Somatic, and What the Word Is Doing

Somatic is currently one of the most productive adjectives in the wellness economy. It attaches to coaching, to healing, to breathwork, to stretching, to dance, to weekend workshops, to sound baths, to sensory journeys, and to hours of paid touch. The pattern it follows is consistent enough to be worth naming: the word arrives, the price moves up a little, and the description of what will actually happen in the room stays exactly as vague as it was before.

This is not a case of an empty word. Somatic has a precise meaning, an identifiable person who put it into circulation, a documented date, and a research literature. It also has two clinical trauma modalities attached to it, delivered by trained practitioners to people with diagnosed post-traumatic stress and studied in published trials. Those are not the same thing as a scented hour with music. The difficulty is not that the word means nothing. The difficulty is that it means several quite different things at once, and a reader is almost never told which one is being offered to her.

Four things are kept apart on this page. What soma and somatics actually mean and where they came from. What the movement teachers usually named as the lineage actually did, one by one, without being folded into a single tradition they never formed. What the clinical modalities are, what the research on them shows, and how weak that research still is. And what a guided sensory session in a room like this one actually consists of — which is a real offer, describable in plain words, and in no need of a clinical vocabulary to justify it. Most of the confusion in this subject comes from pretending otherwise.

Moonlight sells hours in which a person is touched with attention. That gives this house a plain and unglamorous commercial interest in the argument below, and the interest runs in a particular direction. Relaxation is a word that sounds like a candle. Somatic is a word that sounds like a discipline. The hour would be identical either way, but the second word makes it easier to charge more for, easier to describe as serious, and easier to defend to a sceptical friend. A house in this business would benefit from using the word loosely, and would benefit most of all from never being asked what it meant by it.

So the word does not appear on this site as a description of what is on offer. There is no somatic Experience here, no somatic healing, and no somatic journey. That absence is the position, and this page is the explanation of it rather than a decorative caveat attached to a menu that uses the word anyway. The only way to earn a reader’s trust on a subject where the house profits from vagueness is to publish the parts that make vagueness harder, which is what the middle of this page consists of.

A reader should discount the favourable parts of what follows accordingly, and should notice that the least favourable paragraph on this page — the one saying that nothing in the trauma research transfers to an hour of paid touch — is also the one this house would most prefer to leave out.

Soma is simply the Greek for body, and on its own it carries no special charge; it is the ordinary root in words like psychosomatic and somatic cell. The charge was added deliberately. Thomas Hanna (1928–1990) was a philosopher — a doctorate from the University of Chicago, then professor and chairman of philosophy at the University of Florida from 1965 to 1973 — and he used soma to mark a distinction rather than to name a substance. Writing in his own journal in 1986, he put it this way: somatics is the field that studies the soma, "namely, the body as perceived from within by first-person perception." A body observed from outside is one phenomenon. The same body experienced from inside, by the person living in it, is a categorically different one. Hanna’s complaint was that medicine, physiology and psychology all took the outside view, and that no discipline had been built on the inside one.

The dating is worth getting right, because it is quoted carelessly. Hanna set out the thinking at book length in Bodies in Revolt: A Primer in Somatic Thinking, published in 1970, though some sources date that book to 1969. He moved to San Francisco in 1973 and took part in the first Feldenkrais training held in the United States in 1975. In the same year he and Eleanor Criswell Hanna founded the Novato Institute for Somatic Research and Training, and in the autumn of 1976 they published the first issue of Somatics: Magazine-Journal of the Bodily Arts and Sciences, carrying his essay "The Field of Somatics". That 1976 issue is the documented public naming of the field. Some popular accounts give 1967 for the coining of soma instead; the two dates circulate side by side and this page does not try to settle which private usage came first. What can be documented is the journal, the year, and the definition.

The naming was also an argument, and it has been challenged on exactly that ground. Lindsey Drury, writing in Dance Research Journal in 2022, examined how Hanna constructed the field’s history and concluded that he largely invented his own ancestry. In Bodies in Revolt his list of somatic forebears included Darwin, Freud, Lorenz, Piaget, Reich, Kant, Kierkegaard, Marx, Cassirer, Camus and Merleau-Ponty — figures who, as Drury puts it, in many cases dealt minimally with, or simply did not deal with, any cognate of the term. Her argument is that Hanna took the disjointed and internally conflicted intellectual history of Europe and presented it as a single tradition leading to himself, and that later accounts of somatics have repeated that framing without checking it. Whatever one makes of the wider critique, the narrow point is well made: a field with a founding story that flattering deserves to have the story read closely.

