Somatic Facilitation

I work 1-on-1 both virtually and in person. Currently, most sessions are virtual. For those local to Baltimore I am able to do in person sessions on a case-by-case basis.

All sessions begin with an arrival practice through orienting to environment and body through sensation.  Together we will focus on cultivating a felt sense of wellbeing in your body, also known as resourcing.  From there we may decide to continue arriving on the level of sensation or you may elect to name goals/what you would like to work on in the session.  

A typical session centers around tracking bodily sensations.  Sessions can involve movement, stillness, or a combination.  Explicit movement is not necessary to be able to track sensation.  What is important is that we move at the pace of attention. 

The practice can also include self touch as well as noticing spontaneous imagery, emotions, and thoughts.  As a practitioner, my role is to follow what spontaneously emerges for you, not tell you what to do or how to do it. We work in collaboration. 

I will take the time to get to know you and your goals.  People have different needs, but all sessions focus on the felt sense in the body.      

There is no specific way to prepare for a session.  A session is not a performance.  We are mainly working toward being with what is present in the body. 

Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body based form of healing that works at the level of the autonomic nervous system to help resolve embodied trauma.  SE  helps people slowly develop embodied awareness to release physiological activation from their bodies, and find a sense of ease.  This process can often help people reduce stress and/or find a new sense of agency in their lives.  Over time, SE can allow you to engage with discomfort without becoming overwhelmed.  We work to disengage reactivity to the past through conscious yet gentle attention.  SE can cultivate SE can cultivate increased:

-capacity for pleasure and tolerance for discomfort

-sense of vitality, ability to self regulate

- ability to set and maintain healthy boundaries so that more agency is available in one’s life.

Trauma is any event that happened too fast, too much, or too soon without adequate support for your body to fully experience in the moment.  Trauma is an embodied experience that can cause one to continually live in a past experience, as the body still contains powerful unprocessed survival energy.  

“Trauma can also be understood, in this context,  as something that keeps us reacting to past circumstances or future fears rather than creatively engaging with the present moment” —Daniel Bear Davis

I like to use frame trauma in this way because I feel it helps expand the ways we think about and stigmatize trauma.  Trauma is a part of life.  It is not always one big dramatic event.  It can also be a slow ongoing drip of not having your needs met over a period of time, for example. Trauma can be racial, historical, intergenerational, and cultural—and should be acknowledged within these contexts.  

Trauma affects the body and shifts our nervous systems.  It can manifest in a variety of ways: hypervigilance, dissociation, anxiety, chronic pain or illness, difficulty with boundaries.  

In a Somatic Experiencing session we work with the nervous system to slow down enough to come to experience the present moment. We slow down the experiences of highly aroused survival energy to safely experience, metabolize, and discharge.