What is Somatic Therapy?
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Somatic therapy is a pathway to embodiment. To bringing your self, your being, your spirit back into your body – gently, over time. We are trained away from our bodies for many traumatizing reasons. Often we have to move through the world with a level of defended protectiveness and disconnect just in order to survive. Many people have become disconnected from their bodies through violence, abuse, legacies of colonization, and ongoing oppression. Your body may also feel like a trap, a painful place that does not align with your gender or your sense of self.
You may feel deeply unsafe in your body, and afraid to reconnect or build a relationship with your body’s needs. Somatic therapy should never push past this. Instead somatic therapy offers gentle, supported practices to begin to explore your current relationship with your body.
It simultaneously makes space for trauma experiences and disconnect, while building up practices that can feel more safe and supported. Somatic therapy can connect you to the wisdom of your ancestors that lives on within you, as well as slowly help unwind the habitual patterns of movement that you’ve inherited. It does not take away your ability to protect or defend yourself from ongoing oppression. Instead it helps build choice and intentionality around the need for protection, a space to grieve the need for protection, as well as practices where you can connect to safety and nourishment to hold you.
What does a Somatic Therapist do?
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We’ll start by exploring your current relationship and awareness of your body. We’ll practice slowly inviting in awareness of sensations, images, and places of numbness and disconnect. Without pushing past them, we’ll use arts practices, guided visualizations, talking, or gentle, small movement practices to explore these sensations. We’ll get to know why they are there, what they offer you, and how they protect you. We may explore how they came to be, and their connection to your ancestry and legacies. And through knowing and exploring them, we’ll slowly begin to invite in new ways of being within your body.
As you build trust and safety within your own body, we can begin to explore moving in between defended places and places of more expansion and freedom.
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In one session, we may start with some small movements like holding a pillow to create a physical sense of support and security. Then we may draw about the experiences and discuss what feelings it brought up for you. In the next session we may start with that holding place, then gently explore moving away from holding into stretching. We’ll also explore what this brings up within you, and practice moving in between the two spaces.
In addition, we may begin to explore embodiment practices from your ancestry. Envisioning what it would be like for your body to move within those practices, as well as try some of the practices together. We’ll also create somatic movements to help hold legacies of anger, grief, and loss and move with those energies – instead of feeling them get stuck inside you. Additionally we’ll work with numbness, disconnect, and disassociation related to trauma and/or gender identity to build up your body as place worthy of care and capable of receiving support and love – no matter how you feel about it now.
What happens in a session and how we work with your body is always completely up to your control. Somatic therapy can bring up a out of deep, ancestral experiences. We’ll move at the pace that is right for you.
You and your body have full consent over how you engage in the work together. We’ll practice checking for that consent through your body’s cues and language. And we’ll practice not pushing through, instead honoring what it says. Slowly, gently, we’ll begin to repair the disconnect between you and your body. We’ll work together to invite you back into the sacred home of your being.
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I offer a variety of services that can support you on your journey:
For solo journeyers, we will work together to build a sense of safety, connection, and embodiment so you may reclaim your joy, self-love, aliveness, and community.
For partners, I offer couples therapy. We will create a path of more clear and aligned communication. You’ll learn practices to deepen intimacy with each other and your own selves.
For groups, I offer Soul Sanctuary: LGBTQ Empaths. We will come together to explore how to incorporate creativity, spirituality, and healing on the path of activism.
I specialize in supporting LGBQA and TGNC folx. I also offer a variety of therapy modalities, including: spiritual therapy, somatic therapy, expressive arts therapy, and ecotherapy
