We do not just have a body — we are embodied beings, and our suffering and our healing both happen across many dimensions of that embodiment. Integral Somatic Psychology works with the body as the foundation of psychological change, but extends the work across the physiological, energetic, emotional, mental, and relational dimensions of being — building capacity to experience the full range of what it is to be human.
What Is Integral Somatic Psychology?
Integral Somatic Psychology (ISP) is a comprehensive embodied psychotherapy developed by Raja Selvam, PhD — a senior trainer in Somatic Experiencing who spent decades integrating somatic work with psychoanalytic, Jungian, and energy-based traditions. ISP grew out of the recognition that healing requires more than working with physical sensation alone — it requires engaging the whole of embodied experience.
ISP works across what Selvam describes as the five "bodies" or dimensions of embodied experience — the physiological body, the energetic body, the emotional body, the mental body, and the relational body. Each of these is part of how we are alive in the world, and difficulties in any one of them ripple through the others. ISP builds capacity in all five — gradually, sustainably, and in a way that supports lasting integration.
At Newmarket Therapy Centre, ISP is used as a foundational framework that draws on and integrates with many other modalities — including IFS, EFT, and trauma-informed work — bringing depth and integration to the broader therapeutic process.
The Six Dimensions of ISP Work
ISP is built around the recognition that embodied experience has multiple dimensions, each of which can be worked with directly. Together they form a comprehensive framework for psychological and embodied transformation.
The Physiological Body
Sensation, breath, tissue, posture, muscle tone, autonomic state. The most familiar dimension of somatic work — and the foundation on which the other dimensions build.
The Energetic Body
The felt sense of vitality, life force, energy flow. This dimension is less commonly addressed in Western therapy, but ISP recognises that working with energy directly can produce shifts that other approaches cannot reach.
The Emotional Body
The body's experience of emotion — how grief lives in the chest, how anger lives in the jaw, how shame lives in the gut. ISP expands your capacity to feel emotions fully, in the body, without being overwhelmed.
The Mental Body
The embodied experience of thought, image, memory, story. The mind is not separate from the body — it has its own embodied texture, and ISP works with that texture directly.
The Relational Body
How the body knows other bodies — the felt sense of connection, of safety with another, of being met or unseen. Much of psychological difficulty lives at this relational-embodied level.
Integrated Embodiment
The capacity to inhabit all five dimensions simultaneously and fluidly. This is what ISP cultivates over time: a more fully embodied, integrated way of being in oneself and in the world.
Embodiment is not a destination. It is the gradual expansion of your capacity to be fully here — in your body, in your feelings, in your mind, in your relationships — without having to leave any part of yourself behind.
Newmarket Therapy CentreHow ISP Works at Newmarket Therapy Centre
ISP at Newmarket Therapy Centre is gentle, gradual, and shaped to your particular capacity. The work is not about pushing through to insight — it is about expanding what you can experience, hold, and bring into relationship over time.
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Building embodied awareness
Your therapist supports you in building moment-to-moment somatic awareness — what you sense in the body, how the breath moves, what shifts in different states. This is the foundation of all ISP work.
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Expanding capacity
Together you build the capacity to hold and feel more — gradually widening your tolerance for emotion, sensation, and experience that may have felt overwhelming. Capacity is built slowly and sustainably.
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Working across the five bodies
As the work deepens, your therapist supports engagement with whichever dimension is calling for attention — the energetic body in one session, the relational body in another, the emotional body when grief arises. The work follows the system.
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Integrated embodiment
Over time, the capacity to inhabit all five dimensions fluidly becomes a lived reality. You arrive at sessions, at relationships, at your own life from a more fully embodied place — and that embodiment becomes the foundation for sustained change.
The Benefits of ISP
ISP supports profound and sustained change across a wide range of presentations — and is particularly valuable for people who have done significant therapy and want to take their work into deeper embodied integration.
- Expanded capacity for emotional experience
- Greater embodied presence in daily life
- Increased energy, vitality, and aliveness
- Deeper sense of connection in relationships
- Resolution of trauma across multiple levels
- Integration of mind, body, emotion, and relationship
- Sustainable felt sense of wholeness
- Capacity that continues building between sessions
- Foundation for ongoing psychological growth
- Compatible with and deepening of other therapeutic work
What ISP Is Used For
ISP supports a wide range of presentations and is particularly powerful for complex difficulties that involve multiple dimensions of experience — body, emotion, relationship, and meaning.
ISP at Newmarket Therapy Centre
Our ISP-trained therapists at Newmarket Therapy Centre have completed formal training in Integral Somatic Psychology with Raja Selvam and bring this comprehensive embodied framework to their clinical work. ISP is available for individuals and adolescents, and is often woven into longer-term therapeutic work where embodied depth is called for.
Sessions are available in person at Newmarket Therapy Centre or online for clients anywhere in Ontario. If you are specifically seeking ISP, please mention this when you contact us so Susan can match you with an ISP-trained therapist on our team.
Ready to Get Started?
Our intake team is here to answer your questions and match you with the right ISP-trained therapist at Newmarket Therapy Centre. No commitment required.