San Francisco · Somatic Therapy
A Practice Built on Presence
Rooted in somatic psychology, shaped by years of body-centered training — this is a space where your nervous system is welcomed home.
Here, you are met exactly as you are — with curiosity, warmth, and deep respect for what your body already knows.
Where This Work Begins
Trained in somatic psychology at CIIS, rooted in the belief that the body holds what words alone cannot reach.
There is a moment — perhaps you have already had it — when you sense that something more is needed. Not more effort, more understanding, or more analysis. Something more felt. A quiet recognition that your mind has been working overtime while your body has been waiting patiently, holding what has not yet been spoken.
That recognition is what drew me to somatic psychology — and to the California Institute of Integral Studies, where the somatic psychology graduate program offered something rare: a rigorous, academically grounded framework that honored the body as central to psychological healing, not peripheral to it.
I trained in the tradition of body-mind integration — learning to attune to the subtle language your nervous system speaks: the held breath before a difficult memory, the tightening in the chest that arrives before tears do, the warmth that moves through you when something long-frozen begins to thaw. Here in San Francisco, I carry that training into every session I hold.
Graduate training · CIIS Somatic Psychology · San Francisco, CA
The body is not a symptom to be corrected. It is an intelligence to be listened to — one that has been quietly guiding you toward wholeness all along.
A Formation Shaped by Curiosity — and by Sitting with the Unknown
I did not arrive at somatic work through a straight line. I came through my own questions — about what it means to feel at home in yourself, about why certain experiences leave marks in the body long after the mind has made its peace with them. I came through a genuine curiosity about how healing actually happens, not in theory, but in the room, in real time, between two people who are paying close attention.
At CIIS, I encountered frameworks that took seriously what I had long sensed: that psychological experience does not live exclusively in the mind. Trauma, grief, anxiety, longing — these are not just thoughts or stories. They are held in tension patterns, in the way you hold your breath, in where you habitually brace. Embodied awareness — the practice of noticing sensation, impulse, and aliveness in the body — became the cornerstone of how I understand healing.
You may find that you carry questions not so different from the ones I began with. And it is from that place — of genuine curiosity, not certainty — that I meet each person who finds their way here.
The Beliefs That Shape Every Session
The Body Knows
Long before you have words for what happened, your body has already registered it. I take that intelligence seriously — not as a problem to be fixed, but as a language to be learned, together.
The Relationship Is the Work
Healing does not happen in isolation. It happens in the space between two nervous systems meeting with care and attention. The therapeutic relationship is not just the container for the work — it is the work itself.
Slowness Is a Form of Depth
We live in a world that rewards speed. In this room, we move at the pace your body sets. Slowing down is not a limitation — it is what allows something genuine to surface.
If you have found yourself here, something in you is already listening. That is not a small thing. Whatever brought you — curiosity, weariness, a gentle intuition that there might be another way — I trust it. And I am glad you are here.
The Approach
Therapy That Listens to Your Body
This work meets you where you are — noticing sensation, breath, and the quiet intelligence your body already carries.
"Maybe you've sat across from a therapist, talked through everything, and still felt like something was just out of reach. Like the understanding was there, but the relief wasn't."
If that resonates, you're not alone — and you're not broken. It may simply be that your body hasn't been part of the conversation yet.
Your Body as Navigator
Somatic therapy begins with a simple, radical premise: your body already knows. Before a word is spoken, your nervous system is registering the world — storing old stories in muscle tension, breath patterns, and the subtle pull of a clenched jaw. In session, we slow down enough to actually listen to what it's been holding.
The Language of Sensation
You might notice warmth spreading through your chest, or a small tremble moving through your hands. Maybe a long-held breath finally releases, and something loosens in your shoulders. These are not symptoms to manage — they are your body's language, and learning to understand it is at the heart of this work.
Integrating Mind and Body
Talk therapy helps us understand. Somatic therapy helps us feel — and in feeling, integrate. Drawing on the body-mind framework developed in CIIS's somatic psychology program, this approach works with the full intelligence of who you are: your cognition, your emotions, and the lived wisdom stored in your physiology.
