When Therapy Becomes a Spiritual Practice

Laura Starky
Nov 14
5 min read

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”

Rumi

For a long time, I struggled to reconcile the worlds of therapy and spirituality. One seemed to focus on what was wounded, the other on what was whole. Yet the more I travelled both paths, the more I came to see that they are not separate at all. True awakening is not an escape from our humanity - it’s an intimate meeting with it.

Many people imagine that a spiritual awakening should dissolve pain, anxiety or old patterns, as if realisation itself could sweep away our history. But awakening doesn’t erase our humanness; it illuminates it. And therapy, when held with depth and presence, becomes one of the most sacred ways that light can reach the darker corners of our being.

The Echoes That Shape Us

Everything we experience leaves an imprint - not only in our memories but in the subtle fabric of the body and nervous system. Moments of fear, loss, rejection or unmet need do not simply vanish once time has passed. They linger as echoes like a tightening in the chest, a holding in the breath, a quiet belief that love must be earned or that rest isn’t safe.

In yogic and Buddhist language, we might call these imprints samskāras - the energetic traces left by every experience we’ve ever had. In somatic language, we’d simply call them the nervous system’s memories, the body’s way of holding what was too much to process at the time.

Whether we frame them as trauma or karma, they are the same patterns of contraction and protection that quietly shape how we see the world. Awakening doesn’t cancel them, it brings them into the light, offering us the chance to integrate what was once unconscious.

These patterns were never mistakes. They formed as intelligent adaptations to keep us safe - ways the body learned to protect what felt too vulnerable to bear. Yet over time, what once served as protection can become a subtle cage: we live guarded, over-functioning or quietly disconnected from our deeper vitality.

This is why healing can’t happen through thought alone. The mind may understand that the past is over, but the body still speaks its story through sensation, impulse and emotion. When we begin to listen to the language of the body, to the tremor beneath anxiety, to the dull ache beneath exhaustion - something profound begins to unfold.

In somatic therapy, we don’t try to erase these echoes; we learn to meet them with compassion. As awareness softens into the places that have been braced for too long, the nervous system starts to unwind. What was frozen begins to move again. The body learns, slowly and safely, that it no longer needs to guard against life.

Over time, this meeting with the body becomes less about fixing and more about reclaiming.The energy once bound in fear becomes vitality.The places that once contracted in shame begin to open into presence. And the patterns that once felt like obstacles reveal themselves as teachers - guiding us toward greater honesty, tenderness and truth.

This is the essence of embodied awakening:to realise that the very places we once wanted to heal or escape are the portals through which life invites us home.

The Descent Into the Body

Therapeutic work invites us to turn toward what we’d rather avoid, the tightness in the chest, the shame that lives behind the smile, the grief that still trembles in the belly. It asks us to feel, not fix - to bring kindness where there was once self-judgement.

In this way, therapy becomes a devotional act. Each time we pause, breathe and listen more deeply to ourselves, we are returning home. Every tear, tremor or sigh that moves through is the body’s way of completing what was once left unfinished.

This is not separate from spiritual practice - it is the practice. The descent into the body is the gateway to the heart.

Living the Awakening

It’s easy to mistake awakening for an experience like an ecstatic moment, a mystical glimpse, a weekend retreat where everything makes sense for a while. But the real invitation is to let that awareness live through us when life feels anything but spiritual.

Can we stay open when we’re tired, when our children need us, when shame rises again?

Can the truth we’ve touched move through our hands, our words, our everyday relationships?

This is the living edge of embodied spirituality.

Awakening that doesn’t include the body, the emotions and the nervous system is often just another form of avoidance, what we might call a “spiritual bypass”. The work is to keep returning, to feel what’s here and to allow love to become practical.

Therapy as Mirror and Companion

None of us can see ourselves fully without reflection.Just as the body needs another nervous system to co-regulate, the psyche and soul also need relationship to awaken.

As both a therapist and a meditation teacher, I’ve come to see how essential this mirroring is. In meditation, we learn to sit with what arises, to meet our inner world with awareness and compassion. In therapy, we bring that same awareness into the relational field, where our patterns, defences and longings can be gently witnessed and understood.

These two streams of therapeutic and contemplative are not separate.

Meditation opens the capacity to observe and feel, while therapy offers the relational safety to explore what we find there. Together, they create a bridge between insight and integration.

Somatic therapy, especially, helps us grow the subtle gap between impulse and action - the space where choice becomes possible. This is where freedom begins: not in transcending our reactions, but in feeling them so clearly that something new can emerge.

Both healing and awakening ask for humility, honesty and relationship. We cannot do this work alone, nor were we meant to. The presence of another - steady, attuned and unhurried then becomes the mirror through which we learn to meet ourselves more truthfully.

When therapy and meditation intertwine, awareness becomes embodied and compassion becomes relational. It’s here, in the meeting between presence and reflection, that awakening moves from an idea into a lived experience.

The Path of Integration

When therapy loses its connection to spirit, it can become another project of self-improvement - trying to become a better version of “me”. And when spirituality rejects the body and psyche, it often becomes an escape from life itself.

The true path lies in their integration. Healing and awakening are two sides of the same movement - the sacred remembering that we are both human and divine, both tender and vast.

Every moment we choose presence over avoidance, curiosity over defence, gentleness over control, we participate in that awakening. It’s not about reaching somewhere higher - it’s about inhabiting where we already are, more fully, more truthfully, more alive.