“May this work feed the seven generations that have come before, and may this work feed the seven generations to come.”

--Sage Goode

So what is relational somatic healing?

Somatic healing works in depth with intensity in the nervous system (stress, trauma, overwhelm, sensory overload), but can also be used for other challenges. Situations in our lives happen not only to our brain, but to our bodies. Western&colonial “talk therapy” mostly addresses our rational brain or our prefrontal cortex’s narrative of a situation. Somatic healing intends to work directly our instinctual, body-based responses to a situation. Most people, for instance, have heard of “fight, flight, or freeze” - reactions that happen when we experience a traumatic event(s). Fight, flight, and freeze are neurological processes that happen to our body! Our heart rate goes up, we might shake, we look for some way out, our muscles tense. If you’ve ever just reacted on autopilot, this is what I mean. We get charged up with adrenaline and either fight or flee, or in the case of freeze, our adrenaline has no place to go because we see no way out of the situation, so our body shuts down. Our body is taking in the information from what’s happening in our world, and reacts in different ways.

Sometimes words can’t particularly get at the heart of what you’re experiencing. That’s a good time to ask the body to speak instead.

How do we do that? Often in a session, that might look like: rearranging seating positions to discover what promotes a felt sense of safety in your body, tracking the physical sensations (heat, tension, expansion, etc) that are happening in your body as we sit together, and sometimes using those sensations to see if the body “wants” to move or act in a certain way. If this feels unfamiliar, don’t worry. I’ll be your co-creator in this process. Your body has its own unique language, and I’m here to help you tune in to what it’s saying.

We also honor that somatic healing happens in relationship. This means that we are working not only with our individual bodies in a session, but with our relationality - to one another, to ancestors, land, other than human kin, and even cultural bodies that perpetuate or hold systemic oppression. I am deeply informed in this by the lineage and work of folks such as Resmaa Menakem, Edgar Fabian Frias, and Queer Nature (on Instagram), who all talk about both our cultural soma as well as nonhuman kin, ancestors, guides, etc. I also hold a deep belief that our system and cultural context are themselves a body that is intertwined and impacting/impacted by our individual bodies. My somatic sessions integrate this knowledge. While working with you, I am always holding awareness of how cultural bodies may be impacting your individual body and will bring that into our sessions. Further, I believe ancestors, plant kin, animal kin, and others are part of our wider human body and I invite them to participate in our work together.