What You Might Notice
Your Body Knows How to Heal
When the nervous system begins to feel safe, something remarkable happens. The body starts moving what it once had to hold. Clients in somatic sessions across San Francisco often describe experiences like these — not as symptoms, but as signs that something is shifting.
A spontaneous sigh of relief
Warmth moving through the chest
Trembling that signals release
Tears that arrive without knowing why
A lightness you didn't expect
Breath deepening on its own
None of these experiences are required, expected, or engineered. They arise naturally — when the body finally feels it has permission.
If You're Curious but Unsure
You Don't Have to Abandon What You Know
Somatic therapy doesn't ask you to dismiss your intellect, your past therapy work, or your own hard-won self-understanding. It asks you to bring all of that — and simply let your body be part of the room too.
Many clients arrive with insight and still feel stuck. Somatic work isn't a replacement for that insight — it's what allows it to land. To move from something you understand to something you actually feel.
That's what body-mind integration means in practice: not a technique, but a homecoming — to all of who you are.
It's natural to wonder whether this will feel strange, or whether it will work for you. That kind of honest curiosity is exactly the quality that somatic work welcomes.
You don't need certainty to take the next step. You just need a willingness to be curious about what your body might have to say.
How the Work Actually Happens
Being in the same physical space changes what is possible. In-person somatic therapy allows for a quality of attunement — through presence, breath, posture, and subtle contact — that cannot be fully replicated on a screen. Below are some of the core techniques woven into sessions at this practice.
Somatic Tracking
Together, we gently slow attention down to the interior landscape of the body — noticing what arises in sensation, impulse, temperature, or movement. Rather than narrating the past, we meet what is happening right now, in real time, between us. This moment-to-moment tracking is the foundation of all in-person somatic work.
Titration & Pendulation
Healing doesn't require re-living the full weight of an experience all at once. Titration means we approach difficult material in very small doses — enough to begin processing without overwhelming the system. Pendulation is the art of moving between activation and ease, teaching the nervous system that it can visit intensity and return to safety. This rhythm is what allows lasting change.
Grounding & Orientation
When the nervous system has been living in a state of vigilance, the simple act of feeling the ground beneath you — the weight of your body in a chair, the texture of a cushion, the quality of light in the room — can become profoundly regulating. Grounding and orientation exercises anchor the present moment in a way that words alone cannot.
Resourcing
Before we move toward what is difficult, we build an inner sense of what feels supportive — a memory, a place, a quality, an inner figure. Resourcing creates an experiential anchor that the nervous system can return to whenever a session touches something tender. Over time, these resources become genuinely available to you, not just as a concept but as a felt reality.
Touch — Offered With Transparency
In-person somatic work may, at times and always with explicit consent, involve gentle, grounding touch — a hand on the shoulder, or attuned contact with the arms or feet. Touch in this context is not massage or bodywork; it is a form of co-regulation that can reach parts of the nervous system that conversation alone does not. It is always optional, explained, and offered within a clear ethical framework.
Movement & Discharge
The body stores incomplete survival responses — the impulse to run, to push away, to reach for connection — that were never fully expressed. In session, we work with small, mindful movements that allow these impulses to complete themselves, releasing the charge that has been held in the musculature and tissues. Clients often describe a spontaneous sense of lightness or relief following this kind of work.
When two nervous systems meet in the same room, something becomes possible that no video call can replicate — the body's ancient intelligence of co-regulation, presence, and being truly witnessed.
On the value of in-person somatic workRooted in Rigorous Somatic Training
Somatic therapy is a specialised discipline. The depth of in-person work is shaped not only by clinical knowledge, but by the practitioner's own embodied understanding — formed through years of practice, supervision, and direct somatic training.
