Claire Sankey - Mindfulness + Somatic Therapy, Hypnotherapy & Yoga

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Claire Sankey - Mindfulness + Somatic Therapy, Hypnotherapy & Yoga

Helping humans feel safe to (re)connect to your body and befriend your mind 💓

Trauma-informed Mindfulness, Somatics & Yoga practitioner, Anxiety Coach & Educator and your new heart-centered, mindful mentor. I have helped guide and nurture thousands of anxious souls and overthinkers on their journey to peace and greater wellbeing.

My multidiscipline approach combines the power of mindfulness with the wisdom of somatics, potent breathwork techniques, evidence based research and ancient practices of yoga into nurturing and engaging educational and experiential learning and healing experiences.

With my own long mental health recovery journey behind me, I've walked the walk before learning to talk the talk. My own struggles with a fifteen year long eating disorder and anxiety ultimately led me to discover the practices and techniques I am now teaching to you.

13/01/2026

Have you ever gone to a “healing” or “trauma release” experience…
and left feeling worse, not better? 💭

I keep hearing from people who went looking for healing and instead felt overwhelmed, frightened, or destabilised after a so-called “trauma release” 😔

I’ve had this experience myself - hyperventilating with 30 other folk in a transformational breathwork class in Bali. I felt paralyzed, disoriented and stunned at the end. I explained to the “teacher” and I was told it was normal and sent on my way…

It’s often the same dangerous cocktail:
* Big groups.
* Little preparation.
* No real nervous system education.
* And a message of “just let it all out” 💥

For a traumatised or sensitive nervous system, that can be far too much, far too fast.

A system shaped by threat doesn’t need:
• intensity
• pressure
• catharsis
• or being pushed in front of strangers

What it needs is safety 🌿

Those patterns you’ve been told you need to release aren’t the problem.
They’re protective responses and they can only soften when safety is felt 💛

Despite what we see online, healing isn’t dramatic.

It’s slow, steady, relational, and kind… often repetitive, sometimes mundane, boring even.

True healing just doesn’t make dramatic videos - you can’t really capture returning to yourself again and again, because each time you pick up your phone to video, or someone videos you - well, you’re no longer really with yourself.

If you’d like to learn more about a gentle, step-by-step somatic healing approach, comment SAFE and I’ll send you the details.

With love, Claire 🌿

24/12/2025

✨ Please share this for anyone who’s struggling this Christmas ✨

If Christmas is a bit sh*t for you, I hear you 🙋‍♀️ Having endured 16 or 17 Christmases with bulimia, I understand it is not always a wonderful time of year.

A typical Christmas in my 20s used to look like this:

I used to wake up (often still drunk from the night before) and run for 10kms to create a calorie deficit for the day. I would then spend the entire day jittery and anxious around so much food, with my thoughts dominated by calorie counting and how I would find a time to sneak off and throw up or what exercise I could fit in next. My already precarious mental health was shot because of my festive binge drinking and drug taking. I would be short tempered and snappy with my family because I was so wound up inside, relationships were fraught and there would often be arguments. I’d end the day feeling like a failure because I hadn’t been able to resist the food & alcohol I planned on denying myself, and would go to bed berating myself, planning my exercise and restriction for the next day… 🙅‍♀️

Christmas can be really sh*t for so many people, for so many reasons.

It will amplify whatever you’re struggling with because of the pressure to feel like you’re having a “wonderful time”, and because we’re out of our usual routine.

I hear you.

I got nothing to make it better just the love and empathy I’m sending from my heart.

Take a breath. Be kind to yourself.

It’ll be over soon.

Love, Claire 🌷

02/12/2025

🌟 Take what you need this December 🌟

This month can pull us in every direction: invitations, expectations, family dynamics, old patterns, and the steady noise of shoulds that grow louder as the year ends.

At the very time nature slows down and rests, we’re asked to speed up 🌿

Capitalism tells us we should: do more, buy more, be more.

If we can slow down to listen, our body’s (which let’s not forget are a part of nature 🌿) nay be whispering something entirely different: please, go gently. 🙏🏽

It’s ok to winter at your own pace ❄️
It’s ok to say no 🙅‍♀️
It’s ok to say yes, too - to the things that truly nourish you 🫂

Let December be a month where you honour the tempo that supports *your* regulation, *your* energy, and *your* wellbeing.

