loud tends to work better. Noticing which direction you are heading is more useful than having a favorite technique.

If flashbacks, dissociation, nightmares or being permanently on alert are part of your life, body-based exercises are a reasonable thing to use between sessions and a poor substitute for treatment. PTSD Test (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) is a self-check rather than a diagnosis, and a licensed trauma therapist can tell you whether a somatic approach, a trauma-focused cognitive therapy or EMDR fits your situation. Many clinicians combine them, using settling skills early so that the processing work later is tolerable. The Psychology.com directory is free to search by specialty, including trauma.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Checked the titration and stop instructions, confirmed the page separates settling from trauma processing, and verified that the evidence section does not overstate the somatic trial base.

References

1. Brom D, Stokar Y, Lawi C, et al. Somatic Experiencing for posttraumatic stress disorder: a randomized controlled outcome study. Journal of Traumatic Stress. 2017;30(3):304-312.
2. Kuhfuss M, Maldei T, Hetmanek A, Baumann N. Somatic experiencing: effectiveness and key factors of a body-oriented trauma therapy: a scoping literature review. European Journal of Psychotraumatology. 2021;12(1):1929023.
3. Payne P, Levine PA, Crane-Godreau MA. Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Frontiers in Psychology. 2015;6:93.
4. Levine PA. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. North Atlantic Books; 1997.
5. Kabat-Zinn J. Full Catastrophe Living. Delacorte Press; 1990.
6. American Psychological Association. Clinical Practice Guideline for the Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in Adults. 2025. https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline
7. National Center for PTSD. Coping with Traumatic Stress Reactions. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. https://www.ptsd.va.gov/gethelp/coping_stress_reactions.asp

Somatic Exercises FAQ