Living an Embodied Life – Relational Somatic Healing – Receiving as the Key to Softening Our Emotional, Physical & Spiritual Body – Healing Family of Origin & Early Developmental Trauma – Building Resilience & Nervous System Regulation.
As we slowly ease towards the warmth of summer, and spring begins to let go of her grip on the natural world, notice how the warmth of the sun lands on your face, chest and body – allow yourself to drop in to this moment – and receive all that is here for you now.
There is so much beauty and expansion to experience at this time of year – does your body feel open to experiencing it? No matter what is happening for you right now – slow down and notice. I want to support you to develop a clear channel to receive support, softness and healing through your body.
Somatic Healing from early developmental (hidden) trauma happens through both body-centered (somatic) approaches that include innovative and leading-edge modalities. I am deeply committed to a whole person approach to supporting clients, and allowing healing to happen from the inside out and the bottom up; not just coping better with symptoms or changing thought patterns. I will focus on healing the nervous system, nurturing resilience and increasing a client’s healthy connection with their body.
The mind and body are one and that when mind and body are integrated and regulated, capacity for service and spiritual growth expands. I will partner with each person on their healing journey and see my role on their path as not just their psychotherapist, but also their mentor, guide, confidante and safe refuge.
You are welcome here.
This work aims to heal and resolve the underlying traumatic stress that gets stored in the body during challenging experiences. I want to support your nervous system return to a more balanced state, also known as resilience or healthy nervous system regulation.
We will harness the Power of Your Body’s Wisdom for increased resilience. Your body possesses powerful and innate intelligence to heal. Our goal is to awaken people to the wisdom inherent in the body and how to access it.
Trauma, depression, anxiety, and relationship struggles are problems that exist both in the body and the mind – so the cure must involve both as well. The roots of our nervous system dysregulation begins in childhood, with our early experiences and caregivers, so our somatic healing work will also include working our family of origin, our younger part, and how our early experiences are held in the body.
When we experience challenging or life-threatening events, our body’s survival intelligence of fight, flight, freeze, fold and/or fawn turns on.
During times of danger, our bodies are meant to react but then we are meant to come back into flow. However, if our systems are not given time and care to return to flow, people get stuck in a state of nervous system imbalance, also known as dysregulation/dysregulated states which can cause a variety of physical, emotional, psychological, and mental conditions.
Resilience is defined as the capacity to recover quickly and effectively from difficulties. The way back to resilience from nervous system dysregulation happens through harnessing the power of your body’s wisdom.
Ultimately, somatic approaches restore joy, pleasure and ease, three experiences that cannot happen without a body. So, you need your body in the healing journey.
Here’s what you can expect when working with me:
- Empowerment– When recovering from trauma, feeling empowered is a vital experience. I want to support you in having a voice throughout your healing journey.
- Joy: is our birthright, an experience that every human is born with- the ability to feel pleasure. Reclaiming joy from the jaws of trauma and experiencing it to the fullest capacity we have are some of the main goals of post-traumatic growth. Feeling joy is an embodied experience and the more embodied one is, the greater the capacity for joy.
- Regulation– healing the nervous system to live more and more in the middle range of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system where you get to feel relaxed yet alert is an important component of healing. When we are regulated, more of our wisdom, experience and creativity is available so that we have more capacity to create the life we want and have fulfilling relationships.
- Attunement: is the practice of being in relationship with yourself and with others in such a way that you are intentionally aware and curious as well as compassionately receptive. When we feel attuned to and cared about in meaningful ways, this fosters an experience of feeling heard, feeling understood and feeling important. It is foundational to strong, healthy relationships and foundational for healing from trauma.
1) Somatic & Nervous System Healing is a process receiving support through a Transforming Touch, to ease patterns of discomfort in your relationships, within your body and with your relationship with yourself. We will soften and ease the allostatic load – the cumulative effects that chronic stress has on your mental and physical health – the wear and tear on the body that early developmental trauma and life events create in our lives.
