Hi, I'm Laura
I support people to reconnect with their bodies, understand the patterns shaped by past experience and live with greater presence and self-trust.
I am an integrative somatic therapist, founder of the Somatic Wellness Hub and creator of HeartSomatics™, a body-first approach to meditation that helps people reconnect with their body, listen to their inner guidance and develop deeper self-trust.
My work is rooted in over 25 years of experience in trauma, mental health and substance misuse, and draws on trauma-informed somatic therapy alongside meditation and non-dual contemplative wisdom.
Some people come to work with me through somatic therapy. They may be navigating trauma, attachment patterns, nervous system overwhelm, neurodivergence or long-standing coping strategies and are looking for body-based support that goes beyond talking alone. Others arrive through meditation and contemplative practice. They are curious about learning how to listen to the body, sense their inner guidance more clearly and explore what it means to live with greater presence and honesty.
In both spaces, the work is grounded in the same intention. Creating conditions where people can slow down, reconnect with the body and begin to trust their own inner knowing.
I am based in Beverley, East Yorkshire, where I offer in-person somatic therapy alongside online sessions.
My Mission
My work is devoted to creating spaces where people can slow down, reconnect with their bodies and rediscover the quiet guidance that lives within them.
I see my role as bringing people together in a shared field of learning and exploration. A place where we can step out of pressure, performance and hierarchy, and instead meet one another with honesty, curiosity and compassion.
Many of us spend years trying to understand ourselves through the mind. We analyse our past, reflect on our patterns and search for answers, yet something deeper often remains untouched.
Through somatic therapy, meditation and contemplative practice, I support people to listen more deeply to the intelligence of the body. When awareness is allowed to settle in this way, emotions can move, inner conflict softens and a deeper sense of steadiness begins to emerge.
Over time people often discover something simple but powerful. They can trust themselves. They can meet life with greater honesty and presence.
This work is part of my dharma. It is the path I have been shaped for through my own life experience and more than two decades of working alongside others in the fields of trauma, mental health and recovery.
A gentle introduction
Shaped by my own lived experience of dysregulation, addiction and disconnection. After navigating my own history of anxiety, alcohol dependence and a lifetime of functioning on the surface while feeling shut down underneath, I became committed to understanding why so many people, including me, struggle to find relief through cognitive approaches alone.
I've seen first-hand how people are left believing they are “treatment resistant,” when the real issue is that the nervous system isn't being addressed. My insight and experience into the suffering that's created, when we try to think our way out of patterns beginning in the body, sits at the heart of my work.
I support sensitive, high-functioning souls, both online and in-person, who appear to cope on the outside, yet live in chronic anxiety, emotional shutdown or functional freeze. After decades working within overstretched, cognitively focused systems, I am a strong advocate for transforming the way we approach mental health, so the body is no longer excluded from the healing process.
My Story
For most of my adult life, my nervous system survived through freeze. On the surface I appeared capable, reliable and high achieving, while inside I lived with anxiety, emotional numbness and a quiet but persistent disconnection from myself. I was highly sensitive, often out of step with others and never quite feeling as though I fitted in. It was only much later, at 56, that I was diagnosed with ADHD, and that recognition made sense of so much of my life, the sensitivity, the feeling of running a different operating system to those around me and the years of working twice as hard to appear as though everything was managed. Early relational and developmental trauma had shaped both my nervous system and my sense of who I was, and I grew up without a felt sense of identity or internal safety.
Disconnected from my own heart, I moved into caring professions and became the one who supported others, who held things together and who focused outward. For a long time I believed that if I could fix, help or control enough, safety and regulation would finally arrive. It was a strategy that made sense at the time, and for a while it worked well enough to keep things moving.
Over time, though, those strategies stopped working, and what followed was a long and painful unravelling of depression, breakdown, suicidal crisis and time in psychiatric treatment. Running alongside all of it were unexpected moments of spiritual opening that I had no framework for and could not yet integrate. I reached a point where I could no longer outrun what my nervous system was holding, and in a moment of desperation I surrendered to something I could not yet name and asked for help.
Recovery came slowly and not in a straight line. Sobriety was part of it and brought its own profound awakening, a further peeling back and a deeper meeting with myself, and gradually a reconnection to my own inner guidance began to emerge alongside a slow return to my heart and body. It was through that process that I found my way toward somatic approaches, nervous system regulation and embodied contemplative practice, and in them I found something I had not encountered before, a way of working that could reach what talking alone could not.
I trained as an integrative somatic therapist, yoga and meditation teacher, and what I bring to this work is shaped as much by what I have lived as by what I have studied. I know from the inside what it is to function highly while feeling profoundly disconnected, and I know that it is possible to find a way back.
You might also find resonance in these reflections.
“Laura was a revelation. For the first time I learned how to truly recognise the patterns in my body and what it feels like to be deeply relaxed.”
Sally
.png)
My Philosophy
Healing isn't about giving something up, it's about understanding why we reach for it in the first place
The habits we struggle with whether alcohol, stress, perfectionism or avoidance are rarely conscious choices. They are adaptive responses of the nervous system, strategies your body and mind develop to survive. True transformation happens when you reconnect with your body, learn to regulate your nervous system and create new ways of being that foster genuine safety, balance and resilience.
My online and in-person approach brings together body, heart and awareness to support a return to inner safety, emotional flow and authentic connection. Grounded in my lived experience, study and personal practice of Tantrik Yoga, a non-dual path recognising every experience as a valid expression of consciousness.
Healing isn't fixing what's broken, together we meet whatever arises
With deep presence and compassion, we trust that your wholeness is already here, just beneath the surface of patterned experience. For some, this somatic approach brings profound acceptance and inner calm, while for others it opens doors to deeper spiritual inquiry, a chance to explore who you truly are beneath the layers of conditioning and coping. Whether you come for emotional regulation, trauma recovery or reconnection with your authentic self, this work invites you back to the body as a place of safety, where what you have been seeking turns out to have been within you all along.
With Gratitude
My work is rooted not only in lived experience, but in a lineage of somatic and spiritual teachings that continue to inform and inspire my practice.
I want to honour Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis, whose scholarship and practice of Non-dual Shaiva Tantra continues to shape the heart of my work. Through his teachings and guidance I’ve come to experience a deeper awakening to life and love, one that continues to shape the way I share my work.
I give profound thanks to Aimee Rai, whose calling and courage made it possible for me to train with her in somatic therapy. It was through Aimee that I learned to trust my intuition - to listen more closely to the quiet inner thread that guides both myself and those I walk alongside.
I am also profoundly grateful to Dr Aline LaPierre, whose creation of NeuroAffective Touch® has shaped not only how I understand survival patterns and the pathways back to connection, but how I understand what it means to be a regulated, embodied presence in the room. Training with Aline was one of the most significant experiences of my professional life. She is, quite simply, the most regulated human being I have ever been in the presence of, and that quality of settledness is not incidental to her work. It is the work. She embodies what she teaches in a way that makes the possibility of genuine healing feel real and close rather than theoretical or distant. Her intelligence, her warmth and her deep respect for the body's own intelligence continue to inform every session I offer.
Finally, I acknowledge the influence of writers and clinicians such as Gabor Maté, Pete Walker, Bessel van der Kolk and Peter Levine, whose work continues to illuminate the relationship between trauma, the body and the human spirit. Any clarity you find here comes through their influence. Any errors or simplifications are my own!
Free Guide
When the Past Lives in the Body
A gentle somatic guide to reconnecting with your body. For those who are tired of understanding their patterns without feeling them change.
