Are you ready to experience true aliveness and come home to your Self?
Rumi says that “what you seek is seeking you.” I would be honored to guide you on your journey inward and onward.
Through trauma, including environmental and attachment failures, we have lost touch with our connection to the present moment, our primal healing instincts, our life force energy, a sense of safety and ease in the body and mind, our authenticity, our shared humanity, and connection with the other-than-human world. What we seek is a restoration of our birth right: connection with the wisdom of our bodies, our essential nature, with the natural world, our communities, and fellow humans. I have found myself drawn to healing modalities and practices that endeavor to restore our wholeness, uniting body, mind, and spirit. It is a fundamental human right to experience well-being, compassion for self and others, ease in our bodies and minds, connection, and a sense of belonging, and JOY.
The therapies and practices I utilize offer a holistic and well-rounded approach to therapy, providing both top-down and bottom-up processing to treat the physiological, psychological, relational, and spiritual impacts of PTSD, CPTSD, stress, anxiety, and depression. Depending on what you are presently experiencing or bringing to therapy, a session may lean more on one approach over another, or blend several together. Even so, it is important to know that these practices hold no power without your engagement with them. Some of these practices will challenge and stretch you out of familiar terrain, out of your habitual and destructive ways of being and relating to yourself and others. Without the willingness to experience discomfort and try something different, there is no growth and there is no healing. That discomfort often means we are on the right path, moving away from our familiar strategies that are no longer serving us and moving into unfamiliar, but agency-oriented territory. This is where growth and re-structuralizing of our sense of self begins. As one of my teachers, Stefanie Klein, so assertively stated, “there is what is (in the environment), and there is what we do to ourselves with what is.”
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.”
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space, lies our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. ”
The strategies we developed to survive our circumstances are often what are now keeping us from what we most want for ourselves. The NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) asserts that connection (to ourself and others) is both our deepest desire and our greatest fear. It stands to reason then, that the closer we get to connection, or what we most want for ourselves, the more resistance we might have to it. Connection to our authentic selves and others requires vulnerability and a level of surrender, which invites the potential to be wounded, triggering our old strategies of disconnection and constriction once again. This work is both somatic and depth-oriented. It is re-structuralizing on a somatic and psychological level and deeply, deeply subjective and humanizing.
“The degree to which a person can grow is directly proportional to the amount of truth you can accept about yourself without running away”
Therapy and Healing Art Practices
(SE)
(NARM)
(EMDR)
My
practice ethos
Embodied adheres to the Code of Ethics of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) and in so doing, practices through a trauma-sensitive lens in a collaborative and person-centered process with the individual client. Embodied understands that harm can be done when the therapeutic process is not practiced in a titrated manner and sufficient time is not taken to build a foundation of safety. Embodied strives to foster interpersonal safety with relational mindfulness and cultural safety by understanding and affirming intersectionality of identities and how systems of oppression continue to negatively impact an individual's lived experience, trauma physiology, and sense of self. I also acknowledge my own privilege and limitations of experience as a white bodied, cis-gendered, heterosexual, and financially privileged person. I am open to being wrong and not personally understanding someone else’s experience and open to understanding the ways that my affiliated identifies might have even contributed to someone else's oppression.
