Rooted in the Body: Becoming a Certified Sensorimotor Psychotherapist

There is a version of this post that walks through each level of SP training in sequence and explains what each one covered. I started writing it that way, and it felt like the wrong story.

The truth is, the body was never something I came to through professional development. It has been my first language for as long as I can remember.

As a visually impaired toddler, I received Feldenkrais movement therapy, sessions designed to help me develop spatial awareness and find ease in my own body. I had no words for what was happening. I only knew that someone was paying close attention to how I moved, and helping me find more room inside that movement. That quality of attention stayed with me.

By twenty, I was a trained massage therapist. By my mid-twenties, I had studied Kripalu Bodywork at the Kripalu Centre for Yoga and Health, learned Hatha Yoga while living in the Satchidananda Ashram community, studied Healing Touch with the Holistic Nurses Association, and spent time with a local Sufi Healing Order in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Not as credential accumulation. As genuine curiosity about what the body holds and what it can release when someone meets it with care.

All of that came before my formal clinical training. When I eventually found Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, it was less a discovery than a recognition. A framework that matched something I had been practising, in different forms, for decades.

Last September, I became a Certified Sensorimotor Psychotherapist, working online across Canada. This post is about what that means, not as a credential, but as a commitment.

The Body Has Always Been the Beginning

A life shaped by embodied practice

The thread that runs through all of it is the same: curiosity about how experience lives in the body, and what becomes available when it is met there rather than worked around.

Massage therapy taught me to read tension, where it lives, how it moves, what releases it and what holds it further in. Kripalu Bodywork added a relational dimension, attending not just to physical structure but to the emotional landscape underneath it. Yoga offered something different again: breath, stillness, and the experience of being present in a body that had, at times, felt like unfamiliar territory. The Sufi healing work brought in music and movement and a quality of spiritual attunement that deepened my understanding of embodiment as something far broader than technique.

The Feldenkrais work, right at the beginning, was perhaps the most foundational. Those early sessions planted something in me: the understanding that how we move through space carries meaning, and that small shifts in how we inhabit our bodies can open things that other forms of attention cannot reach.

Why Sensorimotor Psychotherapy

When I entered SP training, I was not learning something new. I was learning a rigorous clinical framework for something I had known through experience for years.

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy online integrates body awareness into the therapeutic relationship as a primary source of clinical information, one that speaks through sensation, posture, and movement, often before the verbal mind has caught up. Training in SP deepened my capacity to track these signals with precision and to work with what the body is doing in the room, rather than only what the mind is saying about it.

I completed Levels 1, 2, and 3, including advanced training in complex trauma and dissociation. Each level built on what came before, and each asked me to bring the work more into my own body rather than apply it as technique from the outside.

What the training asked of me

I want to be honest about this part, because the certification did not come without real difficulty.

As a trans person moving through a training environment that was predominantly cisgender, I encountered microaggressions that left me feeling unseen. There were moments where a space designed to support healing did not make room for my particular experience of being in a body. Those moments were hard. They also clarified, with real force, what I was doing this for.

For my Level 3 final presentation, I focused on something that had become central to my practice: helping clients take the regulation skills developed in session out into the world. Not practising grounding in the safety of the therapy room, but walking through public streets together, navigating spaces that are not always welcoming, learning to breathe and orient and take up space in environments that challenge that. Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a long-time trans activist, put it plainly: "I don't need their permission to exist. I exist in spite of them." That spirit runs through this work.

What it means for the practice now

Certification has changed the texture of what I offer. The work is less about guiding people through body-based exercises and more about tracking, moment to moment, what the body is already communicating, and helping clients develop a relationship with those signals rather than moving past them.

Combined with somatic art therapy, the two approaches meet each other well. Where SP tracks the body's responses in real time, artmaking gives form to what those responses are carrying. Together they create space where words, images, and physical sensation do not each have to carry the full weight alone.

Becoming certified matters because it represents a depth of training and sustained practice that anyone seeking therapy deserves to know about when choosing who to work with. It also asks something ongoing of me: to stay current, to consult, to keep learning how the body holds experience and how it can be accompanied back to itself.

That, in the end, is what the certification is. A continued commitment to the work the body has been asking of me since the beginning.