Somatic Therapy for Trauma, Dissociation & Nervous System Regulation
Online body-led trauma-sensitive work
for those who feel too much, or not at all
To alchemise the stories of your past into
lived wisdom, felt sensation & embodied truth
You’ve carried your past like armour. Therapy may have helped you understand it.
But knowing isn’t the same as feeling. Healing begins in the body, when we learn to listen to sensation, instead of overriding it, disconnecting or becoming numb.
When we stay with what’s here, instead of pushing it away.
This is the work: not escaping your story, but transforming your relationship to it.
I work online with people around the world navigating major transitions — menopause, burnout, and the long echo of complex trauma — supporting nervous system regulation through trauma-sensitive yoga and somatic practice, and guiding them back to the wisdom of their own bodies.
Somatic Therapy Rebuilding Safety, Sensation and Self Trust
We all have a deep need to understand what hurt us.
But before we can tend to what’s wounded, we must first return to ourselves as a whole.
This work invites you to reconnect with your body as your guide—
To learn the rhythm of your nervous system.
To listen to the quiet, inner language beneath the noise.
To exist beyond the story of your trauma and into the truth of who you are now.
This is the essence of somatic therapy: a body-led approach to trauma healing, nervous system repair, and reclaiming your truth.
Hi, I’m Soraya
I’m Soraya —
For years, I could explain why I was the way I was, but knowing didn’t help me switch it off. I needed the how. That question — how do I stop living in constant override? — took me on a twelve year, body-led journey guided by lived experience, intuition, and many hours of trauma-informed and somatic study.
I’m Trauma Center–trained trauma-sensitive yoga practitioner specialising in somatic healing and nervous system regulation for women navigating menopause and the long echo of complex trauma. But work with all individuals and genders. I’ve been practising yoga for more than 35 years and facilitating for over 20.
I weave trauma-sensitive yoga, somatic practice, and nervous system work to create spaces where people can soften, rebuild internal safety, and return to themselves.
Our stories may be different. But I know this: trauma lives in the body — and so does the truth of who we are. Healing is not one-size-fits-all, and my role isn't to fix you. It's to walk beside you as you remember your own capacity for choice, clarity, and sovereignty.
This work may be right for you, if ……
You look calm on the outside—but inside, you feel numb, disconnected and like a stranger to yourself
You’ve done the therapy, read the books, can name your trauma—and still feel stuck
You live mostly in your head, rarely in your body
You crave feeling more—joy, anger, longing—but don’t know how touch it safely
You override your needs daily, and can’t remember the last time you truly rested or put yourself first
You ache for slowness, but you’re scared of what might rise if you stop moving.
You’re high-functioning, capable, praised for your strength—yet exhausted by holding it all together
You feel like you’re sleepwalking through life—and something in you is ready to wake up
You don’t just want healing—you want to live from your body, your truth, your sovereignty
If any of this speaks to you, this work can meet you — gently, truthfully, and at the pace your body allows.
A Threshold into Nervous System Healing
There isn’t one right doorway.
A threshold is simply a moment of pause — a place where something old no longer fits, and something new hasn’t fully formed yet.
How you begin depends on where you are, what you’re carrying, and what your body is ready for right now.
HELD — 1:1 Guidance
Before the practice. Before the healing. There has to be trust. A space where you don't have to explain yourself or hold it together.
HELD is my 1:1 offering. One person, one body, one story at a time — worked with gently, through trauma-sensitive yoga and somatic practice, at the pace your nervous system sets.
Not faster than feels safe. Not deeper than you're ready for.
Just you, met exactly where you are — guarded, restless, disconnected, or raw — moving toward yourself, one session at a time.
Each session is an invitation to:
Rebuild trust with your body as your guide
Learn what your nervous system needs rather than override it
Sit with sensation instead of escaping it
Discover what it feels like to be truly at home in yourself
Whether you're carrying complex trauma, crossing the threshold of menopause, or simply exhausted from never stopping — you don't have to find your way back alone.
Pivotal — 4-Week Self-Guided Somatic Journey, for Midlife Women
You've spent a lifetime being capable. Holding it together. Saying yes when you meant no. Feeling everything — or nothing at all.
