Somatic Healing and the Journey Through the Body
Real healing doesn’t happen in the mind. It happens in the body through presence, breath, and direct experience. What most people call yoga is often just physical exercise. But real yoga, the kind passed down through the classical Hatha Yoga tradition, was never about performance. It was a system designed to guide you through the physical body, into the nervous system, and ultimately into the subtle body.
This progression is what creates genuine somatic healing. Not temporary relief. Not a moment of peace. But a deep restructuring of how energy flows through you, how emotion is stored, and how your mind relates to your body.
When practiced properly, Hatha Yoga creates a natural sequence of awakening. First, it opens the physical body. Then it regulates the nervous system. Then, when the winds have quieted, it introduces you to the subtle field, the energetic dimension that most people never touch.
We begin with the physical body. Through asana and breath, the muscular armor starts to loosen. The breath gets deeper. The joints begin to feel spacious. But what’s actually happening is deeper than flexibility. You’re removing physical tension that is directly tied to emotional memory. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika says it clearly: “As long as the breath is unsteady, the mind is unsteady. When the breath becomes steady, so does the mind.”
Once you begin to build steadiness in the physical frame, something else starts to shift. You enter what I call the somatic body. The layer where your nervous system holds patterns of trauma, fear, shutdown, or over-efforting. This is the layer that most people avoid because it feels uncomfortable. But this is where the real healing starts.
By bringing attention, breath, and repetition to this layer, you begin to regulate the nervous system. The breath deepens. The system starts to trust again. You don’t need to analyze your trauma. You just need to stay present enough to stop running from it. Je Tsongkhapa put it this way: “Stabilizing the mind is like tying a wild elephant to a strong post. Without the support of the body and breath, the mind cannot rest.”
And that brings us to the third layer. The subtle body. In yoga, we call this the nadis, the chakras, the bindus. In the Tibetan system, it’s the winds and the channels. Either way, it’s the same architecture. You are made of energy, and when that energy becomes still, awareness opens. Not the awareness of thought, but a field of awareness that is direct, intuitive, and deeply peaceful.
The Pradipika says it this way: “When prana moves, the mind moves. When prana is still, the mind becomes still. By mastering prana, the yogi masters the mind.”
That’s the whole game. Not spiritual bypassing. Not floaty concepts. Grounded, embodied presence that begins with your body and guides you home to your own subtle clarity.
When you follow this progression, you begin to feel what somatic stillness really means. It’s not disassociation. It’s a full return. Not checking out of life, but checking in fully.
This is why Hatha Yoga matters. Not because it stretches your hamstrings. But because it brings you back into direct contact with the part of you that knows how to heal. And when the nervous system relaxes, the subtle body opens, and the breath moves freely, something shifts.
You stop living from fear. You stop managing your symptoms. You start living from wholeness.
And that is the beginning of freedom.