BodyBeing sessions are based in these modalities:
BodyBeing sessions are a powerful resource for integrating life experiences, receiving comfort, bolstering emotional and physical resilience, and restoring health. Bodywork and mindful body practices help you hear the language of your body.
Emotions, beliefs and past experiences are linked to physical responses. I invite you to sustain awareness on what is being experienced through your felt senses in the present moment. When bodily sensations are followed compassionately, restorative shifts naturally occur.
What was unknown becomes known and integrated on many levels.
Emotions may arise during a session. They help you process your inner truth. You may become familiar with and appreciate how your body allows aliveness to flow through you during emotional expression.
Cued by compassionate attunement, healthy physiological changes can occur called the relaxation response. This includes improved flow of general circulation and neurological impulses, improved immune function and cell regeneration, as well as lowered blood pressure, and decreased pain and tension.
Relaxation supports regulatory functions such as sleep, weight control, emotional regulation, digestive, respiratory and cardiovascular health, and hormone balance.
With physical and emotional equilibrium, a non-dual state of resting in your experience without thought can occur. Here you embody the essence of who you are. Spiritual freedom, transformation and wholeness are accessed…as well as your natural capacity for empathy and compassion.
As a bodywork professional, I offer a safe setting for people to experience the healing powers of skilled, attentive touch.
My intention is to be responsive to your concerns and to help you find more ease with the challenges you face. I understand that touch and emotional expression may not always feel safe for people, and I will respectfully work with you to assure your comfort.
Rosen Method Bodywork uses gentle, responsive touch that is non-manipulative, non-directive and listens deeply to the body-unconscious. You may explore what is deep inside, allowing truths from your unconscious to rise up and connect with your conscious knowing.
During your session, I contact and connect with chronic tension and notice subtle changes in your breathing pattern and muscles. I encourage your awareness of the habitual holding, which once served as protection but now limits flow and ease in your body.
I meet you where you are and support the possibility of change. In moments of deep relaxation, long-held feelings and memories may surface and be spoken. You can become aware of choices you made early in life around which you shaped your life. With this awareness, you may discover new possibilities for regaining freedom of movement and more authentic self-expression.
In a typical Rosen Method Bodywork session, the client lays on a massage table with a light blanket on top. I begin by speaking to the client quietly and touching their back through the covering. I then uncover their back and gently touch the skin and contact muscle tension. This work is not massage and no lotion is used. The session proceeds as I invite the client to describe physical sensations, thoughts, emotions, imagery or memories that arise. A quiet dialogue may ensue while the client explores how they feel inside with the touch as their guide. The client will turn onto his or her back, and I continue the gentle touch, including touch to the abdomen of the client if that is comfortable, deepening the connection and relaxation.
After the session, the client may choose to process briefly with me, then continue on their way with heightened awareness and relaxation. Though not necessary, some clients like to sit quietly, take a walk alone, create art or write in a journal after their session to help them process what may have come up for them. Some may explore experiences from their session further with a mental health or physical therapist, or a spiritual director.
Integrative Massage Therapy includes soft tissue manipulation ranging from gentle flushing, smoothing strokes, to very specific touching into particular muscles, tendons, ligaments and fascia in order to encourage the release and healing of scar tissue, trigger points, adhesions, deep muscle holding and tension. Having studied and practiced deep tissue and Neuromuscular Massage Therapy techniques extensively, I’ve learned to use just enough pressure to match the tension in your body. I follow your body’s response to my touch in order not to “force” or impose upon muscles that have been doing an important job of protecting you. In Integrative Massage, dialogue and massage are used to invite your awareness and tracking of what is happening in the body so that held tensions related to suppressed emotions, thought patterns, or experiences can be noticed.
When hardened, ropey or adhered soft tissue is touched in a specific, responsive manner, and you feel supported and relaxed, repair and softening of the tissues can happen. This is different than a traditional “full-body massage”. I typically use this work for addressing specific injuries, post-surgery concerns, pain syndromes and chronic muscle spasm of a particular area in a person’s body.
Somatic Experiencing helps you build awareness and skills to become more comfortable with your emotions and the way your nervous system works. Discover the difference between the stories you believe about yourself and the stories your body tells. Explore how healing past wounds happens in the present moment through your body’s sensations. Experiential exercises and dialogue help you develop a practice of self-awareness and self-trust.
Developed by Peter Levine, Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a psychobiological method that helps you build the skills of awareness, self-regulation, and improvement of your inner and outer supportive resources. I help you track your own experience and develop increasing tolerance for difficult body sensations and suppressed or “stuck on” emotions. Chronic states of shut down, low affect, stress-response, anxiousness, dissociation, feeling ungrounded or disconnected can be addressed through guided exercises that build your mind-body communication channels.
SE can help you renegotiate difficult experiences you have not yet integrated. The SE method does not require you to re-tell or re-live a traumatic event. Instead it offers the opportunity to engage, complete, and resolve—in a slow and supported way— your body’s natural fight, flight and freeze responses. The nervous system can reset, inner balance be restored, and resilience to stress and capacity to engage fully in life enhanced.
Integral Somatic Psychology is a comprehensive approach to embodiment* based in both Western and Eastern psychology that integrates body, energy, and consciousness into the process of healing. Developed by Dr Raja Selvam, ISP practices and information help you build your capacity to embody and tolerate deep-seated emotional experiences with out being overwhelmed by them.
*Dr. Selvam defines embodiment as “connecting all aspects of experience and all levels of the psyche to the physical body”.
Embodied Spirituality * encourages you to unfold into your own spirituality…and there are many paths. Through examining your life as it is today, and considering how you want to face your future, I invite you to discover a deeper sense of your own place in the universe…a place of basic goodness and belonging. I honor your faith tradition, what ever it is or isn’t, as we explore language and practices that express and expand your experience of the sacred. Beyond self-awareness and good intentions, I encourage you to wonder, listen, and feel into your place within the interconnected whole of life, love, and mystery.
*Though commonly called Spiritual “Direction”, I prefer to be your “Companion”, as it is not for me to direct you to your own truth, but for you to feel supported and guided by me as you discover your own path.
