Laura Starky

You may have arrived here looking for a somatic therapist after years of trying to feel better, and you probably already know yourself very well, having gained a great deal of insight through the talking therapy you have done. Perhaps you would not call yourself a seeker, and yet there is a meaning and truth that your heart keeps moving you towards, and quite possibly a bookcase or two filled with self help and personal development books gathered along the way. Perhaps you live with anxiety, burnout or a quiet sense of holding everything together, a nervous system that stays switched on even when nothing is obviously wrong, and perhaps you have found yourself reaching for the things that take the edge off, whether that is a drink at the end of the day, food, overwork or simply staying too busy to feel, alongside being the one who says yes, who keeps the peace and takes care of everyone else's needs but not your own. Often there has already been a great deal of insight, and yet insight alone has not quite reached the place that needs it, because many of us begin hoping to feel better when the deeper invitation is to learn how to feel.

Hello, I am Laura, an integrative somatic therapist, meditation teacher based in the UK, working in person in East Yorkshire and online nationally. I know these patterns from the inside, since for much of my life my own nervous system stayed switched on, kept useful and a step ahead and quietly masked, until I came to understand that the constant doing was itself a way of not feeling. My own recovery from disconnection, dissociation and alcohol brought me to the body after years of trying to think my way to safety, and everything I now offer grows from that journey home.

I work with the kind of difficulty that often takes root early, in environments that lacked the attunement or safety a young nervous system needed, though many people do not recognise their struggles as trauma at all and may quietly minimise what they lived through, while knowing very clearly that something is not working the way they long for it to. This is sometimes called complex trauma or C-PTSD, yet the name matters far less than the lived experience of it, which settles into the body over time as the deep imprints of past experience, what the contemplative traditions call samskaras. These patterns often show up as anxiety, perfectionism, people pleasing, addiction and harsh self criticism, all of which come to make complete sense as the ways a young system once kept itself safe.

A great deal of the healing in my work happens in the relationship itself, in a warm, attuned space where a body that learned early to brace, holding its protection as armour in the muscles and breath, can slowly discover that it is safe to soften. I am trained in NeuroAffective Touch, which allows me to work through gentle, consented therapeutic touch where it is welcome, reaching the numbing and contraction that words alone often cannot, and underneath all of this is a non dual contemplative orientation that informs how I meet what arises, without needing it to be other than it is.

I am neurodivergent myself and offer neuro-affirming therapy, alongside my work with complex trauma, recovery from alcohol, grief and those in spiritual awakening whose experiences feel hard to ground and integrate. I am accredited, insured and in regular clinical supervision, and alongside one to one work I lead HeartSomatics™, an online embodied meditation community. This is a space where the whole of you, including what you have long kept managed and hidden, is met with compassion and without judgement.