Which one are you taking with you into December? 👆🏼

With love, Claire 🌷

18/11/2025

Maybe it’s time we stop calling these disorders, and start seeing them for what they truly are: the body’s intelligent, adaptive responses to environments that weren’t safe 🙏🏽

So many of the things we pathologise; anxiety, depression, eating disorders, dissociation, even “personality disorders” — are survival patterns 🌀

Having been labelled with a few of these myself this is something I feel really passionate about 🙏🏽🌷

After decades of misery, it wasn’t until a psychiatrist took my childhood history & told (a rather dismissive/ “I had a good childhood you know”) me:
“I think these events are more important than you might think they are” that I started to realise how I had adapted to survive and feel safe too 🦸‍♀️

This opened the door for me to explore trauma & nervous system work 🍃

Just like mine did, your nervous system shaped itself to protect you 🌿

When we understand this, shame begins to loosen. Compassion takes root 🌳

And healing becomes possible; not through fixing what’s “wrong,” but by creating the safety that was missing 💗

Sending love and compassion to all on the courageous healing journey ♥️

Love, Claire x🌷x

————-

23/07/2025

I’ve been feeling a lot of despair at the images and videos of the killings and starvation in Gaza…..

& some sort of shame about the way my body wants to shut it all down & scroll past. Not post. Not speak. What’s the point? What can I do?

This is the first post I’ve shared on the horror we are seeing in Gaza and I had to ask myself why? What am I afraid of? Is it judgment, or getting it wrong? Or that my voice won’t do enough or anything at all?

The images that make me feel sick, angry, heartbroken; they’re meant to evoke that.

My body is working exactly as it should by communicating this meaningful feelings to me. They are the body’s way of saying:

“Something is deeply, devastatingly wrong.”

We’ve got to listen to our bodies.
Dont look away.
Be MOVED by our feelings, not shut them down. Because it is when too many people shut down their feelings that atrocities are able to happen. We have anger, disgust and compassion for a reason; guides sent to us from millions of years of evolution and ancestors.

Whether you’re another therapist, yoga teacher, a client or a friend, I hope this might encourage you to listen to and allow your anger at what Israel is doing, and to our complacent governments, and let your feelings move you towards doing something, anything 🙏🏽

With love, and anger,
Claire 🌷

⸻

01/07/2025

This is something I see so often “nervous system reset”…🤨

The truth is there is no such thing as a reset, and if you’re chasing after this then you might be doing more harm than good… 😢

I know I did during my recovery process; I was always on the look out for the next thing that promised to wipe my slate clean & reset my nervous system back to a calm state. The truth is; my nervous system was never just a calm state…it was never meant to be, and neither is yours.

We are designed to adapt and use survival states when our nervous system feels unsafe - that does not need resetting! It’s not a malfunction - it’s an intelligent adaptation.

You don’t need resetting…

Can we stop saying this now please? 🙏🏽

As always, with love 💓

Claire x🌷x

—————

20/06/2025

Your body is a home and every emotion is a room inside it 🏡
⠀
Joy might dance in the kitchen. Love rests in the bedroom. Curiosity looks out from the windows.
⠀
But in the basement? Grief. Shame. Fear.
The rooms we may have locked up long ago, & pretend aren’t even there…
⠀
But when we stop going to a certain room, when trauma teaches us to avoid or exile parts of ourselves, we don’t just shut the door on pain, we shut the door on living in the whole house…wholeness, to being fully alive and experiencing the fullness of ourselves.

It’s much harder to freely dance in the kitchen when you get a sense there is something dark and dangerous lingering beneath you in the basement…
⠀
The home of the body longs to be lived in, fully.
Not just the light and comfy corners, but the forgotten spaces too. Healing doesn’t mean forcing yourself to love every room but slowly and gently turning the handle on a door you were once too afraid to open and letting your nervous system know: “It’s safe now. We’re home. We can feel this.”

