Okay. I’m noticing the sensation. I’m being curious. I’m telling myself I’m safe.So…why is it still here? If you’ve ever tried somatic tracking and had some version of that thought, welcome to the club.
Somatic tracking is one of the core techniques used in Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT), and on paper, it sounds almost ridiculously simple: notice a sensation in your body without fear. That’s it. Except, of course, that is not always it.
When you’ve spent months or years afraid of a symptom, monitoring it, trying to understand it, Googling it, avoiding things because of it, and desperately wanting it to go away, calmly observing that same sensation can feel anything but simple. And sometimes we turn somatic tracking into one more way to try to get rid of it. I know I have.
So let’s talk about what somatic tracking actually is—and, maybe more importantly, what it isn’t.
Somatic tracking is paying attention differently
Somatic tracking is a practice used in Pain Reprocessing Therapy to help change the way the brain responds to physical sensations. Instead of reacting to a sensation with fear, resistance, frustration, or an immediate attempt to fix it, you practice noticing it with curiosity and a sense of safety.
That might mean noticing where exactly you feel a sensation, what its quality is, whether it feels localized or more widespread, or whether it stays exactly the same from moment to moment. Maybe it feels like pressure. Tightness. Tingling. Warmth. Maybe it has clear edges, or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it moves while you’re observing it. Maybe absolutely nothing interesting happens. That last possibility is allowed.
People with chronic symptoms are often already very good at paying attention to their bodies. You probably don’t need someone to teach you that. You may know exactly how your back feels when you wake up, how your stomach reacts after lunch, which movements make your shoulder hurt, whether today’s dizziness is a three or a six, and whether that weird sensation in your foot was there yesterday. But that’s not necessarily somatic tracking.
When we’re monitoring symptoms, our attention usually has a job: Is it still there? Is it getting worse? What did I do? Did that movement make it flare? What if it doesn’t stop? We’re gathering information because we’re trying to determine whether something is wrong. With somatic tracking, we’re still paying attention, but we’re trying to change the quality of that attention. Instead of Is this getting worse?, it might be, Huh. What does this actually feel like? Instead of immediately figuring out what caused the sensation, we allow ourselves to experience it for a moment without solving it.
Imagine you’re sitting on your couch and hear a strange sound outside. If you think someone is breaking into your house, you listen very differently. Every creak matters. Every little sound means something. Your body tenses while you wait for the next one. Now imagine you know your neighbor is outside attempting to assemble a new patio set. Same noises. Completely different experience. You still hear the banging. You just aren’t treating it like an emergency. That’s closer to what we’re trying to do with somatic tracking.
The problem is that you still want the symptom to go away
There is an elephant in the room here: you want to feel better. I have yet to meet the person who came to PRT because they wanted to become exceptionally talented at peacefully observing pain for the rest of their life. We want the symptoms to go away. That’s why we’re here. And this is exactly where somatic tracking can get sneaky. You notice the sensation. Okay, I’m curious. You check. Still hurts. Fine. I’m safe. Check again. Still hurts. I’m allowing it. Another check. WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE? At that point, we’re not really observing the sensation anymore. We’re standing over it with a clipboard waiting for it to leave. I’ve been there.
This was something I had to learn in my own recovery too. There can be an enormous difference between genuinely allowing a sensation to be there and performing acceptance because you’ve heard that acceptance is supposed to make it go away. I could say all the right things to myself and still have an internal agenda that was essentially, Okay, brain. I did the thing. You may remove the pain now. The brain isn’t stupid.
This is why the goal during somatic tracking is not necessarily to make the sensation decrease. The question is closer to: Can I experience this sensation, even briefly, without treating it as dangerous? Sometimes the sensation changes. Sometimes it decreases. Sometimes it moves somewhere else or feels different. Great. And sometimes it stays exactly where it was. That doesn’t automatically mean the practice failed.
I’m often much more interested in what happened between you and the sensation. Maybe it was still there, but for thirty seconds you weren’t terrified of it. Maybe you noticed something you’d never noticed before. Maybe your first instinct wasn’t to stretch it, fix it, Google it, or figure out what you did wrong. Maybe you caught yourself thinking, Oh, there you are, instead of Oh no. Those can seem like tiny differences. From a nervous-system perspective, they aren’t.
You don’t have to convince yourself perfectly
One thing I don’t love about the way somatic tracking is sometimes explained is the idea that you simply observe a symptom and tell yourself you’re safe. Because what happens when you don’t actually believe that? Maybe 60% of you thinks the pain could be neuroplastic, and the other 40% is currently preparing a PowerPoint presentation titled Reasons My Back Is Definitely Broken. That part gets to come too.
