The Embodied Approach: Understanding Somatic Sexology with Taylor Neal
By Taylor Neal
As a somatic practitioner, the most common (and most obvious) question I get is “What the heck is somatics?”
The assumption before we chat about it is often that it’s some sort of new-age-y alternative healing modality, and often folks look at it and say “that’s not for me” based on this impulse to lump somatic work in with the “woo-woo,” more spiritual modalities they associate with long wool capes, crystals, and tarot cards.
But the funny thing is that all people are already having somatic experiences all day long, they just don’t call them that. Getting a knot in your stomach before sending a vulnerable text, feeling your chest tighten during conflict, going blank during intimacy even though mentally you want to be present, automatically saying “yes” while your body feels exhausted or resistant. These are all body experiences, and somatic work is simply learning to notice them instead of overriding them.
The most interesting thing about this whole “woo-woo” thing to me, is that taking a somatic approach to any form of problem solving, inquiry, or healing, is actually the oldest, and most natural way we could possibly do things. It’s arguably the most practical, grounded, and biologically human approach we have.
And yet because our patriarchal, science-based modern world has hierarchized the mind so much over the body, where the body becomes this vapid thing that the mind drags around, we view any practice that intends to derive wisdom and guidance from the body as spiritual or “alt.”
The idea that our bodies carry wisdom is so foreign to the way our societies and systems are set up, so opposed to the structure of the work day, industry at large, productivity, efficiency, surviving the current economy, surviving the average day, that to take a moment to check in with how we’re feeling sounds like something only hippies can do.
So while it’s foreign or uncommon in our world to hold equal value to the experience of the body as we do the mind, it’s important to me to remind us that somatic work is actually what our human bodies are designed to do. There’s nothing woo-woo about it unless you consider the magic of the human body to be spiritual (and we could of course argue this point, but that’s another article).
Somatic work is simply deeply human.
This is also why somatic work has become such an important foundation within the realms of intimacy, relationships, and sexuality.
So many people move through sex, dating, relationships, and touch, from the neck up: analyzing, performing, overthinking, people-pleasing, dissociating, or trying to logically reason their way into feeling safe, connected, or desirous.
And often, the body is having a completely different experience underneath that.
This is where somatic sexology and sexological bodywork come in. These approaches apply somatic principles specifically to intimacy, relationships, sexuality, pleasure, boundaries, and embodiment. Rather than focusing only on thoughts, communication strategies, or sexual “performance,” they help people begin understanding how their nervous system and body are participating in experiences of connection, vulnerability, touch, desire, arousal, shutdown, consent, and pleasure.
For some people this looks like realising they’ve spent years disconnected from sensation during intimacy. For others it looks like noticing anxiety the moment they receive touch, struggling to identify boundaries in real time, or recognising they’ve learned to perform closeness rather than actually feel it.
At its core, somatic sexology is not about becoming a different person. It’s about becoming more connected to the person and body already here.
What is Somatics?
The word “somatic” simply means relating to the body, or of the body.
In therapeutic practice, a somatic approach recognises that our experiences are not only processed through thoughts and emotions, but are also felt and stored physically through sensation, posture, tension, breath, and nervous system responses.
We are not a mind wearing a body around, we are a whole, integrated system.
Most of us in today’s day and age in the western world learn to move through the world disconnected from our bodies, where we’re overriding discomfort, suppressing emotion, or living primarily in our thoughts/heads. There are many reasons for this, and it’s not an accident.
Without spending this entire article on the historical and cultural context for our head-focused society, when we stop to consider why we are taught to relate to our bodies in this way, we can look at how our work days are set up, as Gabor Mate points out in The Myth of Normal (2021), how our school systems are set up, and how society at large operates, and we can see that actually very few things about how we live today are truly aligned with bodies.
Bodies have needs, bodies have functions, bodies do not operate in logic and reason, so for us to operate with the body in mind often directly opposes the demands of our world.
How many times have you had to pee but held it until you finished a task, a meeting? How many times have you felt sick or tired but dragged yourself to work or a function? How many times have you felt an emotion rising up and stuffed it down in order to get through the day?
We are masters at interrupting our body’s sequences, needs, and signals, most often out of necessity because they directly oppose the expectations upon us, but also because they’re simply inconvenient.
For us to live an embodied life requires disappointing the system meant to keep us locked in our head, efficient, productive, and without needs.
Somatic work invites a gentle, authentic reconnection with the body as a source of information, awareness, and self-understanding through practices that involve breath, movement, sound, touch, and placement of awareness, broadly.
By paying attention to physical sensations, emotional responses, felt experiences, and patterns of activation or shutdown (and everywhere in between) within the nervous system, somatic approaches can help people develop greater nervous system regulation, embodiment, emotional resilience, and connection to themselves and others.
