10/23/2025
🌿FREEDOM FROM ANXIETY & what somatic healing has taught me 🌿
The other day, a woman approached me to ask if somatic therapy could help with her anxiety.
Her symptoms were mostly psychosomatic — intense sensations in her skin and a fear of bugs crawling all over her. After months of trying to find an external cause, she noticed a clear pattern: when her stress levels spiked, her symptoms intensified.
This is often how anxiety works. It manifests through the body, and we end up searching outside ourselves for a fix — trying to silence the symptom instead of tending to the root.
I remember when I was young, I struggled with chronic blushing. I even went to a hypnotherapist, hoping he could make it stop. But not once did anyone talk to me about anxiety, self-consciousness, or my nervous system. I was trying to make the symptom go away, without understanding the nervous system dysregulation underneath.
Years later, in adulthood, I struggled with insomnia and other psychosomatic symptoms. I fought my body, desperate to make the sleeplessness stop. Eventually, I began EMDR therapy — and what unfolded wasn’t just sleep restoration. It was grief work. The loss of my dad. The collective trauma of the pandemic. Years of pain from my inner critic.
The insomnia wasn’t the problem — it was the messenger.
Through somatic work, mindfulness, EFT/tapping, and daily adaptogen herbal support, I began to regulate my nervous system and tend to the roots. Healing came not from control, but from relationship — learning to listen, soften, and reconnect.
In my work with clients now, I see this pattern again and again. Beneath anxiety, grief, or stress are often tender parts of us that long for safety and understanding. When we meet those parts through the body, something profound happens — energy moves, symptoms ease, creativity returns, and people begin to feel alive again.
Somatic and mindfulness-based approaches help heal the underlying patterns — the anxiety, grief, and nervous system dysregulation — so you can live with more ease, experience secure and healthy relationships, and bring your creativity and purpose into the world.
If you’re ready to heal from anxiety, stress, grief, trauma, or insecure attachment — to reclaim your vitality, get unstuck, and come home to yourself — I offer virtual somatic therapy sessions and have a new offering on the horizon that I think you’ll love.
With warmth and care,
Leela
https://www.leelakelley.net/
