In wellness practices and healing journeys, people often forget the most important part: the journey. There’s this idea that if you heal “enough,” you’ll reach a point where nothing will bother you again-no more triggers, no more pain, no more discomfort. But that’s just not the reality. Healing isn’t about reaching some perfect endpoint; it’s about continually expanding your capacity to handle what life throws at you. As you move forward, new triggers might arise. Old wounds might resurface in ways you didn’t expect. And that’s not failure-that’s growth. You’re uncovering the ways your nervous system has been reacting all along, and somatic work helps you navigate those reactions with more resilience. Here’s something important to remember if you’re working with a practitioner or doing somatic practices on your own: The goal isn’t to erase emotions or “clear” your energy completely. The goal is to increase your capacity to fee/ those emotions and move through them without being consumed by them. Emotions are natural responses-signals from your body based on what’s happened to you.

Take a simple example: road rage. You’re never going to eliminate traffic, but what you can do is build the capacity to handle that frustration without it derailing your whole day. That’s what breathwork and somatic practices help with: regulating your nervous system so your reactions aren’t stuck on overdrive. Now, let’s talk about something deeper-something I know firsthand: domestic violence. If you’re a survivor, somatic healing isn’t about pretending it never happened or forcing yourself to “move on.” It’s about creating safety in your body again. It’s about trusting yourself enough to process those emotions, feel them, and let them move through you without staying trapped inside. You can’t change the past, but you can build a future where you feel safe and empowered to make different choices. In both examples-whether it’s traffic or trauma-the goal is the same: to help you handle life better, because life will always “life.”

I want to leave you with a thought from Samantha Skelly, the founder of Pause Breathwork, where I was trained: “Pain isn’t optional, but suffering is.” Pain is part of being human-it’s unavoidable. But suffering? That comes from getting stuck in the pain, from feeling unsafe in your body or being unable to process what’s happening. Breathwork and somatic healing give you the tools to move through pain without getting lost in it. And when you feel safe in your body, you can show up differently-for yourself, your kids, your partner, your team. That’s the real magic: not erasing pain, but living fully in spite of it.