What is Embodied Processing?
My Story
It was by happy search engine typo accident that I discovered Embodied Processing (EP), and from the beginning it felt accessible, coherent, and genuinely meaningful, it found me at exactly the right time. As I moved through the months of learning and training, practice exchange sessions with colleagues, eventually embarked on my own regular sessions, I started to notice I felt lighter, challenges felt more manageable, and it became easier for me to do the processing myself. Embodied Processing has become not just training, but a lived understanding of what it means to find my way back to myself, to understand my nervous system, and to have the tools to help myself. That experience is what I now bring into a session with every client. Embodied Processing is a safe, integrative modality, which draws on both modern neuroscience and ancient wisdom traditions. Embodied Processing truly honours the understanding that healing is not just psychological, it is embodied, relational, and at its deepest level, spiritual.
I came to somatic therapy after many years of yoga practice, teaching and through my own healing journey. I was already very interested in somatic movement practices, and then my recovery from PTSD following the wildfire that took our home, and a car accident that left me with a very traumatic hospital experience, I was really searching for support.
In 2017, the wildfires that devastated Portugal tore through our valley and took everything we had built. Our home. Our retreat centre. Our business. Years of work, of growth and community was all gone in less than an hour.
What followed were the most harrowing years of my life. The acute shock of losing everything so suddenly and so completely is a specific kind of trauma that does not announce itself gently or resolve itself with any predictability. So annoying in its particularity that the professionals you expect to understand, don’t really understand. It sequesters itself in the body, in the muscles, heartbeat, nervous system, for me it landed eventually in my throat and shoulders. It took me several years to even be able to identify these things let alone work with them.
The fire lost us our livelihood, our beautiful little off grid retreat centre, so I had to scramble to find new employment in a foreign country with exceptionally low wages (Portugal’s minimum wage is the second lowest in the EU). Luckily I fell back on my teaching qualification, completed a TEFL qualification and taught Asian children English online for the next five years. A slightly heart warming but mostly soul destroying profession.
For the years after the fire I lived in a state of highly unpleasant constant activation, hypervigilant, body braced, disconnected from a sense of safety in my own body, without even really noticing it. Despite my years of yoga and meditation practice I felt completely helpless in finding a sense of normalcy again. Weeks after the fire my GP prescribed alprazolam for sleep, which I enjoyed very much, and kept asking for more. It was a few months later I found out it was Xanax and started diligently ordering it myself on the dark web. I took Xanax daily for 18 months, which horrifies me now, finally deciding enough was enough, weaned myself off and settled into some fairly heavy regular alcohol consumption.
The car accident in 2020 left me with a badly fractured left femur, high up and into my hip socket. What followed was a 16 day nightmarish experience in the orthopaedic ward in Coimbra University Hospital that only compounded my existing ‘fire’ trauma. The ORIF surgery was performed without a general anaesthetic only a ‘left leg epidural’. During my 7 day wait for surgery I had no idea it would be performed without a general anaesthetic, it is not common cultural practice for medical professionals to communicate effectively with patients in Portugal. Shortly after being wheeled me into theatre three young and cheerful medical students informed me that no general anaesthetic would be administered, simply a numbing of the nerves, and they would make me ‘sleepy’. Not sleepy enough! I know enough about bones to know that orthopaedic surgery rates as the most violent and aggressive of surgeries. I had the pleasure of a grumpy, rude, small, brow furrowed surgeon who did not even introduce himself to me. I was awake and aware as my leg was opened, bones were sawed and carved, I listened to cursing and swearing as the wrong size rods were not able to be shoved into the marrow of my femur and femur head, the eventual correct size was found, and shoved, some pins attached, and finally I heard from the cheery medical students, that it was almost finished.
I spent 16 days in hospital without the sort of pain relief we would expect in an Australian or British hospital, and being manhandled by very unsympathetic nurses. I have given birth to three children, two of them in Portugal under equally unforgiving conditions…… but during these 16 days I experienced levels of physical pain that I have never experienced before. It really made me realise the traumatic impact of medical procedures and interventions, and my own ability to cope, and ultimately added more layers for me to untangle and unwind when I was able to.
After the fire I was thrown into the chaos of relentless Portuguese bureaucracy, and exhausting battles with lawyers in an archaic country and language that was not my own. A long story, but in short, in June 2017 the Portuguese government promised to rebuild homes lost in fires because the fires were so bad, in October 2017 there was another wave of fires and this was when we lost our place. The government had also offered tax deals to private businesses to fund the rebuild of homes (I later found out). We were very lucky to have our home rebuilt by a private business, which meant it wasn’t a standard generic government rebuild, it was rebuilt more or less as it was before the fire. A house was built, and despite everything that mattered, it was not rebuilt well (by an engineering company based in Lisboa). As a traditional stone building it requires careful, environmentally aware reconstruction using lime and breathable materials to prevent dampness and mould. Instead there was lots of concrete and bad plumbing. It was a roof over our heads nevertheless, we could finally vacate our kind neighbours holiday apartment.