A short list of names is conventionally printed under the heading of somatics: Alexander, Gindler, Feldenkrais, Rolf, Trager, and others besides. The grouping is a retrospective editorial convention, assembled after the fact by Hanna’s journal and by later writing in dance and movement studies. It is not a school these people formed, and most of them could not have joined one under that name because they were dead or finished before the name existed. Alexander died in 1955 and Gindler in 1961, both before the word was in public circulation. What they share is a family resemblance — an interest in attention to one’s own movement — not a doctrine, and the differences between them are larger than the resemblance.

Frederick Matthias Alexander (1869–1955) was an Australian actor who lost his voice when he performed. Working with mirrors, he concluded that he was pulling his head back and down as he began to speak, and that the habit interfered with his voice, his breathing and his coordination generally. He taught from about 1894 in Melbourne and Sydney, moved to London in 1904, published four books including The Use of the Self in 1932, and began a three-year teacher-training course in 1931. His work is instruction in inhibiting a habitual response, delivered largely through verbal direction and light hands-on guidance. It is a technique of self-use, and it was never framed as therapy.

Elsa Gindler (1885–1961) taught Gymnastik in Berlin, having studied with Hedwig Kallmeyer, and developed her approach out of her own recovery from tuberculosis, working closely with Heinrich Jacoby. She called it Arbeit am Menschen — work with the human being — and it consisted largely of self-observation inside ordinary actions: sitting, standing, walking. She wrote almost nothing and named almost nothing, which is why she is the least commercially visible figure on this list and the one whose influence is hardest to trace cleanly. Her student Charlotte Selver emigrated in 1938 and taught the work in the United States as Sensory Awareness; Laura Perls, later a founder of Gestalt therapy with Fritz Perls, was another of her students. Most of Gindler’s presence in this field is second-hand by design.

Moshé Feldenkrais (1904–1984) was a physicist with a doctorate from the University of Paris who worked as a research assistant to Frédéric Joliot-Curie at the Radium Institute. He met Jigoro Kano in Paris in 1933, studied judo under Mikinosuke Kawaishi, helped found a jiu-jitsu club there, and was among the first Europeans to hold a judo black belt. A knee injury and a poor prognosis sent him to work on his own movement, and the result was two formats still taught today: Awareness Through Movement, verbally guided group lessons in small unfamiliar movements, and Functional Integration, the same enquiry conducted one to one through touch. The connection to Hanna is the one documented link in this whole list — Hanna sat in the first American Feldenkrais training in 1975, the year before he named the field.

Ida Rolf (1896–1979) is the awkward fit, and the awkwardness is instructive. She took a doctorate in biological chemistry from Columbia in 1920 and worked at the Rockefeller Institute, publishing in biochemistry through the 1920s. From the 1940s she developed Structural Integration, later trademarked as Rolfing, whose organising idea is the relation of the body’s structure to gravity and whose method is sustained manual pressure applied in a set series. That is a project about the body seen from outside and altered by a practitioner — close to the opposite of a field defined by first-person perception. It is also the one item on this list whose claimed benefits are not supported by medical evidence, and it should not be borrowed as a credential by anything else. Milton Trager (1908–1997), who qualified in medicine in midlife, sits differently again: his psychophysical integration pairs passive rhythmic table work with Mentastics, a set of light self-directed movements the client does afterwards, and he brought it to wider notice through demonstrations at the Esalen Institute in the mid-1970s, leaving private medical practice in 1977 and founding an institute in 1980.

Read as a group these are five different projects: a technique for undoing a vocal habit, a practice of self-observation in ordinary movement, a method of motor learning built by a physicist, a structural manual system organised around gravity, and a rhythmic table practice with a self-movement component. Calling all of them somatic is defensible as shorthand. Presenting them as one tradition with a shared method, and then borrowing the authority of the whole for a single session on a booking page, is not.