& the more we open those doors, the bigger our space becomes, and the more the house becomes a place where all of you belongs….& all of you can dance in the kitchen 💃🏼

With love, Claire 🌷 x

___________

17/06/2025

⭐️Save this one for later ⭐️

It has one of those nuggets in it that everyone I’ve shared it with has written down or asked “can you WhatsApp that to me” ⚡️✨

(I’m talking about the “how to discern a trauma response” question on slide number 8 ☺️)

It’s a question that can transport us out of a trauma response back into the here and now ⏰
It can shift us away from thinking we’re unsafe back into safety 🤗
& it can reconnect us after disconnection 🥰

It will help you to work out if this anxiety/anger/shut down is a trauma response..?! Or if it is simply a response?!

If you’ve lost trust with your body and lost touch with your intuition this can feel really confusing. I know I’ve sat with anxiety freaking out about whether this was something I should act on or not - my body is telling me to run - should I run? 🏃‍♀️Or is running just re-enacting out past trauma?

This is a roadblock I think we all come up against at some point in the healing journey
& when you get skilled in finding the answer to this question for yourself, you are well on the way to healing 🙏🏽

Spoiler: I didn’t run.

So I hope this is as useful for you as it was for me, and is for my clients.

Let me know in the comments, and don’t forget to get out your journal and write this down, save this post, or screen shot it into your phone or notes - etch this in your memory because this discernment question will change everything 🤗🙌🏼

With love, Claire 🌷 x

___________

09/04/2025

On the healing journey, there will come a time when your body begins to speak…
�Not through words—but through tears, shaking, anger, grief.

These are not signs you’re breaking down…
�They’re signs your nervous system finally feels safe enough to let go 🍃

What was once too much, too soon, is now able to be felt—bit by bit.

In somatic therapy, when we work with nervous system regulation, the goal isn’t to stop anger, anxiety or emotion.
�It’s to grow trust, capacity, and safety—so that these feelings can move through us, rather than getting stuck inside 🌀

& when I say bit by bit, this is where regulation helps us feel the feels - so we can move in and out of the grief, anger, sadness in a titrated way, bit by bit, instead of being flooded.

Sending my love to anyone who’s feeling some big, raw, or messy feelings right now…♥️�
It means something in you feels safe enough to feel it now…
�That’s no small thing 🤗

Love, Claire 🌷x

___________

04/04/2025

There’s nothing mysterious about healing ❤️‍🩹

The clue to what we need to heal is always in what needs were not met for us back then:

•you didn’t feel safe
•you didn’t feel seen
•you didn’t feel heard
•you didn’t have a choice

You can start or continue right now by giving yourself what you didn’t get at trauma time.

When your symptoms arise try saying to yourself “I see you” “I’m listening” “What do you need from me?” ♥️

Healing is meeting yourself now how you weren’t met by then. Start with one little kind gesture, and then another…and another 🤗

Healing is possible - you’ve got this 🌟

Love, Claire 🌷

__________

28/03/2025

🌟Do you know your window of tolerance? 🌟

Your window of tolerance (a model for understanding nervous system arousal) is adaptable. 🪟

People who experience C-PTSD, anxiety, dissociation, depression, chronic stress may have a narrower window of tolerance - but that is not your fault! Your window has narrowed as your nervous system has adapted to protect you. 💪🏼 🦸

Healing is widening your window! 👐🏼

Your nervous system is flexible. 🍃

Just as if adapted to stress, it can adapt to safety 🤗

Healing is possible ✨

You can widen your window of tolerance, build resilience, and navigate life with greater ease 🤗💕

Please share this post so other folk can feel the hope of available healing, and learn about widening our window of tolerance 🙏🏽

with love, Claire 🌷

—————

04/03/2025

Your nervous system has a secret... 🤫
It sees things you don’t see. 👁️
It’s making decisions for you before you even realise ⚡️
It’s your in-built guardian angel 😇

N e u r o c e p t i o n
is one of the incredible processes carried out by your autonomous nervous system to keep you safe 🙏🏽

How does it feel to learn your body is doing this for you all the time?? Thank you body 🥲🥹

👉🏼 You’re invited to join my Nervous System Nourishment monthly workshop where we learn about cool stuff like this 🤓, practice techniques to activate and tone our vagus nerve, hone our neuroception, and nourish our nervous system for connection resilience.

👉🏼 The next session is on 18th March. Info and tickets here: https://www.clairesankey.com/nervous-system-workshop

Please share this post so other folk can learn about our in-built guardian angel too 🙏🏽

with love, Claire 🌷

—————

Address

Salisbury

Telephone

+447791459695

Website

http://www.clairesankey.com/

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