SOMATIC ANXIETY THERAPY & COACHING CERTIFICATE
“Knowing what we feel is the first step to knowing why we feel that way.”
— BESSEL VAN DER KOLK
PROGRAM AT-A-GLANCE
Are you looking for a way to help your clients find deep, lasting relief from anxiety through the wisdom of the body? Do you want to learn powerful somatic approaches to guide people from overwhelm to ease, from tension to flow, and from panic to peaceful presence? Then we invite you to our 60-hr Somatic Anxiety Therapy & Coaching Certificate Program.
This program is designed for individuals, practitioners, and educators who want to discover how body-based approaches can transform anxiety into embodied calm, increased resilience, adaptability, and a sense of agency and control. Through somatic practices and coaching techniques, you'll learn to help clients release stored tension, regulate their nervous system, and cultivate a natural state of ease that extends far beyond traditional “anxiety” coping strategies.
In this unique online certificate program, you will learn evidence-based somatic techniques that address anxiety at its physiological and psychological roots. Discover how to guide gentle movements, breath work, and body awareness practices that help your clients shift from fight-flight-freeze into states of safety, groundedness, and inner peace. You'll benefit from interactive learning, practical exercises, and peer support as you develop these transformative skills.
Taught by world-leading faculty, this program will equip you with the confidence to offer your clients a comprehensive approach to anxiety that works directly with the body's natural capacity for regulation and renewal. Learn to facilitate lasting shifts from hypervigilance to presence, from constriction to openness, from reactivity to responsive calm.
Join us and discover how somatic therapy & coaching can guide the journey from anxiety to embodied ease for yourself and your clients. Register now and get ready to transform your practice and your client's lives through the power of body-based healing.
MEET YOUR INSTRUCTORS
World Renowned Leaders in Somatic Anxiety Coaching And Therapy.
DEB DANA
MORGAN STARR-RIESTIS
DR. SCOTT LYONS
SHARON SALZBERG
NKEM NDEFO, MSN
DR. ARIELLE SCHWARTZ
KAI CHENG THOM
PETER A. LEVINE, PhD
KARINE BELL
ANNA PAPAIOANNOU
LEARN MORE WITH OUR FREE LIVE MEET THE FACULTY SESSION
KAI CHENG THOM
DR. SCOTT LYONS
ANNA PAPAIOANNOU
MEET THE FACULTY SESSION:
Tuesday, April 8th, 2025 from 5 - 6pm ET
We will also send out the recordings to those unable to join live.
ABOUT THE PROGRAM
This unique 10-week online certificate program is designed for individuals, practitioners, and educators who want to discover how body-based approaches can transform anxiety into embodied calm, increased resilience, adaptability, and a sense of agency and control.
Join us and learn evidence-based somatic techniques that address anxiety at its physiological and psychological roots. You’ll discover somatic practices to help clients release stored tension, regulate their nervous system, and cultivate a natural state of ease that extends far beyond traditional “anxiety” coping strategies.
You’ll discover how to guide gentle movements and offer breath work and body awareness practices to help your clients shift from fight-flight-freeze into states of safety, groundedness, and inner peace.
You'll benefit from interactive learning, practical exercises, and peer support as you develop these transformative skills.
This program is more than an anxiety management training. Taught by world-leading faculty, this program will equip you with the skills and confidence to offer your clients a comprehensive and unified approach to somatics for anxiety management.
The faculty will guide you through interactive theory and learning, practical application of exercises, interventions and protocols, demonstrations, and peer practice sessions to inspire and empower you through this effective and powerful healing process for yourself and the people you work with. Once the foundational material is learned and embodied, advanced integration classes will teach you how to modify the foundational tools for the diversity of individuals you are working with.
Join us and discover somatic practices to help clients release stored tension, regulate their nervous system, and cultivate a natural state of ease that extends far beyond traditional “anxiety” coping strategies.
SOMATICS HELP HEAL
‘Soma’ is a Greek word for ‘the living body known from within’, or known to the Self. This ‘knowing’ signifies wholeness. Somatic therapy is an experiential approach towards mindbody integration. The pain, overwhelm, and coping responses manifested by trauma take us away from feeling at home in our body, and as a result there is often a split within ourselves.
Somatic Therapy helps:
Restore the body as a place of safety while helping to expand the capacity to process body (preverbal and nonverbal) memory
Metabolize unprocessed emotions
Complete thwarted (incomplete) stress responses
Restore our optimal relationship to our self and the world around us
Somatic therapy offers techniques for clients to sense and regulate their own physiology and states of being. This includes building more internal and external resources, building trusting and co-regulatory relationships, learning to turn inward with compassion, being invited deeper in the body, and being given time and space to process the trauma. These somatic techniques unwind trauma and restore well-being.
WHAT IS SOMATIC ANXIETY THERAPY?