You will learn about your nervous system, what triggers your nervous system states, how you can move from one nervous system state to another, and The Polyvagal Theory, among other aspects of trauma healing that you will begin to understand and practice. You will learn and practice noticing feelings of safety, and how to cultivate these feelings in your body and in your life.
For many years we can walk around without any awareness that we are looking to our partner to fill the parental void. As we start to wake up to what those needs are, we can start to pinpoint how this still triggers us, and we can almost feel relief when we make the connection.
It immediately starts to allow us to neutralize our partner in this way and the pressure is off of them but also us. When we can understand what we are doing, we can start to put that wound in it’s right place. We almost feel good about the fact that this person was never supposed to be these things for us. We look at them differently, more correctly. We see that this is from childhood and can only ever be healed from within.
The Mother Wound can manifest in many ways: problems with boundaries, giving your power away, feeling unworthy, shrinking to be accepted, being an emotional caretaker of others, etc.
The Mother Wound is also the pain of being a woman passed down through generations of women in patriarchal cultures. The core belief within the Mother Wound is a vague, persistent sense that, “There’s something wrong with me.”
Left unaddressed, this unconscious belief may touch every area of our lives. This can result in not fulfilling your potential and arranging your life around “not rocking the boat.” Our mothers were our first teachers and our first leaders.
Because we live in a patriarchal, male-dominated society, our mothers inevitably and unconsciously passed along messages that cause us to reject ourselves, to dismiss our dreams, and be small in order to survive.
These were the same messages and beliefs that she and her mothers before her had to internalize. While these messages may have helped us physically survive a hostile, unfeeling world as children, they actually inhibit our ability to step forward and live from our authentic power.
5) Father Wound Healing – the Father Wound, which refers to father absenteeism, whether emotionally or both emotionally and physically, and/or your father being very critical, negative and even abusive character, can impact individuals and their future relationships in so many ways.
We may get involved in relationships with emotionally unavailable partners, we may feel low self-esteem & low confidence, anger & rage, too rigid or too loose boundaries, and fluctuating between feelings of anxiousness and low mood.
Attachment theory focuses on how our family met (or did not meet) our physical and emotional needs in childhood reverberates and impacts how we relate to ourselves and others in friendships, relationships, parenting, work, hobbies, self-esteem, and more.
- Are you ready to become a cycle breaker in your family lineage?
- Are you ready to feel alive and awake again or for the first time?
In what area(s) is the Mother Wound showing up in your life?
In your Career, are you:
* Feeling stalled or paralyzed in taking the steps you need to fulfill your career goals
* Feeling unable to speak your ideas or take risks for fear of being exposed or criticized
* Attracting bosses who trigger you, remind you of your mother, and seem to keep you down
In your Romantic Relationships, are you:
* Attracting partners who mirror the same issues you had with your mother
* Acting codependent with your partner and feeling trapped in cycles you can’t seem to shift
* Experiencing patterns of people-pleasing, downplaying your needs, and over-functioning for your partner
In your Friendships, are you:
* Staying in friendships that don’t truly honor or respect you
* Seeing ending a friendship that isn’t working as some kind of failure on your part
* Settling for friendships that are not as reciprocal as you desire or deserve
In your Parenting, are you:
* A mom dedicated to breaking the cycles of mother-child pain
* Not wanting to repeat the same painful situations you grew up with, with your children
* Finding yourself having intense triggers with your child and unsure how to handle it
In your Family of Origin, are you:
* Feeling like the more you grow, the more tension increases with your family of origin
* Noticing that big conflicts occur when you are honest and clear through setting boundaries or doing things differently
* Having a long-standing pattern of trying to create “peace” by silencing yourself and stuffing your feelings.
If any of these could apply to you, Somatic Healing and Healing the Mother Wound could be holding you back from realizing the fulfilling life you deserve.
Let’s get started.