Somatic Experiencing was developed by Peter A. Levine. Its theoretical statement was set out by Payne, Levine and Crane-Godreau in Frontiers in Psychology in 2015, a paper that presents a theory rather than testing one: that guiding a client’s attention to interoceptive, kinaesthetic and proprioceptive experience can resolve symptoms of chronic and traumatic stress through the completion of thwarted defensive responses and the regulation of excess autonomic arousal. A corrigendum followed the same year. Levine’s book Waking the Tiger appeared in 1997. The nonprofit he founded — first the Foundation for Human Enrichment, now Somatic Experiencing International — is based in Boulder, Colorado and marked its thirtieth anniversary in 2024.

The training is specific and worth describing exactly, because the description answers a question a reader will otherwise have to guess at. It runs across eight modules over three years: beginning and intermediate modules of four days and twenty-four instructional hours each, advanced modules of six days and thirty-six hours, with a minimum number of personal sessions and case consultations alongside. The credential it produces is Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, SEP. And SEI states plainly that it is not a regulatory or licensing entity, and that the programme is continuing education for people who already have an active professional practice with clients. The professions it names as eligible include psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers and counsellors — and also doctors, nurses, chiropractors and acupuncturists, and also massage therapists, yoga instructors and Feldenkrais practitioners, and also first responders, educators, clergy, coaches and mediators.

That list is not a criticism of SE. It is a fact a reader needs, because it means the credential alone does not tell her whether the person holding it is a licensed mental-health clinician or a massage therapist with an additional training. Both are possible. Only asking will distinguish them.

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy was developed by Pat Ogden. She apprenticed with Ron Kurtz in the early 1970s, was the first person certified in Hakomi and designed its original curriculum, and in 1981 founded her own school with Kurtz’s blessing — first called Hakomi Bodywork, then Hakomi Integrative Somatics, and renamed the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute in 2002. The method’s standard text is Ogden, Minton and Pain, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, published by Norton in 2006. Training runs in three levels: trauma themes, developmental injury, and certification. SPI states, in the same terms as SEI, that it is neither a regulatory nor a licensing organisation.

Two things are true of both at once, and both need saying. They are serious modalities with published books, structured curricula, supervision requirements and clinical trials — not inventions of the wellness market. And their own institutes are explicit that completing the training is not a licence to practise anything, which means the safety of a session under either name rests on the practitioner’s underlying profession, not on the modality’s name.

This is the sentence the page exists to make unmissable. Somatic Experiencing and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy are clinical trauma modalities, delivered inside a professional practice, to people who are usually seeking help for post-traumatic symptoms, by practitioners who have completed years of structured training on top of an existing qualification. A somatic sensory journey, a somatic healing session, or a somatic massage offered as sensual bodywork is not one of those things. It shares the adjective and nothing else.

The borrowing works in one direction only, and that is how you can tell it is borrowing. The clinical modalities gain nothing from the sensory journey. The sensory journey gains a great deal from the clinical modalities: a research literature it did not produce, institutes it has no relationship with, and an implication of competence in an area where competence is genuinely consequential. When a word travels in one direction and the accountability does not travel with it, the word is functioning as decoration.

Nothing in this is an argument that a sensory session is worthless, and the last part of this page describes one carefully. It is an argument that a sensory session should be sold as what it is. If the hour is relaxation and attention, the honest word is relaxation and attention, and the word somatic on the page is doing work that the hour itself is not.

The best-known trial is Brom, Stokar, Lawi, Nuriel-Porat, Ziv, Lerner and Ross, published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress in 2017. Sixty-three adults meeting DSM-IV-TR criteria for PTSD were randomly assigned to fifteen weekly one-hour sessions of Somatic Experiencing (33 people) or to a waiting list (30), with assessments across thirty weeks. Effect sizes were large: Cohen’s d between 0.94 and 1.26 for PTSD severity and between 0.70 and 1.08 for depression. Ten participants discontinued, five in each group. The authors named their own limitations: a relatively small sample drawn from a community setting rather than a university one, and no measure of behavioural adherence to the protocol, although therapists were closely supervised. One limitation they did not need to name is structural: the comparison was with a waiting list rather than with an active treatment, and waiting-list comparisons reliably produce larger effects than head-to-head ones.

