What somatics actually is — and why it matters for active women

Somatics is a word that appears increasingly in wellness and coaching spaces, often without much precision about what it actually means. Korina Tsipoura, a somatic and energy coach who works under the name Amorphous Being, offers a definition that I find both useful and grounding: somatics is the technology already built into the body for communicating, storing, and releasing. It is not something applied from the outside. It is something the body already knows how to do, once given the conditions.

Korina came to this work through her own body. She was a dancer who was told by multiple practitioners that her severe lordosis was permanent, that it would limit what she could do, that she would simply have to manage. She was diagnosed with psoriasis, an autoimmune condition, and told the same. She did not accept either conclusion. She spent years becoming her own case study — learning her body anatomically, tracking its patterns, understanding the relationship between what she was holding emotionally and what was expressing itself physically. And both conditions resolved. Not through a protocol, but through sustained attention to what the body was actually communicating.

That experience is the foundation of her coaching practice. And the insight at its centre — that the body stores what has not been processed, and that it can release it when given the right conditions — is directly relevant to the kind of women I work with.

What somatic work actually involves

Somatics is not a single modality. It encompasses breathwork, movement, nervous system regulation, energy work, and somatic experiencing — all of which are routes into the same territory: the body as the location where emotional and physiological patterns are held and expressed.

Korina distinguishes this clearly from purely cognitive approaches. Therapy, she notes, can do a great deal. But the body does not respond to insight alone. You can understand, intellectually, that you are chronically stressed — and the jaw will continue to clench, the breath will continue to be held high in the chest, the gut will continue to contract at specific triggers. The understanding lives in the mind. The pattern lives in the tissue.

Somatic work intervenes at the level of the pattern. Not by forcing a different response, but by first bringing awareness to what the body is actually doing — automatically, without conscious direction — and then gradually expanding its capacity to tolerate and process what it has been bracing against.

Why high-performing women often need this most

The pattern Korina identifies in high-performing, highly active women is specific. She describes it in terms of energetic balance — a body that has been living predominantly in what she calls masculine energy. Not a value judgement. A description of a state: forward-driving, output-oriented, action-focused. The energy that executes, achieves, delivers.

This is not a problem. It is an asset. The women who can sustain extraordinary output across multiple domains — career, family, physical training, creative work — are not broken. They are gifted with a capacity for drive that most people do not have.

The problem is the absence of the counterbalance. The receptive, intuitive, restorative quality that allows the system to actually process and recover rather than simply accumulate and push through. When the system runs only in one direction for long enough, the cost accumulates in ways that are quiet at first and loud later. Burnout. Chronic tension. A sense of disconnection from the body that is doing all this work. The inability to slow down even when the need to is obvious.

Korina's observation about how people walk captures this physically. The head pitched forward, the body falling in the direction of travel and catching itself — that is a posture of perpetual forward momentum without arrival. The simple practice of leaning back, settling into the body, and letting the feet lead is both a physical correction and, she suggests, a metaphor for a different way of moving through life.

The 24-hour audit and the nervous system pattern

Korina's first step with any new client is awareness, before any intervention. She gives them what she calls a 24-hour audit: a day of tracking what triggers arise, what the body does in response, where the patterns are. The anger that comes up in specific situations. The contraction that happens before a particular kind of interaction. The shutdown that appears at the end of certain kinds of days.

The goal is not to judge the response. It is to identify the pattern — and to notice where it appears across different contexts. The same nervous system contraction that happens in a difficult work conversation will often show up in training, in relationships, in the moment before something demanding is asked of the body. Once the pattern is seen across contexts, it becomes possible to work with it at the level of the nervous system rather than trying to address each individual expression separately.

From there, the tools are introduced: breath awareness, movement, grounding practices, energy work. The specific tools are less important than the underlying objective, which is to create more safety in the body — to expand what Korina calls the space between stimulus and response.

Three practices to begin

For women who want a starting point before any formal somatic work, Korina offers practices that are genuinely simple. The first is two minutes of breath awareness — not a breathing technique, but the bare act of placing hands on the belly and noticing the breath moving. Rise and fall. In and out. No modification required. The breath will slow and deepen on its own when conscious attention is brought to it, and the first time this is done after a period of shallow, chest-based breathing, there may be a small wave of anxiety or stuckness as the body encounters the unfamiliar depth. That is normal. It is the body adjusting.

The second is the walking practice she described. The next time you are walking somewhere, instead of leaning forward, settle back. Let the feet make contact with the ground and lead the movement. Carry the weight in the body rather than falling toward the destination. Walk from intention rather than momentum. This sounds almost trivially simple. Done consistently, it interrupts the automatic pattern of forward-falling that characterises most stressed, time-pressured movement.

The third is grounding — standing or sitting with feet on the ground, attention brought to the contact between foot and floor, breath sent down rather than up. Two to three minutes. Not to produce a dramatic shift, but to begin building the vocabulary of what it feels like when the nervous system is genuinely regulated rather than managed.

Korina's honest assessment is that these practices will not produce noticeable change in a single session. What they produce, over a week or a month of consistent practice, is a growing familiarity with what the body does — and the beginning of a different kind of self-knowledge. Not the knowledge of performance metrics or training loads, but the knowledge of what is actually happening underneath.

For active women who already have the discipline and the drive, the question is simply whether any of that drive is being pointed in this direction. The body has been doing everything that has been asked of it. The question is whether it is being listened to at all.

Korina is hosting a day retreat in London on 6th June — A Day of Embodiment: Summer Edition. A full day of finding flow, unlocking creativity, and tapping into full embodied expression. 11am to 5pm.

For enquiries contact hello@iamkorina.com

Coming Up | When Pain Speaks

On Thursday 21 May, I'm hosting When Pain Speaks — a clinical and somatic symposium at Beckenham Place Mansion, London (and online via Zoom).

Joined by a Pain Specialist Physiotherapist and a Yoga Therapist-Psychotherapist, we'll be exploring what pain is really trying to communicate — and what becomes possible when we finally listen.

7:00–8:30pm | In person or online | Recording included | Tickets £65

👉 Book your place here

Seema Chopra works with high-performing women to train intelligently, recover well, and sustain performance without burnout