Beyond Knowing: The Journey from Mental Analysis to Somatic Integration
Sometimes we try so hard to understand ourselves and our experiences, we often rely heavily on our mind and it’s cognitive abilities to analyze, categorize, and create narratives that help us make sense of our world. The mind, with all its intelligence, craves knowledge. It seeks to organize information into files and folders, believing that if it can just understand enough, it can keep us safe. This process of knowing becomes a comfort zone, a familiar territory where we feel secure in our ability to comprehend and control.
“If the information you consume doesn’t serve to make you feel more whole and live with integrity odds are it’s truly not serving you” - Xavier Dagba
The Mind's Comfortable Hiding Place
The human mind operates in fundamental + binary ways when it comes to our emotional well-being. It is constantly assessing situations: Is this situation safe or unsafe? Does this information confirm my existing beliefs or threaten them? Can I understand this experience or not? This binary thinking creates a bit of rigidness in us—that if we can just properly categorize, intellectualize and explain our pain, we will somehow fix or transcend our pain.
What emerges from this process is a set of stories and identities built around our wounds. These identities aren't false—they acknowledge real experience and they can become comfortable hiding places. A place we go to for safety. We know how to exist within these narratives. We understand the rules and expectations. We know who we are within them, even if that knowing keeps us confined or stuck to patterns that no longer serve us.
Sometimes this looks like the: Intellectualizing of or feelings-. Psychology Today defines as “a defense mechanism in which people reason about a problem to avoid uncomfortable or distressing emotions”. Intellectualizing is a way for our brains to get us through something that may have been really hard to process. Some of us may even use it to dissociate. While it is useful we want to be careful for it to not always be our go to, as a way of avoidance.
If you are reading this now and resonate with this, an invitation for you below.
Feel your feet on the ground, noticing what they are touching and how you are being supported by the ground beneath you.
Take your hands and rub them together to create some warmth,
Slowing down the hands as you rub them together noticing the change in temperature, or even places on your hands where there is a slight rise
Placing a hand on your heart space or chest and with another
Invitation if you want, say these words “I am allowed to feel my feelings, or you could say “I am here, this is me”.
Check out what you notice, again allowing for whatever is here to be here without having to know everything about it.
When Knowing Becomes an Obstacle:
The mind's attachment to knowing creates an unexpected paradox. In its quest to protect us through understanding, it can actually prevent genuine, sustainable healing from taking place. When we rationalize our emotions and experiences too quickly, we often bypass the actual felt sense of them. We trade the messy, non-linear process of true integration for the more comfortable territory of intellectual understanding.
This is where many traditional approaches to healing fall short. Talk therapy, self-help books, and intellectual analysis certainly have their place, but they primarily engage the analytical mind, the logical part of the brain—that may be keeping us stuck. They reinforce the belief that if we can just understand our pain thoroughly enough, we will overcome it. Yet many find themselves in the frustrating position of knowing exactly why they behave as they do while feeling powerless to change these patterns. You are hear reading this because you may have found yourself reaching a plateau with top down approaches, that work primarily with the cognitive mind. Maybe you can see this pattern loop of the brain and maybe even noticing the approaches to be re-traumatizing. Whatever the reason there is another way.
Somatic Healing: Creating Another Way
Somatic healing approaches our wounds from an entirely different angle. Rather than beginning with the mind's need to know, it starts with the body's capacity to feel and be with. It acknowledges that much of our pain, trauma, and limiting beliefs aren't stored in our conscious thoughts but in our physical bodies—in tension patterns, posture, breath, and nervous system regulation.
By working directly with these bodily experiences, somatic healing creates another way forward. Working with body allows for us to access deeper levels of transformation. This approach doesn't reject cognitive understanding but recognizes that healing often needs to bring the body along—making space for the wisdom that the body holds.
Somatic practices help us to strengthen and build our capacity for true integration. They allow us to witness the uncomfortable sensations that arise when we confront our pain directly rather than through the buffer of intellectual analysis. Through this process, we expand and widen our capacity —our ability to remain present with difficult emotions without becoming overwhelmed or shut down. Allowing for the nervous system to have the coherence it needs.
