Why Understanding Nervous System Regulation First and Somatic Release After
Written by Robyn Gie, Holistic Health Coach
Robyn Gie is a Holistic Health Coach, TRE® Provider, and founder of WHY Holistic Health, known for her intuitive, grounded, and spiritually informed approach. She helps clients reconnect with their “Why,” integrating movement, nutrition, and nervous system regulation to create lasting health.
I am going to start with a confession. Before I understood the language of the nervous system, before I knew what somatic meant, before I had any of the frameworks I now work with every day, I was a health and wellness professional whose body was quietly falling apart. My stomach was in a constant state of either cramping or bloating. I had a dull, distracting pain down the right side of my neck that I was always rubbing for relief. My right ear felt permanently blocked. I even woke up one morning with my neck in full spasm. That was a new level of pain for me.
I spent more money than I care to admit on Ear, Nose, and Throat specialists (ENTs), gastroenterologists, and panels of blood tests trying to find out why my iron was so low and why my body felt like it was wading through sinking sand.
Given the space to reflect on that year, in hindsight, it does go down as one of the hardest ones I've had, with a lot of change and not fully recognising at the time how many other people's emotions I was holding, as well as my own. My body was shouting in the only language it had, and the only way I knew how to answer it was to see another doctor, hoping that someone else could fix me quickly. (They couldn't.)
I'm a fiercely independent woman, not something I really want to be, but alas, I felt like a drain on my partner at the time, constantly complaining about my health because physically it was not something I could hide from him. Every day I walked into a gym and stood in front of clients as a role model for health and wellness, feeling like a fraud because I was living in a body clearly unhappy with the way I thought I was being healthy. Which sent me further into the hole I was already in.
The body led, the mind followed
I am a huge believer in Divine timing. I've lived it my whole life. This was the moment the grand, undeniable pivot happened.
It was the last day of that year. I was deep in meditation when an image from my childhood came into my mind. Then, without warning, my left hip began to tremor. I had never experienced that before, but I had heard about TRE® (Tension and Trauma Release Exercises) from a friend. So instead of resisting it, I just relaxed into the process and let it move.
It didn't go on for long. It's hard to gauge time when you're sitting in stillness. But sometime after, another image surfaced and another release happened in my hips. I sat with it until it slowed and eventually stopped. What followed was a peace I can't explain. Three days later, I signed up to learn more about TRE®.
The course opened the way most courses do, with a promise: "TRE® is going to change your life in ways you can't imagine. People have changed their jobs, moved countries, left relationships." I remember thinking, "Oh gosh! Please don't take away my relationship."
After the second TRE® session with my mentor, as I drove away, something happened that I had no framework for. My stomach turned, just one big, slow swell. With that, my digestion resolved.
Just like that. After months of specialist appointments and no answers, the shift, the real one, had begun. My health began to improve. My energy lifted. The blocked feeling in my ear eased, and the neck pain softened. Even my iron improved.
Ten months later, I lost the relationship anyway. I also left my job. I had flipped the page, and the new chapter had begun. What I finally understood, through my own body before my mind was ready to catch up, is that the body always knows. Long before the mind is ready to hear it.
Reconnecting to your body means building a relationship where the mind learns to listen, and the body learns it will be heard. Because when the mind begins to respond to what the body is communicating, not override it, not medicate it away, not drown it out, the body no longer needs to shout.
So, what is somatic, actually?
There is a lot of talk about the nervous system right now. Yet, when I mention the word somatic to most people, I’m met with a blank look, a polite nod, or a vague association with something spiritual or alternative. But before you assume that because this journey started while I was meditating, and given that I deliver this message presented as someone with dreadlocks, somatic work must be "woo woo," it isn't. It's biology.
The reason my body chose that particular moment, sitting in peace and quiet on the last day of a tumultuous year, is not because of anything mystical. It's because my nervous system had finally found enough stillness to feel safe. Safety is the only condition under which the body will let go of what it's been holding.
I want to invite you to pause for a moment. Scan your body. What do you notice? Tension in your jaw? Shoulders up near your ears? A tightness anywhere?
How often in your day do you allow yourself just one minute to check in with the vessel that carries you? For most of us, the honest answer is only when it's too late, when what we're feeling is already pain rather than the gentle nudge that came long before it.
That awareness, that moment of actually inhabiting your own body, is where somatic work begins. Somatic means "of the body."
It refers to what is happening in your body, as opposed to what is happening in your mind. Somatic work is body-led rather than mind-led. Bottom-up rather than top-down.
For decades, the dominant approach to mental health has been top-down, using the mind to change how we feel. Talk therapy. Cognitive restructuring. Identifying patterns and consciously choosing new ones. All are absolutely valuable and important, but for many people, not quite enough on their own.
"The body holds things the mind never processed" is not a metaphor. It's a physiological reality. When we experience stress, threat, or overwhelm, the nervous system responds. It prepares the body to fight, flee, or freeze. Hormones are released. Muscles brace. The breath changes. The heart rate shifts. We can feel it in the body.
When the threat passes, ideally, the body completes that response cycle and returns to baseline. You can see it clearly in animals in the wild. A zebra escapes a predator, releases the stress hormones through the tremor mechanism, and goes back to grazing. No anxiety. No depression. No autoimmune disease, because the cycle completes.
