Somatic Therapy and Explorations
“Talking can convey a defense against feeling... and that’s why some of the best therapy is largely non verbal, where the main task of the therapist is to help people feel what they feel - to notice what they notice, to see how things flow within themselves, and to re-establish their sense of time inside”
-Bessel van der Kolk
My Approach to Somatic Work
The path of exploring what is arising within your unique experience through somatic experiencing naturally unfolds into a gentle unification of all areas of being. This wholeness happens within each moment of our attention and tending. Building your ability to witness your life with awareness and clarity. A fluidity emerges along with new states of being and becoming.
Somatic Therapy helps individuals discover, or rediscovery, the resiliency to step into life experiences as embodied beings capable of navigating life’s most difficult challenges. Through somatic work, innate body-wisdom becomes a natural state as we break free of fossilized identities and exist in a state of becoming and emerging. Physical pain, emotional difficulties (such an anxiety, panic, depression, and frustration) and other primary complaint symptoms often decrease and sometimes disappear.
Somatic Therapy is a a collaborative practice between client and therapist, between you and me, where we discover together how to create the best initial conditions for you to recover and build upon your resilience, ease and resourcefulness. I gently guide, listen, witness and reflect.
Somatic practice includes educational components, helping you to understand and build a deeper relationship with your body- wisdom, emotional states and nervous system. My primary training in somatic therapy is with Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing model. I am currently an Intermediate Somatic Experiencing Practitioner in Training. I have also studied Sexual Trauma and Sexuality with Ariel Giaretto, Jungian Somatics with Jane Clapp, Sensorimotor Art Therapy with Cornelia Elbrecht, Neurodivergence and Trauma with Janae Elisabeth and Mytho-somatics with Joshua Schrei. My understanding of the somatic experience is broad and depth seeking. While I understand and provide education on multiple models of the nervous system, my focus does does not rest on nervous system down-regulation or “regulating” you, but on increasing your body awareness and increasing your ability to explore repressed emotion, feeling states and interior physical sensations. We do this work together in curiosity: allowing, accepting, surrendering to the enfolding and unfolding movements of your natural somatic states. Somatic exploration is about relationship - being witnessed and being the witness.
In session I may use any of the following: somatic based art therapy called bi-lateral body mapping, guided meditations, movement, touch, active imagination, art, music, sound, voice work, interoception, exteroception, proprioception, equilibrioception, and neuroception to gently guide individuals into a more conscious relationship with their bodies. We unpack myths and personal narratives while building meaning and ritual to celebrate you.
I follow a staged approach beginning with safety and stabilization, fostering self-regulation and trust in the therapeutic relationship before proceeding with the processing of deeper traumatic material.
“The body is the mother of language; our prelinguistic mother tongue, the primal voice of movement.”
— Alkistis Dimech
Somatic Therapy has been recognized as an effective treatment approach for:
sexual trauma from childhood/adulthood, incest, rape, assault, molestation;
post traumatic stress from combat, vehicle accidents, surgeries and other physical impacts;
depression, stress, panic, anxiety; relationship problems,
chronic pain and illness;
grief and sudden loss;
systemic oppression, bullying;
addictive behaviors, including sexual addiction and eating disorders;
body shame and dysphoria;
relationship problems/conscious relationships
unconscious developmental/ attachment trauma;
conscious dying;
and spiritual unfolding.
Pain held in is pain. Pain let out is dance. Worry held in is worry. Worry let out is the cry of a bird that lives on the branch of the heart that no one sees. Sorrow held in is sorrow. But sorrow let out is the song of the continents moving together.
-Mark Nepo
Somatic Resources
“The path of exploration is the natural unfolding that acceptance, allowance and surrender cultivates. It leads to a fluid, direct, somatic unfolding, enfolding, and refinement of the uniqueness of each being as fundamental to the whole.”
— Thessa Sophia