Anxiety has classically been defined as excessive worry or fear accompanied by restlessness, dread, uncertainty, muscle tension, a lack of ease, with chronic catastrophization and negativity that impacts daily living. A somatic perspective of anxiety recognizes it as not just a mental condition but also a physical one.
A somatic perspective works past the symptoms of anxiety and addresses its origins.
From a body-based perspective, anxiety is considered an alarm in the body that signifies that there is a disconnect (in the mind-body). This disconnect can come from a fragmentation of emotions, safety, a sense of power, capacity, and control. Until it is properly addressed that alarm gets louder and more aggressive, escalating the symptoms of anxiety. Finding and soothing the alarm stored in the body is critical to healing chronic worry and a major proponent of Somatic Anxiety Therapy.
In addition to practices that address the alarm aspect of anxiety, Somatic Anxiety Therapy also addresses dysregulation in the body that stems from a perceived lack of safety and chronic patterns of survival playing themselves out, real or perceived separation, lack of sensory-motor balance (that can create a high level of unprocessed arousal energy), and unprocessed emotions and unmet needs that manifest as a deep discomfort in the body.
Anxiety is a feedback loop between the painful feelings in the body and the revving and distorted worried thoughts in the mind. They feed off each other, creating what can sometimes feel like an unbreakable cycle. Somatic Anxiety Therapy offers guidance into the healing power and wisdom of the body combined with powerful tools that address the thoughts, behaviors, and patterns that contribute to the chronic cycle of anxiety, ultimately breaking the loop.
In this program we’ll explore many tools including:
Grounding: Grounding involves sensing the body, feeling your feet on the earth, and calming the nervous system.
Cultivating Somatic Awareness: Teaching clients how to develop and sustain somatic awareness is a foundational step in the integration of body-centered work.
Resourcing: When we help clients develop resources we focus on increasing a sense of choice and safety.
Breathwork: Breathwork empowers individuals to regulate their nervous systems, fostering a sense of safety and connection within their bodies. By combining conscious breathing with somatic awareness, it helps release stored tension and trauma, offering a practical tool for long-term emotional resilience and healing.
Mindfulness: practices that help generate states of curiosity, awareness, compassion, and acceptance.
Self Containment: You’ll explore techniques to help clients contain their feelings of anxiety for example, butterfly hugs, leg press, weighted object, self hugging and many more.
Shaking and tremoring: Guiding clients through sequenced shaking and tremoring practices can be a powerful way to discharge the excesses energy and turn off the alarm of anxiety.
Titration: Titration refers to a process of experiencing small amounts of distress at a time with a goal to discharge the tension. During Somatic Anxiety Therapy, titration is also a key component of managing high levels of distress and reducing the likelihood of re-traumatization during the healing process.
Somatic Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Supporting client in understanding and repatterning their perceptions patterns, cognitive distortions, and behavioral habits that contribute to their personal cycle of anxiety. Additionally, tools will be given to address underlying beliefs and scripts contributing to the stuckness and lack of control.
Somatic Inner Child Work: Helping clients meet their unmet needs and emotions, specifically through addressing inner child work can get to the root cause of the anxiety.
“Somatic approaches to anxiety guide you to harness the power of your thoughts, works directly with your body, and help you to face your fears. With the right support, you may just discover that you are stronger and more capable than you imagined.”
- DR. ARIELLE SCHWARTZ
“In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.”
- BESSEL VAN DER KOLK
“If you were to be asked how you feel when you are stressed or in pain, a common answer might be, 'I feel anxious' or 'I feel upset.' It’s important to go further by becoming curious about how you know that you’re feeling anxious or upset. Is there a tightness or burning that is happening right now inside of you that you are labeling 'anxiety' or 'upset'?”
- PETER A. LEVINE, PhD
“Sometimes the people around you won't understand your journey. They don't need to, it's not for them.”
- JOUBERT BOTHA
MODULE 1: Foundations and Embodied Neurobiology of Anxiety
Introduction and Neurobiology of Anxiety
Origins and Systems of Anxiety
Polyvagal Theory and Anxiety
Practitioners Skills and Navigating Practitioner Anxiety
MODULE 2: Setting The Ground for Processing
Embodying Resources and Cultivating Safety
MODULE 3: Somatic Interventions for Anxiety
Mobilizing and Discharging Anxiety - Part 1
Mobilizing and Discharging Anxiety - Part 2
Movement and Breath
Regulation and Resetting
Containment And Capacity Building
Somatic Practices and Demonstration
Mindfulness for Anxiety - Part 1
Mindfulness for Anxiety - Part 2
Somatic Dialogue Processing - Part 1
Somatic Dialogue Processing - Part 2
MODULE 4: Somatic Cognitive Behavioral Practices for Anxiety
Introducing SCBT & Transforming Intrusive Thoughts
Repatterning Cognitive Distortions
Reshaping Limiting Beliefs
Ecosystemic Interventions
Integrating Somatic, Cognitive & Behavioral Approaches
MODULE 5: Advanced Tools for Anxiety
Advanced Somatic Tools
Expressive Arts Interventions for Anxiety
Holistic Interventions for Anxiety: Rebalancing Ecological & Biological Rhythms
Inner Child Work - Part 1
Inner Child Work - Part 2
MODULE 6: Integration
Somatic Anxiety Therapy Integration - Part 1
Somatic Anxiety Therapy Integration - Part 2
CURRICULUM
This 60-hour certificate program will include 27 live and online sessions, offered over 10 weeks from April 15th to June 21st, 2025. Two Optional Community Connection sessions will also be offered.
