Somatic Counseling
Somatic counseling offers an alternative to traditional talk therapy by acknowledging that words alone may not fully address deeply rooted emotional traumas and patterns. While talk therapy is valuable for exploring thoughts and feelings, somatic work goes deeper by engaging the body’s experiences and sensations. This approach emphasizes bodily awareness, movement, and nonverbal communication, allowing you to access and release emotions that may be difficult to express verbally.
Together, we listen to and process the messages that arise from your bodily sensations and emotions. I support you in exploring your inner world, deepening your relationship with yourself, and tending to your wounds to resolve unconscious blocks. As you become more attuned to yourself, you may discover a clearer sense of internal guidance and direction.
At the heart of my practice is Hakomi mindfulness therapy, a gentle, body-centered approach that fosters self-discovery and nurtures personal growth.
THEMES OR AREAS WE MAY WORK WITH/IN
Reconnecting with your body
Processing grief, stress, anxiety, mood swings, depression, shame, and guilt
Cultivating greater connection and authenticity
Working through and with trauma
Developing self-compassion
Setting healthy boundaries
Self-criticism and judgment
Strengthening communication skills
Understanding and transforming relationship patterns
Finding safety in your body and nervous system
Navigating chronic illness and health issues
Cost: 50 min | Sliding Scale $80-140
If you’re not familiar with sliding scale models, you can give this a read (The Sliding Scale: A Tool of Economic Justice by Alexis J. Cunningfolk).
“Hakomi helps people change “core material.” Core material is composed of memories, images, beliefs, neural patterns and deeply held emotional dispositions. It shapes the styles, habits, behaviors, perceptions and attitudes that define us as individuals. Typically, it exerts its influence unconsciously, by organizing our responses to the major themes of life: safety, belonging, support, power, freedom, control, responsibility, love, appreciation, sexuality, spirituality, etc. Some of this material supports our being who we wish to be, while some of it, learned in response to acute and chronic stress, continues to limit us. Hakomi allows the client to distinguish between the two, and to willingly change material that restricts his or her wholeness.
Hakomi is an experiential psychotherapy: Present, felt experience is used as an access route to core material; this unconscious material is elicited and surfaces experientially; and changes are integrated into the client’s immediate experience.
Hakomi is a body-centered, somatic psychotherapy: the body serves as a resource that reflects and stores formative memories and the core beliefs they have generated, and also provides significant access routes to core material.
The Hakomi Method follows a general outline: First, we establish an ever-present, attitude of gentle acceptance and care known as loving presence. This maximizes safety, respect and the cooperation of the unconscious. With a good working relationship established, we then help the client focus on and learn how core material shapes his or her experience. To permit this study, we establish and use a distinct state of consciousness called Mindfulness. Mindfulness is characterized by relaxed volition, a gentle and sustained inward focus of attention, heightened sensitivity, and the ability to notice and name the contents of consciousness. Its roots derive from Eastern meditation practice. Hakomi has pioneered the use of active, or dynamic mindfulness in psychotherapy: instead of using mindfulness meditation as simply an adjunct to therapy, virtually the entire Hakomi process in conducted in mindfulness. This facilitates Hakomi techniques in accessing unconscious material quite rapidly, but safely.
The heart of the Method works with the client’s present, felt experience, as it is presented spontaneously, or deliberately and gently evoked by having them experiment with habitual tension or movement patterns known as “indicators.” These emotional/cognitive patterns automatically keep deeper experience out of present awareness. The results are processed through different state-specific methods, including:
We work with strong emotions and bound energy, safely releasing them, and finding nourishment in that release
We work with the inner child and other specific self-states, often in the context of vividly re-experienced memories, frequently providing the “missing experience” for the child
We process core beliefs in mindfulness, not as intellectual problem-solving, but as direct dialogue with the unconscious
The basic method, then, is this:
To establish a relationship in which it is safe for the client to become self-aware
To use the Hakomi methodology to evoke experiences that lead to the discovery of organizing core material
To seek healing changes in the core material
All is in support of this primary process. Once discovered in this experiential manner, core material can be examined, processed, and transformed. Transformation begins when awareness is turned mindfully toward felt, present experience; unconscious material unfolds into consciousness; barriers are attended to; and new experiences are integrated that allow for the reorganization of core beliefs. These, in turn, allow for a greater range of mental, physical, and emotional coherence and behavior.
Finally, we help the client to integrate these new beliefs, modes and choices into everyday life. It is here – in the ability to transform new possibilities discovered in the office into on-going actualities of daily living – that real change happens.”
—From the Hakomi Institute website
+Though my work is therapeutic, it is not psychotherapy and isn’t a substitution for psychotherapy if that’s what you’re in need of+
+I welcome clients of all backgrounds and enjoy working with diverse populations. I am LGBTQI/disabled/chronically ill/neurodiverse/kink/poly friendly+
