Somatic Therapy includes Somatic Counseling and Somatic Bodywork. Benefits can include healing from the ongoing impacts of social conditions and traumatic experiences, developing skills for navigating conflict and challenging situations, and loving yourself and others more deeply.

There are three essential components to Somatic Therapy:

Body awareness: Leaving our bodies through dissociation and numbing is a normal response to trauma, oppression, and difficult life experiences. We will work together to connect/reconnect to the sensations in your body. The sensations we can and can’t feel in our body inform our mood, narrative and experience. We will build a language around your physical sensations and emotions and increase your capacity to be with difficult or uncomfortable feelings to bring more agency and choice into your life, and to increase our internal sense of safety.

Interactive practices: You will practice embodied boundary setting, making requests, and building trust and intimacy. We will build these life skills that you never learned in your family or from mainstream culture. You will increase your capacity to connect with yourself and others and take life-affirming actions to move toward what you care about.

Bodywork: Somatic bodywork is done fully clothed, lying on a massage table with your eyes open or closed. It’s participatory, which means that we will both bring our attention to sensations in your body and make meaning from those sensations. I will invite you into breath patterns that will help you access aliveness in your body, and I will make contact with you through touch. We will work together with compassion and curiosity to hear the stories your body wants to tell and transform.