“The opposite of trauma isn’t being healed, it is aliveness” -Sonia Maria Gomes
From Survival to Aliveness
When we live primarily from the mind's need to know and control, we exist in survival mode. We navigate the world through careful analysis and risk assessment. We maintain vigilance against potential threats to our physical and emotional safety. This survival orientation certainly serves important functions, but it's a limited way of being in the world. It doesn’t allow us to live in alignment with our true selves. The core of who we are.
Somatic healing opens pathways to something beyond mere survival—what might be called aliveness. Aliveness is the capacity to experience the full range of human emotion without being overcome by it. It's the ability to remain open or as the girls say “in flow” to new experiences rather than filtering everything through existing narratives. It's the freedom to respond creatively to the present moment rather than reacting from old patterns.
This shift from survival to aliveness doesn't happen through cognitive effort alone. It emerges as we develop the capacity to hold not only our pain but also the healing that comes from being aligned with our deepest selves. It restores hope by reconnecting us with possibilities that our analytical minds couldn't envision. It’s expansive, it’s neuroplasticity, stretching out further than you could even imagine. This system of yours is VAST.
The Surrender to Wholeness
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of this journey is the surrender it requires. Not a surrender to hopelessness or resignation, but a loosening the grip of the mind's attachment to controlling the healing process through knowledge alone. It's an acknowledgment that some forms of healing happen beyond the limitations of our conscious understanding.
“My body is the language”-Michelle Kemp-in this journey of coming home to myself-
This surrender isn't about abandoning rational thought. It's about recognizing its limitations and allowing other forms of intelligence to guide us. It's about trusting that the body has its own wisdom and timing, its own way of moving toward wholeness that doesn't always match the mind's timeline or preferences.
Embracing Integration
The ultimate goal isn't to replace mental understanding with bodily awareness but to integrate them. True healing happens when the insights of the mind are embodied—felt and known in the tissues of the body—and when the wisdom of the body is acknowledged and honored by the mind. This integration creates a wholeness greater than either aspect could achieve alone.
As Prentice Hemphill shared in this clip and from their book, Somatic healing helps us envision again—not just intellectually, but with our whole being. It restores hope not as a concept but as a felt experience. It opens us to possibilities that exist beyond our experiences and the stories that the mind likes to tell. It invites us up to discover that we are not merely our pain or our past, but something far more expansive and alive.
You are made of stars. Quite literally your bones are made up of the same material as stars. Vast you are. V A S T as the ocean, vast as the sky.
Focalizing: Accessing Ancient Wisdom for Modern Healing
Among the powerful somatic approaches available today, I am certified in a modality called Focalizing. Focalizing stands as a transformative technology that truly "transcends talk therapy" and "goes beyond our past stories." This modality recognizes a fundamental truth about human healing: for those suffering from anxiety, trauma, or other barriers to joy, simply retelling painful narratives often provides only momentary relief—and for some, the idea of revisiting traumatic experiences is too overwhelming to contemplate. I also love how gentle this modality has been to me and those that I support.
Focalizing is trauma-informed and founded on the understanding that deep, meaningful healing rarely emerges from re-living stories or intellectually brainstorming solutions to complex emotional issues. Instead, it comes from accessing the oldest part of our brain and body—wisdom centers many have lost touch with in our cognitively-dominated world. The pre-frontal cortex, while brilliant at analysis and planning, is simply not well-equipped for the kind of healing many of us are seeking.
In this journey from knowing to embodying, from analysis to integration, from survival to aliveness, Focalizing offers a direct route to the freedom and hope we've been seeking all along.
It’s inside of you, and I understand that sometimes we need some guidance in excavating the gems inside of us.
If you are curious about Somatic Healing, have found yourself at a plateau on your healing journey an invitation to schedule a chat with me here. A complimentary session to see if this is right for you.
At the beginning of this essay I shared a short practice, if you would like to try this practice out on your own I have a free download linked here. You will be directed to the download that also includes a short 2 min video tutorial.
Lastly if you are want to learn more about focalizing, I have a free guide that goes a little more in depth into some of the neuroscience and what a session can look like.
Take care,
Michelle (she/her)- Creative, Space holder, Space Curator, Partner, Mother, Neurodivergent Being