Mari Joyce Somatic Therapies

04/04/2026

Catharsis is not the same as integration.

In shadow work and deep emotional–somatic practice, these two are often conflated. But something essential depends on our ability to tell them apart—not in theory, but in the fire of immediate experience: in the belly, the breath, the heart, the throat.

As the lost orphans of psyche and soma surge, they do not long simply to be released through spiritual or psychological practice. They yearn for relationship—for that mysterious third space where they can be known, felt, heard, and understood.

There is a growing emphasis on expression—on releasing, purging, acting out what has been repressed. And while expression has its place, something essential is being misunderstood. Because expression alone does not reorganize the psyche.

You can intensify an emotion. You can amplify it. You can even build an identity around it. None of that guarantees transformation.

In fact, without a holding environment—without the capacity to stay present in the body—these expressions can become patterned. Familiar. Even addictive. The system learns, “This is what we do with this energy.” But it does not learn anything new.

This is why catharsis, on its own, often leads to repetition—the same anger, the same shame, the same cycles, just enacted more consciously or more dramatically.

Integration asks something much more subtle. Not: how do I express this? But: can I stay with this?

Can I feel this in the body without collapsing into it? Can I remain in relationship with it, without needing to discharge it immediately?

Can I become curious about what it carries, rather than organizing around its intensity?

Because what we are meeting is not just emotion. We are meeting history—adaptations that formed in moments where there was not enough support, not enough safety, not enough attunement.

And these parts do not need to be performed. They need to be met. Gently. Slowly. Over time.

This is not as exciting. It does not lend itself to spectacle. But it is what allows something new to emerge.

Where there was compulsion, there is now space. Where there was reactivity, there is now choice. Where there was enactment, there is now relationship.

This is the slow alchemical work—not rehearsing the pattern more vividly, but gently, over time, becoming free of the need to repeat it.

19/01/2026

Recent musings on somatic therapy and trauma healing

At the heart of somatic therapy lies the intention to come home to ourselves in all of our aliveness. To establish pathways of connecting with our inner world and the many and rich inner landscapes of feeling, sensation, impulse and intuition, integrated with thought and cognition. When we find tool...

06/09/2023

Processing and integrating learnings from my recent Internal Family Systems training in Bristol. Excited to be able to integrate this powerful and deeply respectful modality into my practice 💗 Photos from the gardens at the beautiful Penny Brohn Centre.

“We are not one-dimensional, and our multiple dimensions are not static. Just as our bodies are made of many parts that form a dynamic, interwoven system that works together, so it is with our psyches. We are more awake, alive, and complex than we know."
Ralph De La Rosa, 'Don't Tell Me to Relax'.

20/08/2023

😻

31/05/2023

On welcoming all of our parts

When a power outage interrupts a bedtime routine, a young woman is confronted by the ghosts of her past, in Ida Melum’s animation “Night of the Living Dread....

01/01/2023

Embodiment is a capacity that supports a healthy relationship with our bodies.

01/09/2022

This is my home treatment room where I offer a range of trauma-informed somatic therapies, including internal family systems, somatic therapy, craniosacral therapy, and somatic movement. My intention is to create a warm, welcoming and safe space, in which my work with clients can gently unfold. I’m grateful for the wider holding of the trees and natural world outside, and the bird song which sometimes drifts in.

01/09/2022

“Being traumatized is not simply a problem of being stuck in the past; it is also a problem of not being fully present in the here and now.”

This is one of the reasons that working with the body is so essential. Learning to orient to present time awareness through embodied sensory information can support us to down-regulate states of nervous system activation and hyper vigilance, and learn to settle into states of safety, ease and connection. We do this by slowing down enough to notice what is actually occurring in the here and now. Such work is essentially relational, in that it required feeling safe enough with the person supporting and guiding us, and also involves developing a relationship to ourselves and our own body.

Peter Levine writes: “I have come to the conclusion that human beings are born with an innate capacity to triumph over trauma. I believe not only that trauma is curable, but that the healing process can be a catalyst for profound awakening—a portal opening to emotional and genuine spiritual transformation. I have little doubt that as individuals, families, communities, and even nations, we have the capacity to learn how to heal and prevent much of the damage done by trauma. In so doing, we will significantly increase our ability to achieve both our individual and collective dreams.”

In The Body Keeps The Score, Bessel van der Kolk summarized his four decades of experience studying the impact of trauma on the brain.

31/08/2022

I’m still digesting the very rich experiences of assisting Linda Hartley's authentic movement summer retreat. Grateful and full from these 5 days of witnessing and being part of the holding container, in which participants dropped into their moving, sensing, feeling bodies. Authentic movement is a contemplative movement practice, in which movers step into the circle, eyes closed, following arising impulses for spontaneous movement and gesture.

Mary Whitehouse, originator of this practice, described the practice with her words: “The open waiting, which is also a kind of listening to the body, an emptiness in which something can happen. You wait until you feel a change – the body sinks or begins to tip, the head slowly lowers or rolls to one side. As you feel it begin, you follow where it leads, like following a pathway that opens up before you as you step.”

Returning from this practice, I am struck by the layers of wisdom and support we can connect to, through this simple act of attending to our emerging experience with awareness and compassion. One breath at a time, one step at a time, we begin to unfold the depth and breadth of each arising moment. Through these acts of attention, we can experience ourselves as part of a collective body, connected through the simplicity and mystery of our shared experiences, which includes also the wider holding of the natural environment, in all of it's beauty and aliveness.

Andrea Olsen writes of this phenomena of our inherent connectivity in her text ‘Body & Earth: “We begin by listening to the earth, using the resources of the body. As we attend to underlying patterns, we recognise that body is part of earth - inseparable. Each individual is not alone but a participant in local and global bioregions, just as every cell is part of us.”

11/07/2022

07/07/2022

Join us for an introductory workshop on Aug 27th. Early Bird Discount available on bookings completed by 16th July.

Have a taster of the IBMT Approach for those interested in joining the Embodied Anatomy and Movement Re-patterning module this autumn.

Meet one of the teachers and learn how we work with movement, touch and exploration to support somatic movement practice.