somatic & relational work
Individuals and Couples
There are seasons when the ways we have always known how to move through the world no longer carry us quite as well. Something feels unsettled, a familiar pattern returns, or the space between two people becomes harder to cross.
You do not have to arrive knowing what needs to change. We can begin by noticing what is here.
What a Few Inches Can Change
A college professor came to me carrying more ideas than one life holds. His work, his writing, his many interests all ran at once, and the drive to perform kept him in motion while it kept him out of reach of the people who loved him. He sat forward in the wing chair, tense at the edge of it, spilling his story until it ran all over the room. The room stayed outside his notice. I stayed outside it too.
I asked him to sit back, to take a long breath, to let his weight sink down into the seat. His body changed. His face softened and his breath let go. A hush entered the room. For a few minutes the stillness rearranged everything in him, and he looked around and saw where he was sitting.
His system wanted time to practice the shift and learn to hold it, and we took that time. Within a few sessions he began noticing what lived around him, outside the driving of his own mind. Insight arrived through his body first, in the few inches between the edge of a chair and the back of it.
Something in you already knows.
A tightness that arrives before the phone rings. A weariness with no clear source. An argument with your partner running the same track it ran last year and the year before. The mind explains these things away. The body keeps the record.
Most of us learned early how to stay safe in the company of others. We learned to hold still, to please, to leave the room without moving our feet. Those strategies worked. They kept us in relationship during years when relationship felt uncertain, and they cost us a fee we may only notice decades later.
My work begins with your body's own intelligence.
We slow down until sensation can speak. We follow what arrives, in small amounts, with plenty of room to rest. Somatic Experiencing, Transforming Touch, sand tray, imagery, and the sound programs each offer a different door, and I choose among them by what your system asks for on a given day.
With couples I watch the space between you. Two nervous systems negotiate long before words arrive, and the argument you keep having usually lives inside that negotiation. Once both bodies find some steadiness, the conversation changes on its own.