WHO IS THIS PROGRAM FOR?
• Social Workers
• Mental Health & Pastoral Counselors
• Yoga Therapists / Yoga Teachers
• Movement Therapists
• Coaches
• Physicians (MD, DO, ND, DC & others) & Physician Assistants
• Nurses & Nurse Practitioners
• Psychologists
• Emergency Medical Personnel
• Meditation Teachers
• Educators
• Massage Therapists & Body Workers
• Acupuncturists
• Hypnotherapists
• Kinesiologists
• Complementary & Alternative Medicine Professionals
• Clergy & Religious Leaders
• Other Wellness Professionals
This program is an education program and not a licenser program.
1. Recognize and embody core principles of somatic anxiety therapy
Understand and integrate foundational principles of somatic anxiety therapy to address the mind-body connection and promote holistic healing.
2. Understand the interconnection between anxiety and collective stres
Explore how individual anxiety is influenced by collective stressors, including cultural, ecological, and systemic factors, and integrate this awareness into therapeutic practices.
3. Apply evidence-informed somatic approaches to anxiety management
Learn and practice evidence-based techniques, such as breathwork, movement, and body-based mindfulness, to reduce anxiety and support nervous system regulation.
4. Engage practical mind-body tools for anxiety regulation
Develop skills in mind-body interventions that help clients build inner resources, ground themselves, and manage anxiety effectively.
5. Facilitate co-regulation to support anxiety reduction
Discover and practice co-regulation techniques to create a sense of safety and connection, enabling clients to move toward self-regulation in their anxiety management.
6. Enhance emotional and sensation tolerance for anxiety reduction
Teach clients tools to increase their capacity to tolerate uncomfortable emotions and physical sensations related to anxiety, fostering greater resilience.
7. Facilitate the interruption of anxiety loops and address core origins of anxiety
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN
8. Balance top-down and bottom-up approaches to anxiety therapy
Understand and apply cognitive (top-down) and somatic (bottom-up) interventions to tailor the pace and approach of anxiety therapy to individual needs.
9. Identify and address anxiety-driven somatic holding patterns and beliefs
Explain how anxiety creates physical holding patterns and survival responses in the body, and learn methods to release these patterns for lasting relief.
10. Navigate post-anxiety hyper-arousal and hypo-arousal states
Recognize and address hyper-arousal (overactivation) and hypo-arousal (shutdown) states in anxiety, ensuring a balanced and individualized approach to care.
11. Facilitate resilience building for anxiety management
Equip clients with strategies to build resilience and adaptability in the face of anxiety, promoting long-term well-being and emotional flexibility.
12. Prioritize practitioner self-care in anxiety therapy practice
Learn self- and collective-care practices to maintain boundaries, avoid burnout, and sustain energy while working with clients experiencing chronic anxiety.
13. Learn to mobilize unresolved anxiety energy
14. Understanding of the social origins of anxiety
PROGRAM DETAILS
PROGRAM SCHEDULE
This 60-hour certificate program runs live and online over the course of 10 weeks from April 15th to June 21st, 2025. Additionally, all sessions will be recorded and available to watch online and on-demand at your own pace via your online Content Library which you will gain immediate access to upon registration. You will also receive access to an Online Community Forum, and two live online Community Connection sessions.