You don’t need 100% certainty before you can practice relating to a sensation differently. Sometimes the most believable message is not This is definitely safe. It’s What if this is safer than it feels? Or I’ve had this sensation before, and nothing terrible happened. Or even I don’t have to figure this out in the next thirty seconds. For me, that kind of language matters because I don’t want safety to become another thing we force. If every part of your body is screaming that something is wrong, white-knuckling your way through ten minutes of staring at the sensation while repeating I AM SAFE probably isn’t creating the experience we’re after.
Sometimes we back up. We look around the room. We notice something neutral or pleasant. We feel our feet against the floor. We talk about something else for a minute. We let your attention move away from the symptom. Safety doesn’t have to mean proving that you can stare down a sensation indefinitely. Sometimes safety looks like realizing you don’t have to keep checking it at all.
This is why somatic tracking can be surprisingly hard to do alone
On paper, the instructions seem simple enough. Notice the sensation. Get curious. Remind yourself that you may be safe. But when it’s your symptom- and you’ve been afraid of it for months or years- it can be surprisingly difficult to tell whether you’re approaching it with curiosity or just very calmly monitoring it and hoping it goes away.
This is one of the main things I work on with clients.
When I’m guiding someone through somatic tracking, I’m listening to more than their description of the sensation. I’m paying attention to how they’re responding to it. Are they scared? Frustrated? Trying really hard to “do PRT correctly”? Are they giving me an update every five seconds because some part of them is still checking whether the sensation is changing? Are they so focused on the symptom that getting even more curious about its exact shape and location is actually making them more hypervigilant? That information changes what I do next.
With one person, we might get really curious about the sensation. With someone else, we might zoom out because focusing closely on it is making everything worse. We might bring in movement, humor, imagery, a pleasant sensation, or something completely unrelated to the symptom. Sometimes we spend thirty seconds with a sensation. Sometimes longer. Sometimes I decide that continuing to focus on it is the least useful thing we could do at that moment. There isn’t one perfect somatic tracking script.
And I think that’s important, because I’ve talked with people who tried somatic tracking on their own and concluded either that they were doing it wrong or that PRT simply didn’t work for them. Meanwhile, when we actually look at what they’ve been doing, they’ve spent ten minutes intensely monitoring a symptom while waiting for it to decrease. That’s useful information. It gives us somewhere to work.
The same is true if you get scared halfway through, become annoyed that the sensation is still there, desperately want it gone, or forget everything you know about neuroplasticity the second your pain spikes and think, Nope. This one is definitely structural. Welcome to having a human brain. The goal isn’t to respond perfectly every time a symptom appears. And it definitely isn’t to become so good at somatic tracking that you spend the rest of your life closely observing every sensation your body produces. The goal is much bigger than that. We’re practicing a different response often enough that your brain has the opportunity to learn something new: Maybe I don’t have to be so afraid of this.
And eventually, the thing I want for my clients isn’t that they become experts at somatic tracking. It’s that they need it less. That they can feel a twinge and keep making dinner. Notice their stomach and continue the conversation. Wake up with a sensation that once would have dictated the entire day and realize a few hours later that they forgot to keep checking it. That’s the direction we’re headed. Not perfect observation. Not perfect safety. And definitely not a lifetime of standing over your symptoms with a clipboard.
If you’d like to explore this with an audio practice, you can find my free guided practices here. There’s no need to do it perfectly or make a sensation change—just an opportunity to practice a different response.
If you’ve tried somatic tracking on your own and keep wondering whether you’re doing it “right,” or if you understand the concept but can’t seem to get out of monitoring mode, that’s exactly the kind of thing I work through with clients. We can look at your symptoms, what happens when you pay attention to them, where fear sneaks in, and what might work better for your particular nervous system.
I offer free 15-minute connect calls if you’d like to talk about what you’ve been experiencing and whether working together through Pain Reprocessing Therapy might make sense.
About the Author
Amberleigh Maida, ICF-ACC, is an Advanced Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) Practitioner with additional training in Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy (EAET). Having experienced and recovered from years of debilitating chronic pain herself, she brings both professional training and lived experience to her work. She also holds a master’s degree in creative writing with a focus on nonfiction. Through her writing, she explores neuroplastic symptoms, the brain-body connection, and evidence-based approaches to chronic pain and other persistent symptoms.
Learn more about Amberleigh’s personal story and approach or explore her professional credentials and training.
