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 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 will move into the Advanced Training Level in the Summer of 2026. 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. I am also in an extended long-term study of TantraSoma with Thessa Sophia and Fleur Innana, a somatic container building awareness through body consciousness exploration and movement.

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 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.

I practice acupuncture in conjunction with somatics as a form of integration. In my sessions, the body’s lived experience leads—and the needles follow. Rather than applying a protocol first and hoping it reaches the deeper layers, we begin by listening: to sensation, breath, emotion, memory, rhythm, and the nervous system’s protective responses. As we track what is happening in real time, the somatic work reveals where energy is braced, where tissue is holding, where something inside is closing down or pushing through. That information directly informs the acupuncture, so the needle work is not generic, but responsive to what your body is actually asking for in that moment.

In this model, acupuncture becomes a kind of anchor for what we discover. The needles help “meet” the places that are stuck—supporting circulation, softening guarding patterns, and inviting the system out of fight/flight, freeze, or collapse. It can open space in areas that have been chronically closed. It can soothe the mind-body loop of stress and pain, not by overriding it, but by giving the nervous system a different signal: you are safe enough to shift.

In session, I may use any of the following, in addition to acupuncture: 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.