What is Somatic Experiencing?

Somatic Experiencing (SE) is an approach to supporting shifts in the way that trauma, or stuck protective responses, is held in our nervous systems. SE assumes that some of what drives our reactions to and experience of life is the way our wise bodies’ learned to protect themselves. While these protective strategies are wise and benevolent, sometimes we find that they’re also keeping us from what we long for. As we support some of these reflexive patterns to resolve or let down (when they’re ready), we free up more space for our life force to come through, allowing us to move through the world with greater presence, resilience, agency and a sense of being more fully alive!

What is Internal Family Systems / Parts Work?

Internal Family Systems (also called “parts work”) is an approach to inner work which assumes that all people contain many parts - each of which developed in order to take care of us and help us cope with or survive our lives. Parts work helps us to identify, get to know, and integrate these parts of ourselves —like a self-critical part, a people-pleaser or a fearful inner child. As we tend to the needs and fears of these parts, they begin to soften, resolving persistent internal conflicts and allowing us to move through our lives with more choice and self-compassion.

So then, what’s Somatic Coaching?

My approach to coaching integrates both of these modalities, along with my experience as an educator  / facilitator in justice-seeking communities, and the anti-oppression framework that I bring to my work. This means that in our sessions, as I help you tune in to the wisdom of your body, we hold both curiosity about your unique, individual story and “parts”, alongside paying attention to the impacts systemic oppression has had on our bodies and our patterns. 

My hope is that our work on the individual level also makes us less compliant or exploitable tools of those oppressive systems and that as we heal our conditioned patterns, we also create the conditions in our communities and relationships for a more just world to unfold.  I am eager to work with anyone looking for support in becoming more embodied, especially as it allows you to more fully and freely live out your values and make this world a better place.

Somatic Coaching can support:

• the shifting of deeply rooted patterns that we just can’t seem to talk our way out of

• greater capacity to return to and reconnect with ourselves when the intensity of life has left us feeling unmoored or disconnected

• getting in touch with our emotions, tolerating and befriending a broader range of feelings

• a deepened sense of agency and capacity to act powerfully in alignment with our values

• a stronger sense of connection to and support from the web of life, spirit, non-human kin

• deeper capacity for connection and intimacy in our closest relationships

• greater resilience in the face of stress, change, conflict or charge.

(Note: Since I am not a mental health therapist, if you are experiencing severe depression or other psychiatric diagnoses, I should not be your primary practitioner. I’m happy to talk about this further!)