After two years of living back on the land, I watched the eucalyptus regrow with a kind of relentless indifference to what had just happened there. Portugal's eucalyptus monoculture is a cash crop, planted for the cellulose industry, beloved by the landowners for its fast returns and despised by everyone who understands fire and the damage the eucalyptus does to the indigenous forest that once covered the land. The same trees that had turned our valley into a tinderbox were coming back, because nothing in the land management had really changed, despite new government laws around replanting and maintenance, nothing had been learned, and nobody in authority seemed particularly troubled by any of it. The imported Blue Gum grows fast and has a 8-9 year turn over, as opposed to the Maritime Pine trees that were previously grown in rural Portugal, which could be harvested after 30-35 years of growth. It is understandable in a country of poverty and subsistence farming that landowners choose to grow this crop, unfortunately it is mostly unmanaged, left to grow wild, and easily harvested after fire. Ultimately it causes lots of damage and destruction for most and earnings for the few, already wealthy landowners in the small Portuguese villages, and this happens almost every summer in Portugal. The sickening feeling that we lost our home to the toilet paper industry had set in and all I wanted to do was get out! The same trees that burned our home to the ground were replanted to make toilet paper, and are backed by industry lobbying so powerful that any meaningful land management reform is unfortunately highly unlikely.
*Renova is one of the major Portuguese pulp and paper companies whose products reach consumers as toilet paper and paper towels, and whose industry depends on eucalyptus plantations in the very regions devastated by the 2017 fires. Six years after the 2017 Pedrógão Grande fire, a mantle of eucalyptus already covers much of the mountainous landscape again, plantations rather than forests, grown exclusively for pulp.
*Mancini, D. (2023, December 5). Portugal: Wildfires and the eucalyptus curse. European Data Journalism Network.
In my initial attempts to put our property on the market, I tried to get the unfinished legal documents completed, but after long silence and delay from the local town council, I was eventually told by the business that had funded the rebuild that I had signed an agreement and that I was not allowed to sell the property. I had no memory of signing an agreement, asked lawyers to get a copy of the agreement and received a lot more silence, no answers and more delays. Finally after five years, a meeting with the new mayor of the rural town council, and one dramatic meltdown on my part, the paperwork was completed and the property sale was underway. I returned to northern NSW, my home, and am now able to joke about having Portugal Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Jokes aside, initially I tried some more conventional ways to find my peace again. Counselling, EMDR, six months of talk therapy. They each had their value, but none of it touched the constant hum of nervous system activation and anxiety that had become my baseline. I moved off the land and relocated to the coast in Portugal, while I continued the exhausting process to be able to sell our property and move forwards with my life.
About three years after the fire I truly acknowledged that I had developed PTSD, and I began to understand what it means to have been through something overwhelming and not yet know I am safe. I had become super reactive in a way I had never been before, very impatient with my children, lots of shouting and ironically zero tolerance for loud noises. My youngest children were 4 and 6 at the time of the fire, and my eldest child age 12 went to the UK to live with her father, an extra layer of loss that I couldn’t even begin to process at the time. I couldn’t sleep, often waking every hour, or hour and a half, falling asleep dreams waking me up all night. Yoga nidra became my saviour practice.
As I started to acknowledge that I wasn’t feeling OK, I noticed an unrelenting tightness and tension in my throat that had always been there, so familiar it had become part of who I thought I was. I noticed that whenever another hurdle arose, my throat discomfort and constriction would increase.
Even after the property sale had started and we had flights booked to Australia, the restriction remained in my throat.
Finally a couple of years later, and many session of ongoing Embodied Processing work, that constriction has gradually released and mostly disappeared. Sure there are still moments of activation, that I can clearly identify, and occasionally a twinge in my throat, but my day to day, baseline is calmer, more grounded and leaves me with more energy and clarity than I have had in years.
That is what working with the body can do!
The irony of Fire
At the end of every yoga retreat week in Portugal, we used to light a fire in our fire pit, and light our wood burning hot tub for the guests. It was always a joyous way to end each week.
History of Somatic Therapies
Embodied Processing was developed by Matt Nettleton and Ryan Hassan of The Centre for Healing, in Melbourne. Drawing on influences from the NARM approach to healing developmental trauma, Peter Levine's somatic experiencing, Gabor Maté's work, and Hakomi Method, as well as their own lived experiences. Matt is a Somatic based therapist and Holistic AOD Counsellor whose integrative approach brings together wisdom from ancient spiritual traditions and modern neuroscience around trauma and the nervous system. Ryan has been a Trauma Therapist for many years, previously creating and managing a holistic outpatient clinic in Melbourne.