On the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy side the studies are smaller. Langmuir, Kirsh and Classen published a pilot in Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy in 2012: ten women with histories of childhood abuse attended twenty weekly sessions of a group adapted from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. Body awareness improved significantly and the improvement held at six-month follow-up; somatic dissociation, dissociative experiences and receptivity to soothing did not change significantly. Classen, Hughes, Clark, Hill Mohammed, Woods and Beckett followed with a pilot randomised trial in the Journal of Trauma & Dissociation in 2020: thirty-two women with histories of childhood trauma randomised to a twenty-session group or a waitlist, with significant improvements in body awareness, anxiety and soothing receptivity. Both papers describe themselves as preliminary, and both are small.

Kuhfuss and colleagues published a scoping review of Somatic Experiencing in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology in 2021. Eighty-three articles were identified and sixteen met the inclusion criteria; the review reported preliminary evidence of positive effects on PTSD-related symptoms. A scoping review is a map of a literature rather than a verdict on it — it does not pool effects or grade study quality — so the honest reading is that a small literature exists and points in a favourable direction, not that the question has been settled.

The most useful single number comes from outside the field. The International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies published prevention and treatment guidelines based on the evidence available to its committee as of 10 October 2018, grading interventions in five bands: Strong, Standard, Low Effect, Emerging Evidence, and Insufficient Evidence to Recommend. Somatic Experiencing was placed in Emerging Evidence for the treatment of adults with PTSD, alongside acupuncture, neurofeedback, saikokeishikankyoto, transcranial magnetic stimulation and yoga. The guidelines define that band precisely: it was used where the quality criteria for a strong, standard or low-effect recommendation were not met, but the results and their confidence intervals were better than the control condition — and where a single randomised trial was the basis, at least twenty participants per arm were required. That is a real place on a real ladder. It is also the fourth rung of five.

Now the part this house would prefer to leave out. None of the above transfers to an hour of paid relaxing touch. Not the effect sizes, not the direction of effect, not the guideline placement, not the plausibility. Those trials studied a defined protocol, delivered over fifteen or twenty sessions, by supervised practitioners, to people who met diagnostic criteria, measured against symptom instruments. Change any one of those and the finding no longer applies; change all of them, which is what happens when the word moves to a booking page, and there is nothing left to apply. A session of bodywork is not a short course of Somatic Experiencing, and no amount of shared vocabulary makes it one.

There is a real thing underneath all of this, and it has a name that predates the marketing. Interoception is the sense of the body’s own internal condition — the afferent traffic reporting temperature, effort, tension, hunger, breathing and cardiac activity. A. D. Craig set out the influential neuroanatomical account in Nature Reviews Neuroscience in 2002, tracing a pathway from the spinal lamina I system through the thalamus to the insular cortex. Khalsa, Adolphs, Cameron and colleagues published a field-wide agenda in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging in 2018, defining interoception as the process by which the nervous system senses, interprets and integrates signals originating inside the body, and reviewing its involvement in anxiety, mood, eating and addictive disorders. That attention to internal sensation is a real and studied capacity is not in dispute.

What is disputed is how to measure it, and the dispute is not a minor technicality. Garfinkel, Seth, Barrett, Suzuki and Critchley argued in Biological Psychology in 2015 that interoception is not one ability but three separable ones: performance on an objective task, confidence in that performance, and self-reported sensitivity — and that people are frequently confident and wrong. The most widely used objective task is heartbeat counting, in which a person counts their own heartbeats without taking a pulse. Zamariola, Maurage, Luminet and Corneille argued in Biological Psychology in 2018 that accuracy scores from that task are badly confounded, in particular because they track actual heart rate and largely reflect under-reporting. A published comment disputed that conclusion, attributing the problems to the statistical form of the score and to the analysis used rather than to the task itself. The argument is live, and it is an argument about the field’s central instrument.

The self-report side is better behaved but measures something different. Mehling and colleagues published the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness in PLoS ONE in 2012 — thirty-two items across eight scales, built with focus groups drawn from teachers and patients of body-awareness practices — and a revised version, MAIA-2, in the same journal in 2018. It is a good instrument for what it is: a record of how a person describes her own relationship to bodily sensation. It is not a measurement of how accurately she detects it, and the two should never be quoted as though they were interchangeable.