Rather than trying to “fix” the body, somatic work focuses on building a more attuned and compassionate relationship with it.
The Science
Most people can resonate with the experience of feeling like your head and your body are at odds, whether it be the head opposing the heart, or noticing a gut feeling and rationalizing yourself out of it. The feeling like the emotional self is at odds with the logical/rational self makes complete sense when you look at how the human brain has developed over time.
The human brain developed in stages, to quote Ellen Heed Ph.D., it is somewhat like a ramshackle house.
The oldest part of the brain and first to develop in human evolution, is the brainstem, and we can think of this as the foundation of the house. It’s responsible for our survival functions (fight/flight/freeze, eat, sleep, reproduce, etc). This is often called the reptilian brain, because it’s the part of the brain we share with reptiles. The limbic system is next to evolve, and it’s much like the kitchen of the house, responsible for metabolism, memories, and producing chemical-emotional cues. This is what sometimes gets referred to as the emotional brain, or the mammalian brain. The prefrontal cortex then, is the newest part of our brains, and we might think of this as the executive office of the house. Its domain is long-term memories, meaning-making, logic and reason, forming opinions, and finding a sense of purpose.
When we look at the different parts of the brain through evolution, we can see how it’s quite easy for our survival instincts, our emotional self, and our logical self, to be at odds, because they’re simply disjointed systems evolutionarily. The body doesn’t speak in the logic and reason prioritised by the prefrontal cortex simply because language, logic and reason wasn’t around when the body was already surviving, feeling, and relating, so we learned to survive without it.
Language and logic comes last and separates us from other animal life, which is why it’s been so prioritized and venerated. But we’ve now swung the pendulum so far into the prefrontal cortex that we’ve forgotten we really are animals with bodies that feel, and emote, and are above all, hard-wired to keep us safe at all costs.
In somatic practice, it’s important to acknowledge that we do not hold the body’s experience above that of the mind. Rather, we remove the hierarchy altogether.
We do not look for the mind to cooperate whole-heartedly with the body, and we do not expect the body to communicate to us in the same way, or act exactly as the mind does (the mind simply does not feel). We horizontalize the two, body and mind, creating neural pathways that run between them, supporting integration between them in the words of Daniel Siegel, so the choices we make and how we live our lives feels more aligned. So both body and mind can get on board.
Top-Down vs Bottom-Up
To apply somatics in the therapeutic space, we look at experiences from both the top-down, and the bottom-up.
A top-down approach begins with the mind and moves down to application in the body. This includes thoughts, beliefs, meanings, and the ways we make sense of our experiences. From here, we explore how our interpretations of ourselves and the world can shape emotional responses and influence how we relate to our bodies and others. Working top-down can support insight, reflection, and awareness of patterns that may have developed over time.
A bottom-up approach begins with the body and moves upward to access the mind. Rather than starting with thinking, we pay attention to physical sensation, breath, posture, movement, and nervous system responses in the present moment. This can include noticing areas of tension, numbness, activation, or ease, and gently tracking how the body responds in different situations. Bottom-up work supports regulation and integration by allowing experience to be processed through the body rather than only through analysis.
In somatic work, these two pathways are not separate but complementary. By moving between top-down insight and bottom-up embodied awareness, we can begin to develop a more integrated understanding of ourselves. This integration supports greater self-awareness, emotional regulation, and the capacity to respond to life from a more grounded and connected place.
It is also very useful to have access to both skill sets/directions of working, because there are circumstances (such as trauma) when certain parts of the brain are shut off or inaccessible, and we need to find alternative pathways to bring the human back into the present moment.
The combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches in somatic practice, used in collaboration with the 5 embodiment tools (breath, movement, sound, touch, placement of awareness) and curiosity toward the mental processes, creates a holistic somatic approach with the intention of holding the whole human through whatever they’re experiencing, to move toward their goals.
What is Somatic Sexology?
Building on this understanding of somatic work, somatic sexology applies this horizontalized, non-hierarchal, body-based approach to the realm of sexuality, intimacy, and relationships. Some of the reasons folks might access somatic sexology are:
Feeling disconnected from your body, pleasure, or desire
Sexual pain and sexual function concerns
Low desire, high desire, desire discrepancy in relationship
Processing sexual trauma
Anxiety, numbness, or dissociation around intimacy, pleasure, or touch
Difficulty with boundaries, needs, or communication
Repeating relationship or sexual patterns that feel stuck
Wanting deeper body connection, confidence, and embodiment
Healing shame, stress, trauma, or sexual conditioning
Somatic sexology recognises that our experiences of connection, desire, attraction, boundaries, and sexual expression are not only shaped by thoughts or beliefs, but are also deeply influenced by how safety, emotion, and sensation are held and processed within the body. With an embodied approach, we can learn to notice the signals the body is sending when we think about, talk about, and engage in pleasure, intimacy, and sex.
