Somatic Psychotherapy

Somatic Psychotherapy is a practice that helps us become more fully awake to our entire lived experience. It is a non-linear, creative, and relational process by which we come to discover and heal ourselves.

Somatic psychotherapy teaches us how to listen deeply to ourselves. Mindfully attending to all of the different aspects of what we are experiencing in any moment increases our awareness of the more subtle parts of our being, the parts of ourselves that may go unnoticed in our daily lives, and this actually changes the neurological structures of our brain and body, and helps make connections between what we think and how we feel. This awareness creates greater freedom because it helps us to see and feel more of ourselves, and this enables us to choose how to relate to ourselves and to others in ways that might be different than how we've done it before.

This practice is important because it helps us to ground our thoughts and what we imagine into what is palpable, not just emotionally, but directly in our sensorial world. In this time and place, many of us have come to feel disconnected from our bodies, which are the root of our life and aliveness. We may come to feel fractured, and with that or in that fracturing we can feel lost and confused, and we suffer. This work helps us to build bridges between the disparate parts of ourselves, to unite these parts  into a synchronized, connected, aligned, harmonized whole that is our birthright. We are enabled to shine, and from that place we can live a life in which there is creative authorship made from a sense of conscious choice.   

Hakomi

Hakomi is a method that combines many different theories and traditions - psychodynamic, gestalt, taoism, buddhism, systems theory - into a heart-centered way of being with people. Essential to this method is mindfulness, which can be considered an internally focused, altered state of consciousness. In Hakomi, the therapist trusts the innate, organic process toward growth and healing that exists in every person or every living thing. Clients are guided into following their present moment experience so that core beliefs can emerge, beliefs that they may not have been aware were there. Core beliefs are not just cognitive, but are also neurologically patterned bodily states of being from which we relate to the world. Clients are then given the opportunity to have a new experience in relationship to the therapist that may help to shift these beliefs. A new, broader framework for how to relate to the world becomes possible.