Cultivate heightened embodied presence, expanding your body’s intuitive genius and expressive vocabulary, and inhabiting your emotional and sensual maturity, so you can be deeply present in supporting others on their journeys
Develop your own deep body intelligence and tap its emotional, instinctual, sensual, and mythopoetic wisdom, so you can guide others towards self-discovery and personal growth, aligned with the soul.
Inhabit your deep feminine nature and experience its life-shaping force in your life, accessing the intelligence of the female anatomy, and reclaiming your body’s expression, pleasure, and sovereignty
Experience changes you’ve longed for, pivoting your life toward more sensual freedom, soul-fulfilling expression, and restful authenticity through shifting outdated somatic patterns.
To live fully we must be fully embodied, which means inhabiting our bodies with care, connection, listening and responsivity.
Somatic Healing and Embodiment supports you to:
- experience safety at a body level through finding body anchors to keep you grounded
- feel your emotions and the sensations and impulses that come with your emotions
- slow down, get out of your head and back into your body
- uncover habitual patterns in mind and body that keep you stuck
- track the rhythms of your nervous system,
- implement somatic and cognitive skills to increase your capacity for regulated or balanced states,
- and eventually, trust your body to guide you through your daily life such that you feel more states of flow and ease.
It is a collaborative process that fosters and forges a healing dialogue in which the client fully participates. Together we discover and listen to the story of the body, to the interior landscape of the person.
Today, we have many habits or defensive accommodations – that keep us out of feeling. Many people didn’t get the opportunity to feel or sense their bodies and experience themselves in a healthy way – life circumstances interrupted that – so it can feel scary and very difficult to do.
We will be together to build capacity within your nervous system for feeling into your body for the first time and creating a new relationship with yourself. This takes some time.
I love supporting and guiding people in a deep, contemplative way through their inner waters and awareness to their origins – a remembering and expanding into awareness nature and the earth.
This is an invitation to go deeper into the expanded landscape within our bodies and cells. Somatic healing offers us a process that involves touch, softness, simple vocal sound streams, breath, subtle gentle movements and awareness to access our fluid consciousness. Supporting nervous system healing and creating the space and context to move in new ways and to feel more present and alive in our bodies. We explore the inner realms of our bodies where we learn from our own cells and rhythms within.
New life begins to emerge in what may have become held, withered and alienated within your body. As we become attuned to our fluid body and how this watery mystery guides us into the experience of direct connection with all life, we notice an amplifying and refining of communication networks within ourselves and with others.
We will explore connecting with the deep joy and mystery of life.
Emotions are messengers, not facts. We are not our emotions.
When emotions drive our behaviour, we can go into self-protection mode.
When we learn how to witness our emotions, we see ourselves as separate from them. We become the witness experiencing emotions.
Then, we have choice and can act in alignment with our values.
Somatic healing invites in those who have become prisoners to a life lived in survival mode. It offers a reprieve so you can better understand the wisdom and inner workings of your nervous system.
Once your body begins to feel better, you’ll quickly accept that there is, in fact, nothing wrong with you. The way you feel, think, and behave, although perhaps seemingly self-destructive, has merely been an armoring of self-protection—a necessary response to a traumatic environment or experience.
Instead of self-criticism or defeat, you’ll begin to see that depression or anger or fear are natural, instinctual responses to an overwhelmed nervous system, merely trying to protect you. You are not broken and you do not need to be fixed. You just need to get back in the driver’s seat of your life and body. Let somatic healing free you from a settled life of survival.
What to Expect During a Whole Body Health Somatic Practice –
Co-Regulating Touch Bodywork for Trauma Session
For true emotional and physical healing, we can’t leave our body and how it feels and responds, out of the process. Each person needs something very specific in their healing journey, which is why it is so important to have a customized approach with sessions that are specifically tailored for you – a combination of emotionally-focused psychotherapy and body-focused Transforming Touch, Co-Regulating Touch Bodywork for Trauma.
Your body doesn’t have energy – it is energy. When we allow traumatic stress that is contained in our nervous system to begin to move through our system – flow begins to happen in our body and we feel more energetic, grounded, healthy and alive.