And now menopause is turning up the volume on all of it.
Pivotal is a four-week, self-guided somatic journey for Gen X women who suspect there's more going on beneath the surface than hormones alone.
If you grew up learning to override your feelings, shrink your needs, and keep moving — your body has been keeping score. Menopause has a way of making that impossible to ignore any longer.
This isn't therapy. It's not yoga as you know it. It's something quieter and more honest than either.
No analysing. No performing. No keeping up. Just you, your body, and four weeks of learning to listen differently.
We move through four layers of the work:
Earth — Grounding learning what it feels like to be steadied, maybe for the first time
Water — Emotional Reconnection discovering what emotions actually feel like in the body, rather than in the head
Fire — Power of Choice noticing where you've been saying yes out of habit, fear, or exhaustion — and finding your no
Air — Embodied Sovereignty what it means to take up space, use your voice, and belong to yourself
Pivotal won't transform you in four weeks. But it will show you what's possible when you stop abandoning yourself.
A small step. With real weight behind it.
Alchemy — 6 Month Online Menopause & Somatic Healing Journey
For those who've had a taste of this work — and know they're ready to go deeper.
Then immediately after, something like:
Pivotal showed you what was possible. It gave you a felt sense of the work — a first breath, a loosening, a glimpse of what life might feel like when you stop abandoning yourself.
Alchemy is what comes next.
Where Pivotal is a gentle introduction — four weeks, self-guided, your own pace — Alchemy is a six-month immersion. Longer, slower, held within a small circle of women. This is where the deeper layers get to surface. Where the patterns that formed in childhood, not just menopause, begin to shift. Where you stop visiting this work and start living it.
If Pivotal was the door — Alchemy is walking through it.
Raw & Real Retreats Nature-based retreats in wild places
For anyone ready to stop performing and start living
No spa. No itinerary packed with Instagram moments. No pressure to arrive already healed.
Raw & Real retreats are something rarer than that.
Intimate gatherings in genuinely wild corners of the UK and Europe — places where nature does what no workshop can. Where mountains, rivers, forests and fire remind you, without a single word, what it means to be a body alive on this earth.
These retreats are open to everyone. All ages, all genders, all starting points. The only requirement is a willingness to show up honestly.
What you'll find here:
Not a programme designed to keep you busy — but a rhythm designed to slow you down. Days woven from simplicity and real community living. Cooking together. Sitting in silence. Gathering around a fire at night.
And within that simplicity, the work:
Yoga and somatic practice that meets the body where it is. Self-development processes that invite you beneath the surface story. Journaling, meditation, talking circles, sound baths, embodied art and dance — not as entertainment, but as doorways. Yogic philosophy not as lecture, but woven into the way we move through each day.
Shadow work that doesn't frighten — it illuminates. Stillness that doesn't feel empty — it feels like arrival.
What makes these retreats different:
The locations are not a backdrop. They're part of the work. There's something that happens when you step out of ordinary life and into genuinely wild terrain — the land strips away what the mind holds onto. The mountain doesn't care about your productivity, your roles, your performance. It just is. And in that witnessing, something in you begins to remember.
This is not escape. This is return.
A return to your body, your voice, your own particular truth. Discovered not in isolation — but in the company of others doing the same brave thing.
Raw. Unpolished. Real.
What others have experienced
Trauma-Sensitive Yoga
Healing Complex Trauma through your Body
Trauma-Sensitive Yoga is grounded in trauma theory, attachment theory, neuroscience, and traditional Hatha Yoga.
It is used as an adjunctive approach for complex trauma (C-PTSD) and treatment-resistant post-traumatic stress (PTSD), supporting nervous system regulation, safety, and choice.
You don’t need to be flexible, spiritual, or experienced in yoga. This work meets you where you are, and moves at the pace your body allows.
@sorayayoga
connect with me on INSTA
I share fragments of daily life, reflections from practice, and moments from the path — often imperfect, always real.
If you want to see how this work lives and breathes day to day, you’ll find me there.
Notes from the Path
Reflections on trauma, embodiment and the quiet work of becoming
More reflections are shared on Substack
