Your body holds wisdom your mind has forgotten. It remembers every stress pattern, stores every unprocessed emotion, and maintains rhythms that modern life constantly disrupts. When hormones feel chaotic, when anxiety lives in your chest, when exhaustion persists despite adequate sleep—these aren't failures to fix but signals to understand. True healing doesn't come from overriding your body's messages; it comes from learning to hear them. Completely Chantelle offers Somatic Therapy in Lisbon and UK that helps women restore the connection between body, hormones, and Nervous System—moving from Surviving to Thriving through embodied, holistic practice.
When Your Body Feels Like a Stranger
So many women describe feeling disconnected from themselves. The body becomes something to manage rather than inhabit—a source of symptoms to suppress rather than wisdom to access. This disconnection develops gradually through years of:
- Pushing through exhaustion instead of resting
- Ignoring hunger and fullness cues
- Overriding emotional signals with productivity
- Living in chronic stress without recognising its toll
- Disconnecting from cyclical rhythms in favour of constant output
The results are predictable but often misunderstood. Hormonal imbalances that medication masks but doesn't resolve. Anxiety that therapy addresses cognitively but still lives in the body. Fatigue that rest doesn't touch because the nervous system never truly settles. Cycles that feel like monthly chaos rather than natural rhythm.
Completely Chantelle addresses these patterns at their root—not by adding more strategies to an overwhelmed system, but by restoring the body-mind connection that makes self-regulation natural again.
Understanding Somatic Practice
"Somatic" simply means "of the body." Somatic body oriented coaching recognises that we don't just think our experiences—we feel them physically, store them cellularly, and express them through posture, breath, tension, and movement.
Traditional talk therapy addresses thoughts and beliefs. This matters, but thoughts represent only part of experience. The body holds the rest—the racing heart during difficult conversations, the shoulder tension that never releases, the shallow breathing that has become normal, the gut responses that logic can't override.
Somatic practice works with these physical patterns directly. Rather than only discussing anxiety, you learn to feel where it lives in your body and how to release it. Rather than just understanding stress cognitively, you develop embodied capacity to shift your nervous system state.
This approach proves particularly powerful for:
Trauma work: Trauma lives in the body as much as the mind. Somatic approaches access what cognitive processing alone cannot reach, allowing resolution of patterns that talk therapy may circle indefinitely.
Nervous System Regulation: The autonomic nervous system—fight, flight, freeze, or rest—determines much of how we feel and function. Somatic practice builds capacity to shift states consciously rather than being hijacked by unconscious reactions.
Hormonal Health: Hormones don't exist in isolation from the nervous system. Chronic stress directly disrupts hormonal balance. Somatic work that settles the nervous system creates conditions where hormones can rebalance naturally.
Emotional Processing: Emotions are physical experiences before they're mental ones. Learning to feel and move emotions through the body prevents the accumulation that creates chronic tension and dysregulation.
Women's Hormonal Health: Beyond Symptom Management
Women's hormonal health involves intricate rhythms that modern life often ignores entirely. We're expected to perform identically every day—same energy, same productivity, same emotional availability—when our bodies cycle through dramatically different states each month.
This mismatch creates problems conventional medicine typically addresses through suppression. Difficult periods? Take hormonal contraception to override natural cycles. PMS? Here's medication for the symptoms. Perimenopause chaos? Hormone replacement to smooth the transition.
These interventions have their place, but they don't address underlying imbalances—they mask them. Meanwhile, the body's attempts to communicate get silenced rather than heard.
Completely Chantelle's approach as a women's hormonal health practitioner works differently. Rather than suppressing symptoms, we explore what they're signaling. Rather than overriding cycles, we learn to work with them. Rather than treating hormones in isolation, we address the nervous system patterns, lifestyle factors, and emotional patterns that influence hormonal function.
This might include:
Cycle Awareness: Understanding your menstrual cycle as a vital sign rather than an inconvenience. Learning to recognise patterns, optimise activities for different cycle phases, and identify early signals of imbalance.
Stress Pattern Recognition: Identifying how your particular stress patterns affect your hormonal health. Chronic stress elevates cortisol, which directly disrupts reproductive hormones. You can't supplement your way out of a stress problem.
Lifestyle Alignment: Sleep, movement, nutrition, and rest patterns that support rather than disrupt hormonal balance. Not restrictive protocols but sustainable adjustments aligned with your body's actual needs.
Emotional Regulation: Emotional states directly affect hormonal states and vice versa. Building capacity for emotional regulation supports hormonal stability; hormonal balance enables better emotional regulation.
The Nervous System Foundation
Everything connects to the nervous system. Hormonal balance requires a regulated nervous system. Emotional wellbeing depends on nervous system capacity. Physical health reflects nervous system state. Even spiritual connection becomes accessible when the nervous system feels safe.
Most women live in chronic sympathetic activation—the "fight or flight" branch that evolution designed for occasional emergencies, not constant engagement. This state served ancestors facing genuine physical threats. It serves modern women facing emails, deadlines, and difficult conversations much less well.
