Body Intelligence
Cultivating Awareness Through the Body
Experience is reflected in the body - in breath, tension, posture, sensation and nervous system response. Somatic practice helps you notice and work with these patterns to create change.
...sometimes the mind has to catch up to what the body already knows."
--- Bodhi Somatics
What is Bodhi Somatics?
Soma (from Greek and Latin) refers to the body. Bodhi (from Sanskrit) means to “awaken” or “awakening to reality,” pointing to a quality of clear, embodied awareness.
Bodhi Somatic practice is based on the understanding that mind and body are inextricably linked, and that lived experience is held in and expressed through our body as well as through the mind and emotional process.
Bodhi Somatics offers an integrated somatic approach informed by a range of movement, mindfulness and contemporary somatic psychology practices. This includes influences from somatic experiencing, polyvagal theory and other bioenergetic and body-oriented traditions, as well as my ongoing personal practice and teaching in yoga and mindfulness traditions
Who is This For?
People interested in how the body feels experience
In breath, tension, posture, movement and nervous system response.
Helping and Healing Professionals
For therapists, coaches, movement teachers, educators and wellness practitioners who want to work more directly with how experience is held and expressed in the body.
Movement Teachers and Practitioners
For yoga, Pilates, dance and other movement teachers who work with people through the body.
This approach shifts attention from what a movement looks like to what your students feel while doing it — breath, effort, coordination, tension, ease, and how the body is adjusting as it moves.
For teachers, it changes how cues flow. Instead of only instructing shape (“lift the arm,” “straighten the leg”), cueing can point toward internal experience: where effort is building, how breath is changing, where there is holding or where it feels ease, how weight is moving through the body. It brings more depth into how students experience a posture, not just how it looks..
The Somatic Dimension
- we carry experience in the body
Somatic practice is not only about healing what is difficult. It is also about deepening awareness, refining our relationship with movement and breath, and learning to listen more closely to the intelligence of the body. For practitioners, teachers and helping professionals, somatic work offers a way of cultivating presence, embodied understanding and greater sensitivity to how experience is expressed through the body.
Somatic work sits alongside talk therapy. It works with how our experience is carried in the body, alongside the narrative and meaning we make of it.
When we perceive danger, the hypothalamus floods the body with stress hormones, muscles tense, breathing shallows and heart rate spikes. That's the fight-flight-freeze response. This stress response was designed for acute physical threat. You run from a predator, discharge the energy through movement and the body resets.
That physical discharge often doesn't follow modern threats (job stress, burnout, arguments, divorce, car accidents, medical trauma, grief), which means the body stores that incomplete response. This can result in noticeable physical changes in the body - in posture, tension, muscle memory and non-optimal breathing. The body doesn't experience time the way the mind does, and a memory that may feel distant - something you've 'dealt with' or 'moved past' can still be present in the form of the body holding the unresolved discharge.
Many people override those body signals: pushing through stress, tiredness or anxiety, ignoring tension, or living in a persistent state of bracing.
Somatic work focuses on the physiological patterns which carry that experience. The practice gives us space and time, allowing awareness of breath, muscle tone, posture and nervous system activation and how these patterns are organised in the body.
Learn more about Somatic patterns or the benefits of Somatic work
"A somatic experience is like
having a conversation with your body"
- Bodhi Somatics
Retreats
&
Experiences
Somatic Guided Sessions 2hrs
Guided group sessions. A different way of moving and noticing in a shorter, class-type environment.
A combination of yoga-style & intuitive movement, guided meditation, reflection and NSDR (Non-Sleep Deep Rest)
Somatic Exploration - half day
Group workshop-style explorations.
A combination of somatic movement practices (yoga-style & intuitive movement), guided meditation and reflection and NSDR (Non-Sleep Deep Rest), guided metta bhavana style titration / pendulation practices.
Group Day Retreats
A deeper, day-long exploration.
A restful, restorative trauma-informed somatic day retreat designed to help you pause and notice what your body may be holding beneath the pace of daily life.
If you're experiencing stress, burnout, tension, insomnia, overwhelm or simply wish to go a little deeper into reflection, somatic experience and nervous system awareness.
Combination of somatic movement practices (yoga-style & intuitive movement), guided meditation and reflection and NSDR (Non-Sleep Deep Rest), optional: journaling, creative expression, various other somatic practices.
Professional Retreats
Experiential retreats or workshops especially created for therapists, counsellors & helping and movement professionals
Created for those who spend much of their lives attending to or attuned to others.
Ways to Work Together
Clinical Collaboration Retreats
Co-facilitation option for health, movement and healing professionals
These retreats are open to collaboration with professionals across therapy, movement, health and healing fields, including therapists, physiotherapists, biokineticists, yoga / pilates / movement teachers, occupational therapists, coaches and other practitioners working with embodiment, regulation or nervous system-informed practice in their client work.
If you feel that working more directly with the body and its sensory and somatic processes is the next layer in your work. If you would like to offer a different way to deepen outcomes, shift patterns, or support clients - these retreats provide an experiential space to explore and integrate that dimension.
Collaborations are structured on a case-by-case basis and agreed in advance to ensure clarity of roles, intention and ethical boundaries.
Meet Maja
I'm Maja Heynecke, Founder of Bodhi Somatics.
I've been living this kind of work in one way or another since 1993. Not necessarily as a career path I chose, but as a personal practice to find balance, calm and clarity - and to make better choices while maintaining a busy modern lifestyle.
Learn more about me here
