Cultural Considerations in Body-Based Therapy

I remember sitting cross-legged on the floor of a small room in India, watching an older woman comfort a crying child.

There was no discussion about emotional regulation. Nobody was explaining attachment theory. She simply pulled the child towards her, held him against her body and continued talking to the women around her. The crying softened. His head settled against her shoulder. Within a few minutes, he was watching everyone else again.

Culture shapes how we experience the body long before we have words for it.

I saw this repeatedly during my years in Kenya and India. People had very different ways of expressing distress, comfort and connection. Grief might be carried communally rather than privately. Physical closeness could be ordinary between people as community and connection are embedded in the culture. Sitting together in silence could communicate something that, in another setting, might require a long conversation.

These experiences changed how I think about body-based therapy.

The body is universal. The meaning we give to what happens in the body is not.

A tight chest may be familiar to someone as a sign of anxiety. Another person may understand that same sensation as a spiritual experience, a warning, grief, anger or something connected to a particular relationship. If I walk into a therapeutic relationship assuming my interpretation is the correct one, I can very easily miss what the person's body is actually communicating.

This is where cultural humility becomes essential.

I once worked with someone who found the idea of closing their eyes during a body-awareness exercise deeply uncomfortable. The exercise itself was simple, and I initially wondered why there was so much resistance. When we explored it together, the meaning became clearer. Closing the eyes had a very different association for this person because of experiences from their cultural and family environment. What I had thought was a straightforward invitation to feel safe was not being received that way at all.

The exercise was not the problem.

My assumption was.

This is an easy trap in somatic work because the language of the body can sound universal. We talk about grounding, regulation, safety and connection as though everyone arrives with the same map.

Yet our bodies develop within families, communities, languages, histories and belief systems. We learn what touch means. We learn whether tears are welcomed or hidden. We learn whether speaking about suffering brings people closer or creates shame.

We also learn what kinds of bodies are considered acceptable.

Some cultures encourage emotional restraint. Others have rich traditions of openly expressing grief, joy, anger or devotion through movement and sound. Some people grow up with regular physical contact between generations. Others learn very early that their body belongs to them and touch must always be negotiated carefully.

None of these differences can simply be labelled healthy or unhealthy.

They have to be understood.

This is particularly important when working with trauma. A therapist may invite someone to notice their body, yet for a person whose body has historically been watched, judged, controlled or violated, increased bodily awareness can initially feel exposing. The therapeutic task then becomes creating enough choice for the person to decide how much contact with their own sensations feels possible.

I think this is one of the great strengths of body-based therapy when it is practised with curiosity. The therapist does not have to arrive with a fixed interpretation. We can become interested together.

What happens in your chest when you talk about home? What happens in your breathing when someone stands close? Where in your body do you feel belonging?

Those questions can open very different doors depending on who is sitting in front of you.

Traditional healing systems have understood this relationship between body, community and emotional life for centuries. Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine and many Indigenous healing traditions have never treated the body as merely the container for a psychological mind. Their frameworks differ enormously from one another, and they should not be collapsed into one convenient category called 'Eastern wisdom'. Yet there is a shared recognition in many of these traditions that wellbeing involves the whole person within their environment and relationships.

Western psychology is increasingly rediscovering parts of this understanding through somatic therapies and contemporary neuroscience.

For me, the lesson is less about choosing one cultural approach over another. It is about becoming curious enough to recognise that my own understanding is also culturally shaped.

I carry assumptions into the therapy room.

So does everyone else.

The work becomes richer when we can notice them.

Sometimes cultural sensitivity is not a technique at all. It is the willingness to slow down when something does not make sense, to ask rather than assume, and to let another person's experience teach us what their body means to them.

I think back to that woman in India and the child resting against her shoulder. She did not need a theory to know that he needed closeness.

Her body knew.

His body knew.

And perhaps the therapeutic skill is learning to listen closely enough that we do not mistake our own cultural language for the body's only language.

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