So here is the honest extent of the bridge. Established: interoception exists, has been mapped neuroanatomically, and is measurable in at least a plural and contested way. Established: slow, sustained attention to a region changes what is available to notice about it — which is an ordinary fact about attention and needs no special claim. Not established, and not claimed here: that an hour of relaxing touch improves interoceptive accuracy, that improving it would be therapeutic, that it addresses anything diagnosable, or that noticing a sensation is a form of understanding it. Noticing is not diagnosing. A sensation that worries you is a question for a clinician, not an interpretation exercise, and nobody in this house is qualified to tell you what your body is saying.

Stripped of vocabulary, the thing being offered is straightforward, and it is easier to describe honestly than to describe impressively. It begins with an agreed scope: what will be touched and what will not, decided in words before anything starts, so that the hour does not have to be negotiated while it is happening. It includes breath, not as a technique with a name but because breathing slows when nothing is being chased and a person is not asked to keep up with anything. It runs slowly, because speed outruns sensation — there is a pace above which a hand becomes a blur rather than a texture. Attention is directed toward sensation rather than toward performance: what is felt, not how it looks, and not whether anything is being achieved.

And it is long enough that hurry stops organising the hour. That last element is the one most often left out of descriptions and is probably the most consequential. A great deal of what people are actually buying, in every corner of this industry, is a block of time in which nothing is due. It takes a while for that to become believable to a nervous system that has spent the week being efficient, which is why a short version of the same session is not a smaller dose of the same thing but a different thing.

That is a genuine offer and it is complete as it stands. It does not require a clinical word to be worth an evening, and adding one does not improve it. The description above contains no mechanism, no outcome and no promise, which is not an omission — it is the accurate shape of the thing. A house that cannot make an hour sound worthwhile without borrowing the vocabulary of trauma treatment is telling a reader something about the hour.

Most people reading this publication are women, and the practical situation is specific. A woman who encounters the phrase somatic healing on a booking page cannot tell from the page whether she is being offered a clinical trauma modality, a massage, or an atmosphere. The three are priced similarly, photographed similarly, and described in the same soft register. No generalisation is offered here about why she is reading; the reasons are as various as the readers. What can be offered is a way to make the page answerable, which is more useful than reassurance.

First: what is the practitioner trained in, and by whom. Not what the session is called — what the person is qualified in, which body issued the qualification, and what that body says its qualification is. A clear answer sounds like a named profession plus a named training with a named institute. A vague answer, or an answer that names only a modality, is itself the information. And note the earlier point: even a real SEP credential does not by itself mean a licensed clinician, because the training admits bodyworkers, coaches and clergy alongside psychologists. The follow-up question is what the underlying profession is.

Second: what is being claimed to change. Relaxation for the evening is a claim about the evening. Better sleep, less anxiety, resolution of a past event, release of something stored — those are claims about a person’s health, and a page making them should be able to say who is accountable for them. The useful test is whether the claim survives being restated plainly. "You will feel looked after for two hours" survives it. "Your body will let go of what it has been holding" does not, and a page unwilling to restate it plainly has told you why.

Third: what happens if something difficult surfaces during the session. This is the question that separates the three most sharply, because it is the one a decorative page has never thought about. A clinical practice has an answer involving clinical judgement and, where needed, referral. A responsible non-clinical practice has an answer too, and it is short: stopping, and pointing toward somebody qualified. A practice that answers by describing how it would work with the feeling, process it, or hold space for it is claiming a competence it has not demonstrated, in the one situation where the cost of claiming wrongly falls entirely on the person on the table.

Moonlight offers relaxation and personal care. It does not offer treatment, rehabilitation, correction or diagnosis, and it is not trauma care. Bodywork here does not treat trauma — not as a secondary benefit, not incidentally, and not in a softened form. Nothing is released, processed or resolved. No stored experience is being reached. Those are not modest phrasings of a therapeutic claim; they are the refusal of one.