Somatic sexology explores how the nervous system can affect the way we relate to others and experience pleasure, desire, and sex, including how we experience closeness, vulnerability, trust, curiosity, and embodied consent. For some people, this may show up as disconnection from sensation, difficulty accessing desire, anxiety during intimacy, challenges with boundaries, or feeling overwhelmed in relational contexts.
Rather than focusing on performance or outcomes, this approach supports a slower, more attuned exploration of your embodied erotic experience. It creates space to understand and shift relational patterns from within the body, supporting greater safety, connection, and capacity for intimacy in ways that are grounded, consensual, and self-directed.
What is Sexological Bodywork?
Sexological bodywork is one of the ways somatic sexology can be practiced. It is a professional, consent-based, client-led modality that combines somatic education, body awareness, nervous system work, and experiential learning in the realm of intimacy, relationships, and sexuality with the embodiment tools (breath, movement, sound, touch, placement of awareness) with the possibility for consensual clothes on or off one-way-touch from the practitioner to the client, for the purpose of the client’s learning.
Unlike traditional talk therapy, sexological bodywork acknowledges that our bodies often hold patterns, responses, and protective strategies that cannot always be accessed through insight or conversation alone. Sometimes we can understand something logically, and still find that our body responds in a completely different way when intimacy, vulnerability, touch, or pleasure enters the picture.
Sexological bodywork works with this directly through embodied, bottom-up approaches that may include breath, movement, touch, body mapping, guided awareness practices, communication exercises, and nervous system regulation work, right in the sessions so the client gets the experiential learning within the session with the practitioner present, rather than trying to figure it out themselves at home after the session alone. The intention is not performance, achievement, or “fixing” sexuality, but rather supporting a safer, more connected relationship with your body, your boundaries, your pleasure, and your capacity for intimacy, and the practitioner is there to check-in, guide processes, offer experiential learning, and most importantly provide a safe container where shame, stigma, and inherited beliefs can melt away slowly as trust builds.
One of the most important things to understand about sexological bodywork is that it is always client-led, collaborative, and grounded in explicit consent. Nothing is ever done to someone. Instead, the work focuses on building awareness, choice, agency, and the ability to notice what is happening within the body in real time. You are not going to Sexological Bodywork to “receive a passive service,” such as a massage or a pedicure. Rather, you go to a Sexological Bodyworker to learn about your body. The goal of the practitioner will be to support the client’s learning about their own body, so they can leave the session feeling resourced to explore on their own.
For many people, sexological bodywork can offer an opportunity to slow down enough to actually hear the body’s experience around intimacy and sexuality, sometimes for the first time, in real time (while the experience is happening). And often, beneath the anxiety, shutdown, shame, or disconnection, there is not something “wrong” with the body at all, but rather a body that has been adapting intelligently to the experiences, conditioning, and environments it has moved through.
The Language of Your Body
One of the things I find most meaningful about somatic work is that it invites us into relationship with parts of ourselves we’ve often learned to override in order to function.
For many of us, especially in the realms of intimacy, relationships, and sexuality, disconnection from the body becomes so normalized that we stop recognizing it as disconnection at all. We think it’s normal to push past discomfort, disconnect from sensation, overthink during intimacy, suppress needs, freeze during conflict, people-please, struggle to access desire, or only realize how we actually felt about something hours later once we’re alone. I’ve been in many a work environment where it’s actually the butt of the joke to be overtired, underfed, and disconnected from our body needs. I don’t, and never have, found this funny so much as concerning that it’s a topic so many of us can laugh and bond over.
To be clear though, these responses don’t happen because we’re bad, or failing, or not doing “self care” right, or broken. Most often, they’re actually highly intelligent adaptations our body makes to survive, I always tell clients that their nervous system is actually genius when you think about it, it’s just not always aligned with our mind. When we disconnect, the body is learning how to protect us, maintain connection, stay safe, stay desirable, avoid rejection, avoid conflict, survive stress, or simply get through the day.
Somatic sexology and sexological bodywork create space to slow down enough to notice those patterns while they’re happening, not from a place of judgment, but from curiosity. To begin noticing the tension, the shutdown, the numbness, the holding, the longing, the pleasure, the fear, the boundaries, the breath, the places where the body says “yes,” “no,” “not yet,” or my favourite: “I’m not sure.”
Not because every sensation holds some grand spiritual truth or needs to be pathologized, but because the body is constantly participating in our experiences, and has feedback, whether we are listening to it or not.
And often, when people begin reconnecting with their embodied experience, what they discover is not that something is wrong with them, but that there has been an enormous amount happening underneath the surface all along.
If you’re curious about somatic sexology, embodiment work, or sexological bodywork, and want to explore whether this approach might support you, you can learn more and book an intro call with Good Vibes’ somatic sexologist Taylor Neal here.