But often, for most of us humans, it doesn't. We don’t give ourselves the time or the space to downregulate. The stress response gets interrupted, suppressed, or overridden by circumstance, by survival, by the demand to keep going. When that happens, the body stores what it couldn't finish. Not in memory, not in narrative, but in the fascial tissue network. In tension that was never released. Sadly, in the nervous system itself, which continues to read that stored tension as a perceived threat. So, we get stuck in a loop until something interrupts it.
You don't need to know the story
This is one of the most important things I tell new clients. We don't always need to know what your body has experienced in order to work with what it's holding.
The body doesn't store trauma as a story, any more than it knows whether you're doing bicep curls in a gym or in front of the TV. It doesn't care about the context. It stores the pattern, a tension, a bracing, a way of holding itself that feels normal.
Which is why so many people carry symptoms they can't explain: pain without injury, fatigue without reason, anxiety without a clear source, digestive issues, hormonal disruption, immune dysfunction. The body finds increasingly urgent ways to say, "Something here needs attention."
Somatic work asks the body to complete what it started. To finish the response cycle that got interrupted. To release what was stored, not through talking about it, but through the body itself. It just needed the right conditions to let go.
Regulation before release
There is something that needs to be explained more clearly in the healing space because it really matters and it's often misunderstood: Somatic release does not come first.
Nervous system regulation does. A nervous system that is dysregulated, running on high alert, stuck in survival, braced for the next threat, is not a nervous system that can safely release. It is a system that is doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect you. You cannot ask a protective system to let go before it feels safe enough to do so.
This is why so many people try body-based practices and feel worse instead of better. It's not because the practice is wrong, but because the sequence was skipped.
Regulation first. Always.
Regulation means bringing the nervous system back within its window of tolerance, the zone where it feels safe enough to be present, to connect, and to process. This looks different for everyone. For some, it's breath or movement. For some, it's the simple, repeated experience of being in a safe environment with a regulated other person co-regulation – until the system begins to trust that it doesn't have to brace anymore.
Only from that place can release happen naturally. When it does, it can be far from dramatic. It can feel like a softening, a sigh, a yawn, or the shoulders dropping in a way they haven't in years.
In my practice, our sessions start with properly understanding the nervous system, learning what regulation actually feels like in the body, which for many people is an entirely new experience. We build safety slowly and deliberately. You can't rush this part. Only when the system is ready do we work with release. TRE®, the modality that changed my own life, is one of the primary tools in my practice. When what was stored begins to move, we gradually begin to work with capacity.
The ceiling nobody talks about
Regulation and release are not the end of the work. They are the beginning of a different kind of work. Once the old pattern begins to break, once the body starts to let go of what it's been holding, a new kind of resistance emerges. Because the nervous system doesn't just store what felt threatening. It stores what felt familiar. Familiar, as we've established, is what the nervous system reads as safe, even when familiar is painful.
So, when something genuinely new arrives – a relationship without the drama, a bank balance that exceeds what you grew up believing was possible, a version of yourself that is actually well and settled the nervous system doesn't always welcome it.
It hesitates. It self-sabotages. It finds its way back to what it knows.
The nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do: read the unfamiliar as unsafe and do everything in its power to return you to familiar ground.
Neuroplasticity, rewriting the script
The genuinely good news is that the nervous system is not fixed. Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to rewire itself based on new experience. New neural pathways form when we repeatedly live something different from what we have known and survive it. When we feel it in the body as safe. As real. As allowed.
This is not the same as positive thinking. It is not visualisation or affirmation. Which is why the work is not just about releasing the old. It is about building capacity for the new.
Capacity is the nervous system's ability to hold more, more safety, more connection, more abundance, and more aliveness, without contracting back to what it knew. Receiving is the somatic act of letting that new thing actually land, without deflecting the compliment, minimising the success, or finding a reason why the good thing won't last.
Staying in the body while something new arrives. Breathing through it. Letting it be real. That is the work after the work. It is, in my experience, the most profound part of all of it.
If this is new language for you
You are not behind. You are exactly where most people are. Somatic work is still finding its way into mainstream conversation, and even as the nervous system becomes a trending topic, the body-based work underneath it remains largely misunderstood.
If you are carrying something your mind has tried to make sense of and can't, if your body has been speaking in symptoms that nobody has been able to explain, this may be the missing piece.
Not because somatic work is magic. But because the nervous system wrote the code. The body has been trying to hand it to you ever since.
Read more from Robyn Gie
Robyn Gie, Holistic Health Coach
Robyn Gie is a Holistic Health Coach, TRE Provider, and Personal Trainer with over a decade of experience in movement, nervous system regulation, and nutrition guidance. She is the founder of WHY Holistic Health, a practice rooted in the belief that lasting change begins when people reconnect with their deeper why. With a background in the Film and Events industries, Robyn brings creativity and authentic storytelling into her coaching and writing. Her work integrates strength training, nervous system-informed movement, and practical nutrition support to help people build sustainable health and resilience. Through lived experience and embodied practice, she supports individuals in moving out of survival mode and back into connection with themselves.
