love happens in the body
Face to face with a beloved, it's our nervous system that determines how vulnerable we can be, how safe we believe we are and how we will respond to the inevitable challenges of deep intimate relating.
The nervous system, research is revealing, is actually our relational system. Our earliest experiences of connection, abandonment, safety and repair become the patterns and dynamics that inevitably play out in our romantic relationships.
We call these patterns and dynamics Attachment Strategies (or Attachment Styles).
Our attachment strategies evolve as deeply unconscious adaptations in response to somatic signals that tell us whether we are facing threat or can relax into safety -- both with someone else and with ourselves. Because our attachment styles are developmental in nature, the impulse to connect, retreat, fight, flee, repair or fawn (and with whom) sits mostly outside of our conscious awareness or control.
The good news is that attachment styles are not personality types, and they aren't set in stone. Attachment is a flexible response system that evolved to keep us safe (however dysfunctional it may seem at times) and it can be healed.
Repairing attachment through the felt sense and wisdom of the body allows for a gentle restoration of trust, primarily in the relationship we have with ourselves. Here are some of the ways we work to repair the ruptures living in your relational body:
+ Cultivating trust in your felt sense, learning to speak (and listen to) the languages of your body
+ Learning how to trust that your needs and desires are valid, and what full-body expression of those needs/desires feels like
+ Discerning the difference between attraction, chemistry and attachment wound replay
+ Mobilizing stuck emotional energy so you can recognize and lean into your innate capacity for secure relating
+ Developing the energetic capacity for profound sexual depth and intimacy
+ Feeling and trusting the difference between nervous system threat responses and intuition
+ Discerning the truth in your triggers, and how to cultivate relational safety, even in an activated state
+ Cultivating a compassionate relationship with boundaries (yours and everyone else's)
My career began over 15 years ago at a non-profit organization serving at-risk youth. This was where I began to see the connections between relational trauma, the brain and the body.
Fueled by my love for meditation, I began learning from the brilliant minds of Dan Siegel and Bruce Perry, as I began to integrate the healing effects of mindfulness and interpersonal neurobiology into my practice and research.
After several years, disenchanted and burned out by the juvenile justice system, I followed my instincts toward a deep-dive in the energetics of healing at the level of the subtle and emotional bodies. I became a Reiki practitioner and later trained as a transpersonal hypnotherapist.
As a hypnotherapist, I was finally able to help clients access the subconscious and spiritual levels of their beliefs, patterns and behaviors, but found that when asked to close their eyes and go within, many people were so activated and overwhelmed by simply being with their felt experience that they couldn't access the deeper spiritual healing they were seeking; their nervous systems literally didn't have the capacity to hold large amounts of healing energy. I knew I had to rewind and go much deeper into the somatics of healing and the delicate art of trauma resolution.
Now, as a certified somatic healing practitioner and breathwork facilitator, I specialize in attachment repatterining and nervous system repair. My deepest passion and purpose is combining the science of relational healing with the esoteric and embodied wisdom I've gleaned from studying sexual polarity, Neo-tantra and embodied relationship practices some of the most heart-forward and influential teachers in the field for the last 10 years.
This is where the work becomes life-changing: in the subtle realms, where we revere relationship and intimacy as a spiritual practice.
This dance between science and spirit has allowed me to access and bring forth these subtle realms to my clients, working with the sacred nature of love and intimacy. I offer clients an experience of healing through the body, of which the heart and spirit are an inexorable part.
practices, workshops and gatherings within a community
of heart-forward people.