Your body is a great communicator. But, you learned to ignore its language.
You’ve heard all about #selfcare. Maybe you’ve even tried things like stretching, massage, and hot baths to take care of your body. But you still feel tense, drained, and exhausted. It seems as if the rest of the world is soaking into your space, and you can’t find the sacred space of you anymore.
You find it hard to determine why different sensations are happening in your body, and what they mean. Is your back tense because of something that happened to you or something you need? Is it because your friend just told you all about their break-up and you somehow feel like you’re carrying that for them? Or is it because there’s a sound or scent that’s making it hard to relax?
As an empath, highly sensitive person, or intuitive, you tend to soak in the world around you. You experience other people’s feelings as if they were your own. Your body is highly attuned to your environment. You pick up on sounds, lighting, emotional cues, energy, and scents that others miss. Sometimes it can feel like magic! But other times, especially when things are hard or out of balance, it feels like a burden.
What is Somatic Therapy?
Somatic therapy is a process of bringing your body back into healing. Your body is always speaking to you, giving vital information about your external and internal environment and needs. But you may not understand or trust those cues. After a lifetime of being taught to push through and ignore your body, paying closer attention can feel challenging. Instead of ignoring your body’s signals, we’ll work together to build up your comfort in ease in understanding the ways your body communicates with you.
Somatic Therapy Can Help You Reconnect With Your Body
So many of us have been taught to give our bodily autonomy and power away. Somatic therapy reframes this to reclaim the intuitive knowing and power that is rightfully yours.
Your body is an equal partner in your life’s journey. It develops muscle memory and movement patterns based on everything you’ve experienced, even when you don’t consciously know or remember. Somatic therapy allows us to work directly with these patterns to unwind places of hurt and suffering. We can then make space for new patterns of security, ease, and nourishing connection.
You can reclaim trust in your own body’s knowing. Together, we will develop compassionate awareness of yourself in your body, while emphasizing choice, self-pacing, and consent. Somatic therapy can help your body heal – and heal you in return.
What does a Somatic Therapist do?
We’ll start by building awareness around sensations in your body throughout the somatic therapy session. These sensations are often signs that things are working, or that we need to slow down or stop. We’ll practice noticing when these signs arise and exploring what they mean for you. And we’ll attend to your body’s needs as they arise.
As your comfort and familiarity with your body grow, we can explore movement practices. In one session, we may do some small movements like looking around the room. Or holding a pillow to support your body and develop a sense of security. In another session, I may offer a guided meditation to listen for sensations or images present within your body. After that, we may explore larger movements together. We will guide your body through internal cues and external practices to help restore a sense of safety, connection, and ease.
What happens in a session and how we work with your body is completely up to your control.
You and your body have full consent over how you engage in the work together. We’ll practice checking for that consent through your body’s cues and language. And we’ll listen to what it says.
Somatic therapy in Berkeley, CA can help rebuild your relationship with your body. It can help you learn how to trust yourself – no matter what anyone else says. If you’re ready to learn to trust your body, please reach out. I’d be honored to support you.
I offer a variety of services in my Berkeley therapy office that can support you from the comfort of your own home:
- For solo journeyers, I offer individual therapy. We will work together to identify where you are out of balance. You deserve to reclaim your sense of joy, self-love, aliveness, and self-knowing.
- For partners, I offer couples therapy. We’ll create a path of more clear and aligned communication. We will explore practices to get both of your needs met, and reveal new ways to deepen your intimacy with each other and yourselves.
- For groups, I offer Soul Sanctuary. This is a refuge for empaths, intuitives, and highly sensitive people. You will learn more about your gifts, explore your needs, and receive support from a group of others just like you.
- For all, I offer various ways of working with LGBTQ & TGNC folx. I also offer other services including spiritual therapy and ecotherapy
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