Integrative Somatic Approach to Anxiety Care
Anxiety is not just a mental or emotional challenge — it arises from a dynamic interplay between your body, mind, relationships, lived experiences and environment. At Integara Therapy, I offer a comprehensive approach to anxiety relief through integrative somatic therapy, combining body-based practices, somatic cognitive-behavioral strategies, inner child healing, and daily wellness and healthy routines. The combination of these evidence-based methods addresses anxiety at its roots and holistically, and offers flexibility and adaptability — meaning I’ll be able to meet you where you are at, and bring in tools helpful to you at any given point of your journey.
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Understanding and embodiment are not opposites — they’re complementary forces in transformation. While cognitive exploration helps us make meaning of our experiences and explore new ways of thinking, somatic work addresses the "stuckness" that lingers beneath words. An integrative, mindbody approach helps to transform anxiety from a controlling force into a manageable sensation you can hold, understand, and release. The approach focuses on feeling, embodiment, and integration of insights and wisdom; time and space of realisations and understandings to digest and to be experienced. We hold space for your body and nervous system to be tended to, and all parts of you to be met with compassion.​​​​​​​​​
The Role of Somatic Practices in Anxiety Care
​​Traditional therapies often focus on thinking patterns, emotions and behaviours. While talk therapies and CBT are valuable, they may fall short in anxiety care. Talk therapies rely on insight, but insight alone struggles to calm and reshape a nervous system that reacts to threats faster than the mind can process them. Understanding, analysing and making meaning of our experiences offer valuable insight however can keep us at arm's length from our challenges. The vagus nerve plays a key role in calming the body and mind, and 80% of the vagus nerve fibers send signals from the body to the brain — which highlights the importance of working with the body. Anxiety is a manifestation of lived experiences stored in the body’s sensations, reflexes, and survival responses, all of which affect the way you think, feel, and experience others and the world around you.The body is a record keeper of the past, and a gateway for shaping the present moment and the future. The capacity of your nervous system to hold discomfort, joy, possibility, uncertainty and expansion, affects your ability to not only navigate anxiety and stress without overwhelm but life itself.
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Recurring stress and anxiety can lead to the brain misinterpreting bodily signals, and tolerance for stress and anxiety to adjust to a lower set point — meaning that bodily sensations and stress can trigger anxiety more easily, with less internal or external stressors. With practice and repetition, somatic therapy helps the brain to interpret bodily sensations more accurately, and readjust the set point of anxiety and overwhelm. Somatic therapy shifts the focus from managing or fixing symptoms to reconnecting with your body's innate ability to heal, change and rewire. It honours your body’s language of feelings, rhythms, and sensations — inviting compassionate curiosity toward what your nervous system has learned to protect you from. Instead of analysing anxiety from a distance, somatic work guides you to safely reconnect with your body, release stored stress, and restore its natural ability to return to ease, presence and connection to self and others.
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This isn’t about “fixing” you or silencing your body’s signals. It’s about rebuilding trust in your body’s resilience and listening to the wisdom it has to offer. By teaching your nervous system to recognise and return to safety, and hold discomfort, somatic practices create a foundation for sustainable change. They bridge the gap between insight and embodied transformation (the difference between knowing and being), ensuring shifts in perspective are grounded in lived experience. Without this integration, even the most transformative insights can feel fleeting, leaving the body’s survival loops unchanged.
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About Me
I am a Somatic Anxiety Therapist with a background in Occupational Therapy. Whilst working in healthcare, I found myself researching ways of helping both myself and others that go beyond symptom management and coping, and delivering true change. I am passionate about understanding the bigger picture and how the mind and the body work as a dynamic system; how anxiety is linked to digestive issues, what are the underlying causes of coexisting health complaints, and so on, instead of masking or managing symptoms in isolation. I believe root cause healing is key, and symptoms are not our enemy — the body and mind's adaptations to circumstances, and a way of communicating imbalances and needs for attention. Curiosity about root cause healing and the desire to help others led me on a path of learning about the nervous system. Understanding what is natural to us as humans is a big driver of my personal life and work, honouring both the universality in our experiences and the unique ways anxiety can impact my clients.
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My journey into this field is both professional and personal. I’ve navigated social anxiety, and general anxiety particularly during life transitions and high pressure seasons. It was somatic practices and compassionate inner work that helped me reconnect with feelings of ease, agency and joy. Approaching anxiety with curiosity and compassion enabled me to understand what anxiety was telling me, learn more about myself, and ultimately inspired me to make necessary changes for myself. This also led to a shift in my career toward helping others heal in a way that respects our evolutionary roots, nature, the profound connection between the body and the mind, and addresses nervous system stuck in survival patterns. This is why Integara Therapy exists today.
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A little bit about me outside work: I love spending time in nature and adore animals, dogs in particular. I prioritise mindful living, and in the power of noticing the beauty and joy in small and simple moments in life. My most important self-care practices are tuning in and cooperating with my nervous system (no surprises there) and a healthy lifestyle: exercising, eating nourishing food and prioritising rest and recovery, along with authentic and truthful self-expression. I have danced since the age of nine, and have bit of an artistic side to me — and I enjoy drawing and painting.
My Values
Compassion
Compassion is at the heart of my services. Your responses and symptoms make sense considering your circumstances and experiences. I will meet you where you are at, and hold space for your experiences.
Trust
My services are backed by research - and are trauma and polyvagal theory informed. Honesty, transparency and ongoing professional development are at the top of my priority list.
Integrative
As anxiety rarely has a single cause, and it is a full mind-body experience shaped by our context - integrative approach that incorporates multiple modalities (mind, body, environment, relational aspects) is essential for effectiveness of care. Integration also refers to using modalities that create embodied shifts, and allowing time and space for new wisdom to be incorporated into daily life intentionally.
Personalised
Research and evidence provide a framework, however the therapeutic journey is built around you, empowering you to take an active role in your therapy and enabling you to gain the maximum benefits from my service.
Nature Informed
Honouring what is natural to us as humans informs my practice cultivating compassion to our reactions and bringing effectiveness to care - and avoiding stigmatising and pathologising.