Chronic sympathetic activation:
- Elevates cortisol, disrupting other hormones
- Impairs digestion and nutrient absorption
- Reduces immune function
- Interrupts sleep quality regardless of duration
- Keeps emotional responses reactive rather than responsive
- Creates the persistent background anxiety many women accept as normal
Completely Chantelle focuses significantly on nervous system restoration. This isn't about never feeling stressed—that's neither possible nor desirable. It's about building capacity to return to regulation after stress, rather than accumulating activation indefinitely.
Somatic practices build this capacity through the body rather than through cognitive effort alone. The nervous system learns through experience, not instruction. Telling yourself to relax rarely works; showing your body safety through sensation and movement actually shifts the system.
Trauma Work: Completing What the Body Started
Trauma work within somatic practice recognises that trauma isn't just what happened—it's what happens in the body when overwhelming experiences aren't fully processed.
During threatening experiences, the body initiates survival responses. These responses involve massive physiological mobilisation—stress hormones, muscle activation, heightened sensation. When circumstances prevent completing these responses—fighting back, fleeing to safety—the activation remains stored in the body.
This stored activation underlies many chronic symptoms: unexplained anxiety, persistent tension, emotional reactions that seem disproportionate, difficulty feeling safe even in safe situations. The body remains prepared for danger that has passed.
Somatic trauma work allows these incomplete responses to complete. Not by re-traumatising through detailed trauma narrative, but by carefully accessing and releasing stored activation. The body finally discharges what it's been holding, often for years or decades.
This release creates space that symptoms previously occupied. Chronic tension softens. Hypervigilance settles. Emotional bandwidth expands. The nervous system finally updates its threat assessment to match current reality.
From Surviving to Thriving
Many women have normalised mere survival. Getting through days rather than enjoying them. Managing symptoms rather than experiencing vitality. Coping rather than flourishing.
Surviving to thriving isn't about adding more—more supplements, more practices, more effort. It's about removing what blocks natural wellbeing. When the nervous system regulates, when hormones balance, when stored trauma releases, when the body-mind connection restores—thriving becomes the natural state rather than the impossible goal.
This transformation looks different for each woman, but common experiences include:
- Energy that sustains through the day without artificial support
- Emotional responses that feel proportionate and manageable
- Sleep that actually restores rather than merely passes time
- Cycles that flow predictably without monthly dread
- Stress that resolves rather than accumulates
- Joy and pleasure that arise spontaneously rather than requiring effort
- Trust in your own body's wisdom and signals
Women's Empowerment Through Embodiment
True women's empowerment isn't about doing more or being more. It's about coming home to yourself—trusting your body, honoring your rhythms, and living from an internal authority that external circumstances can't shake.
This empowerment is embodied rather than conceptual. You don't just believe you're worthy of care—you actually care for yourself. You don't just know boundaries matter—you feel boundary violations in your body and respond accordingly. You don't just understand your cycles intellectually—you live in rhythm with them.
Completely Chantelle guides this journey from disconnection to embodied empowerment. The work isn't about becoming someone different but about returning to who you already are beneath the adaptations, the chronic stress, the accumulated tension.
Working with Chantelle
Sessions with Completely Chantelle blend somatic practice with hormonal health guidance, addressing both the nervous system patterns underlying symptoms and the practical lifestyle factors affecting hormonal balance.
This might include:
- Guided somatic practices for nervous system regulation
- Body awareness exercises reconnecting you with internal signals
- Breathwork and movement for releasing stored tension
- Cycle tracking and pattern identification
- Lifestyle assessment and adjustment guidance
- Emotional regulation skill building
- Trauma processing when appropriate
The work meets you where you are. Whether you're managing significant symptoms or simply sensing that more vitality is possible, the approach adapts to your specific situation, capacity, and goals.
Serving Women in Lisbon and the UK
Completely Chantelle serves women in both Portugal and the United Kingdom, offering Hormonal Health in Lisbon and UK through a practice that bridges both locations.
This dual presence reflects the reality of modern life—women living internationally, relocating between countries, or simply seeking practitioners whose approach resonates regardless of geography. Online sessions make somatic work accessible wherever you're located, while in-person sessions offer deeper embodied work when geography permits.
Whether you're in Lisbon, London, or elsewhere, the work of reconnecting with your body, balancing your hormones, and restoring your nervous system remains the same—and remains available to you.
Beginning Your Journey Home
The path from disconnection to embodiment, from survival to thriving, starts with acknowledging that something different is possible. Your body isn't broken—it's been trying to communicate through the only language it has. Learning to listen changes everything.
Completely Chantelle offers the guidance, space, and expertise to support this journey. Somatic practice that meets your body where it is. Hormonal health understanding that honors your rhythms. Nervous system support that builds genuine capacity for regulation and resilience.
You deserve to feel at home in your body. That feeling is possible—not through more effort, but through the kind of deep, embodied healing that restores what was always meant to be yours.
Ready to reconnect with your body and restore hormonal balance? Visit Completely Chantelle for somatic therapy and women's hormonal health support in Lisbon and the UK—guiding women from surviving to thriving through embodied, holistic practice.