We explore our fluid bodies through the language of sensation, co-regulating touch,and subtle movement. We have the opportunity of allowing time to slow down, to notice, let go and shed that which needs to shed, and to come through anew and refreshed.
For those who would like to focus on a body-focused, somatic approach, we begin by talking about your background, symptoms and history. We do this online and or in-person by sitting in chairs across from each other or you lie on your back on a table. When you are sitting in a chair, we can do some talk therapy, and you may also be asked if you are open to closing your eyes and noticing your feelings, emotions and body sensations that are happening for you in each moment.
For those who would like to do Co-Regulating Touch Bodywork for Trauma Session – sessions consist of lying on a table with eyes closed – and I offer touch on several areas of the body: the head, stress organs, the belly, and joints in the body.
Therapeutic Co-Regulating Touch Bodywork for Trauma is a gentle, backed-by-science method that enables qualified practitioners to work safely and ethically with the emotions stored in the tissues and organs of the body. It works to unlock and release emotional pain buried in the body, sometimes since before we born, in-utero, our early childhood and all way up to present day adult experience.
Using touch, we reset complex physiological systems and help harmonize energy flow in a person’s body. Often, we restore what was missing in the early years. Touch can give a client greater awareness of their body’s sensations and the ability to get to know themselves better from the inside out.
Bringing a compassionate presence to the body is another essential part of healing. It helps address the neural numbing, muscular bracing, and autonomic disorganization that are physiological by-products of grief, shame, anger, and fear.
Therapeutic touch works to heal the nervous system by providing an avenue for the body to process deep-rooted trauma and facilitate self-actualization. Through gentle, attuned touch, we can help to rebuild an underdeveloped nervous system that has been negatively impacted by early trauma.
Sessions are done fully clothed. Each session is one-hour, unless we are doing an extended session – and is unique depending on what you are experiencing on that day and would like to focus on during a session – we want to tune in and understand what’s really going on in your body – beyond pathology and diagnoses – to allow your body to move into a flow state, rather than to remain stuck in a stress response state – during the session and in the hours and days afterwards.
This work is support for you to feel more ease through deep embodiment, the immense gifts of slowing way down, how to lovingly hold and transform your story and become a master of our nervous system.
As you heal, you begin to feel your core as goodness; to deeply know that you belong, to feel a oneness with life. You can feel an unshakeable love in your heart that becomes a stable background in your life. The greater empathy and compassion you feel for yourself extends to all beings and the earth itself.
I will hold you with kindness, deep respect and space to be with you as you are. This deep presence will shift our felt sense experience of whole body mental and physical health care. My approach is open, spacious and flexible. I look forward to inviting you in to my space.
There is a great longing in each of us to uncover the secrets and mysteries of our individual lives, to relate more deeply and to uncover what is unique and truthful within ourselves and related to others in our lives. I look forward to seeing you in the depths of soul nourishment, vulnerability and courage.
When we begin to unravel the layers of emotions and patterns and re-route neural pathways, we have to connect back to our physical selves. Trauma forces us out of our bodies. This is why the somatic approach works so well.
When we approach the human system in a holistic, regenerative, systemic way, we build a foundation that is solid and has more capacity to experience difficulty. Yes, we will experience stress, pain, and loss like all humans do, and we will bounce back.
Ready to take the next steps in your healing?
I am honoured to walk alongside you on this path toward greater well-being, happiness, and fulfillment.
Who would you be if you felt nourished and loving towards yourself every day? Say ‘yes’ to what feels nourishing, joyful and expansive. Be ever so gentle with your heart.
Working together is a deeply nourishing, supportive and intensive collaboration between us. My intention is to allow you to bring your whole self, to explore all the areas that feel hidden or stuck and to celebrate all the deep pleasure that can come from living in our bodies. I am here to listen to the wisdom of your magical body together.
Together, we will work with body-based approaches, inner child healing, and self compassion to support you in experiencing joyful aliveness.
