Somatic Experiencing: What It Is, and Why I'm Training in It
I'm partway into a three-year qualification in Somatic Experiencing, a body-based approach to working with traumatic stress that Peter Levine developed across the 1970s and onward. I get asked, fairly often, what the heck SE is and why I'm undertaking it alongside my counselling and yoga teaching work. This piece is the answer.
It's partly personal, what the training is asking of me, and partly informational: what SE is, and why this training fits the broader work I do at Jala Yoga®.
What Somatic Experiencing is
Somatic Experiencing is a body-oriented approach to addressing the residue of traumatic stress in the nervous system. The framework starts from the observation that traumatic stress is, in part, an unfinished physiological response: a fight, flight, or freeze pattern that didn't get to complete at the time of the event, and that continues to register in the body afterward. SE works to support that physiology to complete in a regulated, slow, choice-based way, through attention to body sensation, pacing, and a particular kind of relational attunement between practitioner and client.
It is, importantly, not the same as trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy, EMDR, or other narrative-led approaches. SE is body-led. The work is in physical sensation, in subtle shifts of autonomic state, in completing micro-movements the body holds in suspension. The narrative of what happened is a context the work moves through, not the focus of the work.
Why I'm training in it
A few reasons.
The first is integration. My counselling work, my yoga teaching, my massage therapy, and my YTT educator role all sit at the same intersection: the body, the nervous system, and the experience of being a person who has carried difficult things. SE is one of the most developed body-led frameworks for that intersection. Training in it gives me a deeper somatic literacy that strengthens each of those roles, and helps me work more effectively with clients.
The second is scope. SE has a clearly defined scope and a rigorous certification process. It is taught and held within a community of practice. The structure of the training itself, three years of progressive supervised work, models the kind of slow, integrated capacity development that body-based work requires. This really matters to me! (We've written about a similar principle in the context of trauma-informed yoga teaching's scope of practice.)
The third is professional. SE is increasingly used alongside allied health work in Australia, by counsellors, OTs, psychologists, and physiotherapists who want to add a body-led capacity to their existing practice. The growing presence of SE-trained allied health professionals means the field is becoming an interprofessional language. I want to be able to use that language credibly.
What this means for the YTT and counselling
My SE training is part of my professional development, not a credential I claim. The work I bring into the 350-hour Trauma-Informed Yoga Teacher Training and into counselling sessions is what is within the scope of those qualifications. SE work specifically is not part of the YTT curriculum. It is a separate clinical modality.
What does carry over is the somatic literacy, the pacing, and the attention to nervous-system state that SE develops. Those are competencies that strengthen any trauma-informed practitioner, regardless of the modality they use. They show up in how I teach, how I hold a counselling room, and how I model the principles for trainees. (Our piece on polyvagal theory in yoga teaching covers related ground.)
A note on the slow path
What SE has reinforced for me, more than anything else, is the value of slow training. Three years is a long time for a qualification. The slowness is the point. Body-led capacity is built through repetition, supervision, and integration time, the same way embodied teaching capacity is built. The trainings that work the most reliably are the ones that take long enough to integrate.
That principle shapes how I think about the YTT. It runs across 10 months for the same reason. Embodied capacity is slow capacity; and true skill integration. Working with trauma effectively cannot be learnt in a weekend course. This stuff is nuanced, and takes time.
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