The concept of embodied processing has roots in early 20th-century developments across psychology, neurology and somatic traditions, evolving from Wilhelm Reich’s proposition that unresolved emotional trauma becomes physically held in the body as chronic muscular tension, what he described as "character armour." His work laid the foundation for all modern somatic and body-oriented therapies. Alexander Lowen developed Reich’s research by working directly with the body through movement, breath, and grounding exercises to release held tension and restore energetic flow. His work brought Reich's ideas into a more structured therapeutic framework and significantly influenced the development of modern somatic and trauma-informed approaches.
Somatic movement pioneers like Moshe Feldenkrais, F. M. Alexander and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen influenced practices by emphasising movement awareness, somatic learning and sensorimotor integration. Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s work is a huge influence on my own practice and movement explorations.
The field of somatic therapy has undergone a quiet revolution over the past two decades, moving from the fringes of alternative healing into mainstream recognition as neuroscience began to validate what body-oriented practitioners had long understood, that trauma is not just a memory, it is a physiological state. Trauma was understood for most of the twentieth century as primarily a psychological phenomenon, something that happened in the mind, to be processed through memory, narrative, and meaning-making. Talk therapy operated on the assumption that if you could understand what happened to you, work through the story, and reframe your experience, relief would follow. For many people, it helped. But for many others, it did not solve the problems; the background hum of anxiety, a body that startled easily, sleeplessness, and a nervous system that couldn't seem to relax, even when the danger was long gone.
What neuroscience shows us, and what somatic practitioners have known for decades, is that trauma doesn't live in the stories we tell about what happened, it gets stuck in the body's response to what happened. When we experience something overwhelming, the nervous system prepares for survival, flooding the body with stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, accelerating the heart rate, tensing the muscles, preparing for immediate survival. This mobilisation prepares the body to fight, flee, freeze, or fawn, our ancient and intelligent responses that were designed for short-term threats, but become a problem when they are chronically activated, repeated, or never fully resolved.
When our survival response is interrupted, incomplete, or chronically repeated, our body can get stuck in that state, literally locked into patterns of fight, flight, freeze or fawn long after the original threat has passed. Our muscles hold it, our breath holds it. Our posture, our belly, our heartrate, all of it carries the imprint of experiences our conscious mind may barely remember, or may have processed cognitively years ago. We might think that we understand our trauma completely because we can tell the story, we understand it intellectually, but we still feel anxious, afraid and jumpy. The cognitive understanding didn’t reach our body, because our body speaks a different language. Somatic therapy works in that language, meeting the nervous system where it actually lives, rather than where we wish it did.
Modern day pioneers like Bessel van der Kolk, who brought the phrase ‘the body keeps the score’ into the culture, Stephen Porges' Polyvagal Theory and Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing, have given the field a rigorous scientific basis and language.
Somatic therapy gently invites the body to release what it has been holding, creating the conditions for the nervous system to soften, settle, and find its way back to a felt sense of safety and ease.
What happens in an Embodied Processing session?
Sessions begin with a gentle check-in, we talk, take a moment to arrive and be heard. You can bring whatever is present into the space. One important feature of any trauma informed work is that this space is for you. You set the pace. Nothing you bring is wrong, nothing you feel is incorrect, and nothing is ever pushed or rushed. You are always the one making choices about what to explore, what to stay with, and what to set aside for another time. Everything is welcome here.
Then we move into grounding and a mindfulness-based body scan, settling the nervous system and building a felt sense of resourcing before any deeper work begins. This supports your ability to stay safe and grounded, and have a place to return to if you start to feel over activated.
The heart of the session involves turning attention inward to bring curiosity to something we have chosen as a starting place, or just noticing sensation in the body in this present moment, what is arising and allowing it to be met rather than managed. Using techniques like pendulation, titration, questioning, distancing and merging, we work gently with what comes up, moving towards and away from activation in a way that keeps you within your window of tolerance. Breath and movement are invited in as tools for exploration as a natural way of following what the body is already trying to do. Rather than pushing through or re-telling the story, the invitation is simply to notice, stay curious, and allow sensation to move and shift in its own time. Embodied Processing is a gentle, safe, integrative somatic practice.
Integration is experienced differently in every session, or series of sessions. It might involve progression of visualisation or sensation, gentle reframing, words or memories that surface and want to be acknowledged. There is no fixed path, the session follows you, not a script. Integration often happens in an organic way, in it’s own time.
We close by returning to resource, a final body scan and breath, a settling, a moment to consolidate what has arisen, and a gentle acknowledgement of any moments of insight or shifts that emerged along the way. The intention is always to close feeling grounded rather than exposed. By gently tracking sensation, building regulation, and allowing the body's own intelligence to lead the process, EP works to create the conditions in which change becomes possible.
The healing hangover; after a somatic session, it's not uncommon to feel tired, tender, or a little spaced out in the hours that follow, or sometimes the next day. This is a normal and often positive sign that the nervous system has been engaged in real work, and it may need a little time to rest and integrate.
Be gentle with yourself after a session. If possible, avoid scheduling session on a busy day. Drink water, rest if you need to, and allow whatever arises to move through in its own time.