If something difficult surfaces during an appointment, the response here is to stop. Not to continue more gently, not to shift into a therapeutic register, not to explain what is happening. To stop, to make the room unhurried, and to point toward somebody qualified — which is an ordinary and finite thing to do, and the only honest one available to a house without clinical training. This is a limit, not a disclaimer. A disclaimer sits at the bottom of a page and protects the business. A limit governs what happens in the room and costs the business the part of the hour it would otherwise have sold.

In Japan this sits inside a legal landscape that also does not care what an hour is called. Anma, massage and shiatsu — あん摩マッサージ指圧 — is a licensed occupation under Act No. 217 of 1947, so the word massage is not a neutral description in this country. The word somatic, by contrast, has no legal standing here at all: it licenses nobody, certifies nothing, and creates no accountability. That asymmetry is worth holding on to. A regulated word constrains what may be claimed. An unregulated word constrains nothing, which is precisely why it is attractive to whoever is writing the page. Moonlight’s work is offered as relaxation and personal care, not as 治療, not as licensed anma-massage-shiatsu practice, and not as a substitute for seeing somebody qualified.

And the thing worth saying last. Declining the word costs this house something real: a serious-sounding adjective, an implied lineage, and a borrowed research literature, all of them free and none of them earned. What is left after they are declined is what was actually on offer the whole time — time, attention, skill, an agreed scope, an unhurried pace, and a practitioner who will not tell you an impressive story about your own nervous system.

This is not medical, clinical or psychological guidance and it diagnoses nobody. Nothing here says that a reader has a condition, lacks something, or would be repaired by an appointment. Nothing here says that touch treats, cures, relieves or resolves anything. If touch, or the prospect of it, brings distress rather than curiosity, the appropriate resource is a qualified mental-health professional; a paid evening is not that and cannot become that. This house has an obvious commercial interest in the opposite recommendation, which is why it is printed in its own paragraph.

What could not be verified is therefore not claimed. The grouping of Alexander, Gindler, Feldenkrais, Rolf and Trager as a single somatic lineage is reported here as a retrospective editorial convention, because no evidence was found that these practitioners understood themselves as members of one tradition; the only documented link on that list is Hanna’s own participation in the first American Feldenkrais training in 1975. The coining date is reported with its discrepancy intact: 1976 is the documented public naming of the field in Hanna’s journal, and the 1967 date that circulates for the coining of soma could not be traced here to a primary source. Bodies in Revolt is given as 1970, with the note that some sources say 1969.

The theoretical account of Somatic Experiencing — completion of thwarted defensive responses, discharge of excess autonomic arousal — is reported here as what the modality claims about itself, sourced to Payne, Levine and Crane-Godreau in Frontiers in Psychology in 2015, and it is not reported as an established mechanism; that paper presents a theory rather than testing one. No claim is made here that any modality named on this page is effective, ineffective, or better or worse than any other. No number is given for how many practitioners exist, how common these services are, or who uses them. And no scholar, journal, institute or professional body named here endorses this house, is affiliated with it, or knows of it.

The trials named above are Brom, Stokar, Lawi, Nuriel-Porat, Ziv, Lerner and Ross (Journal of Traumatic Stress, 2017); Langmuir, Kirsh and Classen (Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 2012); Classen, Hughes, Clark, Hill Mohammed, Woods and Beckett (Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 2020); and the scoping review by Kuhfuss and colleagues (European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 2021). The guideline placement is from the ISTSS Prevention and Treatment Guidelines, based on evidence available to the committee as of 10 October 2018. The interoception sources are Craig (Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2002); Garfinkel, Seth, Barrett, Suzuki and Critchley (Biological Psychology, 2015); Mehling and colleagues (PLoS ONE, 2012 and 2018); Khalsa, Adolphs, Cameron and colleagues (Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 2018); and Zamariola, Maurage, Luminet and Corneille (Biological Psychology, 2018) together with the published comment disputing it. The historical critique is Drury (Dance Research Journal, 2022). Every finding is reported as a finding with its limits attached, never as an effect a reader should expect.

Statements about Japanese regulation describe the legal landscape as published by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. They are orientation, not legal advice; a reader with a question about a specific practitioner or service should ask that practitioner for the qualification. Statements about what this house does restate only what its Experience, Trust and Pricing pages already publish. And the interest, once more, at the end as at the beginning: this house would find the word somatic useful, which is the whole reason this page took the trouble to find out what it means.