When the Climate Crisis Enters the Body: Somatic Shamanism, Creativity and Climate Anxiety

This summer has made the climate crisis feel painfully physical. In the UK, repeated heatwaves culminated in temperatures reaching 38.1°C at Kew Gardens on 13 August, the fifth hottest day recorded in the country. After weeks of unusual heat and prolonged dry weather, climate change can stop feeling distant or abstract. It is experienced through the body: in sleepless nights, fatigue, irritability, restlessness and the uneasy feeling that the seasons themselves are becoming unfamiliar. (Met Office)

The World Health Organization recognises climate change as a growing threat to mental health and psychological wellbeing, associated with distress, anxiety, grief and depression. Extreme heat can itself aggravate mental health difficulties. In this context, therapeutic approaches that engage not only the thinking mind but also the body, imagination and our relationship with the living world have an increasingly important role to play. (World Health Organization)

Why Somatic Shamanism?

Somatic Shamanism is the approach at the heart of my therapeutic practice. Developed by Christine Holt, it brings together shamanic, Taoist and yogic traditions with contemporary therapeutic approaches. In my work, this can include deep listening, body awareness, parts work, Internal Family Systems, Focusing, Polyvagal-informed practice, breathwork and shamanic journeying. Rather than beginning only with “What do you think?”, somatic work also asks: What is happening in your body? Where do you feel this? What happens when we stay with it? (Therapeutic Shamanic Healing)

This matters with climate anxiety because our response to ecological crisis is not purely intellectual. We can understand the statistics and still find ourselves frozen, overwhelmed or numb. We may oscillate between compulsively reading the news and wanting to avoid it altogether. Somatic practice gives us ways to notice these responses without immediately trying to suppress them, and to find enough steadiness to remain present with difficult feelings.

Shamanism adds another dimension. It is rooted in an animistic understanding of the world: the recognition that humans are not separate from nature, but participants within a much larger living ecology. In Somatic Shamanism, relationships with plants, animals, landscapes and archetypal imagery can become resources for reflection, connection and healing. This wider perspective can be especially powerful when ecological loss creates feelings of helplessness and isolation. (Therapy With Alicia)

Climate anxiety does not necessarily mean that something has gone wrong inside us. Anxiety, grief and anger can be understandable responses to witnessing damage to a world we love. The task is therefore not always to make those feelings disappear. It can be to build our capacity to feel them without becoming consumed by them, and to rediscover connection, agency, pleasure and care alongside grief.

The recent heatwave shows why this embodied dimension matters. Heat changes how we sleep, move, work and relate to one another. It can leave us feeling physically and emotionally stretched before we have consciously named what is happening. Somatic Shamanism offers a space to slow down and listen.

Therapeutic or spiritual practices should not, however, minimise the material reality of climate change. Inner work needs to sit alongside practical care, community, public-health advice and meaningful ecological action. The aim is not to become comfortable with climate breakdown, but to become more able to meet difficult realities without shutting down.

Creativity as a response to climate anxiety

Alongside being a therapist, I am also a professional artist, and creativity forms another important strand of my practice. I run creative visualisation sessions that use guided imagery, somatic awareness and making to explore experiences that can be difficult to reach through words alone.

Creative practice can be especially useful with climate anxiety because it gives form to feelings that may otherwise remain diffuse. The British Association of Art Therapists has highlighted the potential of nature-based creative practice to help people express ecological grief and anxiety while developing agency, connection and a stronger relationship with place. (baat.org)

You do not need to consider yourself an artist to use creativity in this way. You might:

• Draw a climate feelings map of your body, using shape, line or colour to locate fear, anger, grief, hope and energy.

• Spend time with a tree, stone or plant, noticing its texture, age and presence, then draw or write from the perspective of that more-than-human being.

• Make something from what is already around you: scraps, fallen leaves, old paper, packaging or broken objects.

• Visualise the landscape you want future generations to inherit, then draw, write or make something from that image. Ask yourself what actions it invites you to take now.

• Create with other people. Draw, write, make or simply talk together about climate feelings. Creativity can transform private anxiety into shared witnessing, connection and, potentially, action.

For me, this is where Somatic Shamanism and art meet. Both invite us away from the idea that healing happens only through analysis. Both involve attention, imagination, relationship and embodied experience. And both can remind us that we belong to a world much larger than ourselves.

In a time of climate crisis, that sense of belonging is not an escape from reality. It can be one of the resources that helps us face reality: feeling what is happening, caring for ourselves and one another, staying connected to the living world, and finding meaningful ways to act.