STUDENT ORIENTATION: Tuesday, April 15th, 2025 from 4 - 5:30pm ET
WEEKLY CLASSES:
Wednesday, April 16th, 2025 from 7 - 9pm ET
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025 from 7 - 9pm ET
Friday, April 25th, 2025 from 3 - 5pm ET
Saturday, April 26th, 2025 from 11am - 2pm ET and 3 - 6pm ET
Wednesday, April 30th, 2025 from 7 - 9pm ET
Friday, May 2nd, 2025 from 3 - 5pm ET
Sunday, May 4th, 2025 from 11am - 2pm ET and 3 - 6pm ET
Wednesday, May 7th, 2025 from 7 - 9pm ET
Friday, May 9th, 2025 from 3 - 5pm ET
Wednesday, May 14th, 2025 from 7 - 9pm ET
Friday, May 16th, 2025 from 3 - 5pm ET
Wednesday, May 21st, 2025 from 7 - 9pm ET
Friday, May 23rd, 2025 from 3 - 5pm ET
Wednesday, May 28th, 2025 from 7 - 9pm ET
Friday, May 30th, 2025 from 3 - 5pm ET
Wednesday, June 4th, 2025 from 7 - 9pm ET
Friday, June 6th, 2025 from 3 - 5pm ET
Wednesday, June 11th, 2025 from 7 - 9pm ET
Friday, June 13th, 2025 from 3 - 5pm ET
Saturday, June 14th, 2025 from 11am - 2pm ET and 3 - 6pm ET
Wednesday, June 18th, 2025 from 7 - 9pm ET
Friday, June 20th, 2025 from 3 - 5pm ET
Saturday, June 21st, 2025 from 11am - 2pm ET and 3 - 6pm ET
COMMUNITY CONNECTION SESSIONS:
Monday, May 5th, 2025 from 1:30pm - 3pm ET
Monday, June 2nd, 2025 from 3pm - 4:30pm ET
LEARNING PLATFORM FORMAT
ONLINE LEARNING PLATFORM: The online learning platform hosts all the information about the course including:
Detailed course schedule
Supporting materials such as PDFs of the reading material and presentations
Access to your Online Community Forum
ACCESSIBILITY
VIDEO / AUDIO: Within the online learning platform, students may watch the video within their online library or download the video or audio to their computer. They will have lifetime access to the content.
LIVE CAPTIONING / TRANSCRIPTS: Captioning will only be available during the live sessions. Transcripts are offered in English.
READING LISTS: Each instructor will provide required or recommended readings.
Required readings will be available freely online or in PDF format.
Recommended readings are optional and for futher exploration. They may include books, online articles etc.
PDFs of the instructor’s presentation will also be provided.
CERTIFICATE OF COMPLETION
Below are the requirements to receive the Certificate of Completion:
Attend the live sessions or watch the recordings.
Complete the Self Evaluation.
Submit full payment.
REGISTRATION / ENROLLMENT / TUITION
Enroll for the certificate program here. Once you register, you will receive a welcome email with how to access all the details for the certificate program.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
+ Who is this program designed for?
+ What are the dates, schedule and time commitment?
+ Will there be an orientation session?
+ Do I need to attend live or am I able to watch recordings?
+ How can I interact with the instructors? Will I receive guidance?
+ What are the homework requirements?
+ Do you offer scholarships?
+ Is there a deadline for registration?
+ Do you offer refunds?
+ How can I access the online course and recordings?
+ Is this a summit?
+ Is this a theoretical or practical (experiential) program?
+ Will I receive a certificate?
+ After completing the Somatic Anxiety Therapy Certificate program, what title am I allowed to use?
+ Will Continuing Education Units (CEUs) be offered?
YOUR
BONUS OFFER ✨
Register now to receive your bonus package valued at $394 for free!
PROGRAM REGISTRATION
THE PROGRAM BEGINS APRIL 15TH, 2025
CHOOSE YOUR PAYMENT OPTION BELOWWith great appreciation for Reverend angel Kyodo Williams who created this format of the sliding scale in the Embodied Social Justice Certificate program, we are continuing to offer a scaled pricing structure for this program.
The scaled pricing offers three options rather than one fixed price. This structure makes it possible for more people to access the program, supported by the community and those who have access to more resources. Your enrollment also helps us to add more scholarships. Please choose the option that feels appropriate to you and your circumstances.
Upon registration, you will receive a welcome email with details on how to access the program.
REBALANCING ACCESS
For those with more than enough financial resources and a desire to support access for others to help rebalance systemic inequity.
$1527 USD
TWO PAYMENTS OF $763.50
FAIR ACCESS
For those with sufficient financial resources and who can pay fair value for the experience.
$1227 USD
TWO PAYMENTS OF $613.50
SUPPORTED ACCESS
For those with currently limited financial resources who will benefit from access supplemented by the community.
$1027 USD
TWO PAYMENTS OF $513.50
BECOME A MEMBER OF THE EMBODY LAB FOR FREE & SAVE $50
Why wait for the information session? Our registration guarantee means that if you register but decide the course isn’t for you, we’ll refund you - no questions asked - up to 48 hours before the course start date.
LEARN MORE WITH OUR FREE LIVE MEET THE FACULTY SESSION
KAI CHENG THOM
DR. SCOTT LYONS
ANNA PAPAIOANNOU
MEET THE FACULTY SESSION:
Tuesday, April 8th, 2025 from 5 - 6pm ET
We will also send out the recordings to those unable to join live.