Master of Arts — Somatic Psychology
California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS)
CIIS's somatic psychology program is one of the few graduate programs in the world that integrates body-centered practice into the very structure of clinical training. The curriculum draws on somatic, depth, cross-cultural, feminist, and contemplative psychologies — forming practitioners who understand the body not as a substrate of the mind, but as a co-equal intelligence in the healing process.
Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) — In Training
Somatic Experiencing® International
Somatic Experiencing® is a body-oriented approach to healing trauma developed by Dr. Peter Levine. The SEP training is a three-year, post-graduate program that deepens practitioners' capacity to track the body's physiological responses, work with the felt sense, and support clients in completing thwarted survival responses with precision and care.
Hakomi Mindful Somatic Psychology — Foundations
Hakomi Institute
Hakomi is a mindfulness-based, body-centered psychotherapy rooted in the principles of organicity, unity, mindfulness, non-violence, and mind-body integration. Its foundational training shapes a therapist who can work gently and precisely with the body's spontaneous responses — the micro-movements, shifts in breath, and postures that carry the deeper stories of a person's experience.
Polyvagal-Informed Practice — Continuing Education
Polyvagal Institute
Dr. Stephen Porges' Polyvagal Theory offers a neuroscientific framework for understanding the body's three-part autonomic nervous system and how it governs states of safety, connection, mobilisation, and shutdown. Polyvagal-informed training shapes every aspect of in-person session work — from how safety is established in the room, to how the pacing of a session is calibrated to the client's nervous system state.
Knowledge Embodied, Not Just Learned
In somatic training, you cannot learn the work only through reading or lecture. You learn it through your own body. The practitioner programs that shaped this practice required personal somatic therapy, peer practice, and years of supervised client work — so that the techniques offered in session are not theoretical tools, but capacities that live in the therapist's own nervous system.
This matters for you as a client. When a therapist is truly embodied in their practice, the session feels different — less like a technique being applied, and more like two people genuinely present together in the room.
Graduate training · CIIS Somatic Psychology · Ongoing supervision & continuing education
In Their Own Words
The experience of in-person somatic work is difficult to describe in clinical language. These reflections — shared with permission — capture something of what actually happens in the room.
Names are abbreviated and identifying details changed to protect client privacy.
"I had been in talk therapy for years, and I understood my patterns intellectually. But something stayed stuck. In our first few in-person sessions, I noticed sensations I'd never had language for — a warmth in my chest when I felt safe, a tightening that told me when I was about to shut down. It was like being given a map of my own interior. I can't imagine doing this work any other way."
"What surprised me most about in-person sessions was how much my body had to say before I'd even opened my mouth. The way I held my shoulders when I sat down, the way my breath changed when certain topics came up — none of that would have been visible over video. Being in the room together made the work feel alive in a way I hadn't expected."
"There was a moment in a session when I noticed my hands trembling — not out of distress, but something releasing. It was so quiet. My therapist just held space for it, said something like, 'your body is moving something.' I started to cry — not because anything dramatic had happened, but because for the first time, I felt like I was actually in the room with someone who saw me. Not just my thoughts. All of me."
"I came in curious but skeptical. I'd read about somatic therapy but didn't know what to expect from the actual physical presence of it. Within a few sessions, I noticed I was sleeping differently — more deeply. My shoulders stopped living up around my ears. Little things, at first. Then bigger ones. The in-person quality of it — the attunement, the pace — made all the difference."
"I want to say something about the pace. Everything in my life moves fast — work, relationships, obligations. Coming into session felt like stepping into a different kind of time. The slowness was intentional. It took a few sessions to stop waiting for things to speed up. When I finally settled into the rhythm of it, something in me relaxed that I didn't even know was holding."
"The first time grounding was introduced — the idea of actually feeling my feet on the floor, noticing the temperature of the room, letting my eyes soften and look around — I almost laughed. It seemed so simple. Then I felt the shift. Something I can only describe as: oh. This is what present feels like. I'd been living above my shoulders my whole life."
Healing is not a dramatic event. It is a gradual returning — to sensation, to presence, to the quiet knowledge that you are safe in your own body.
These reflections are offered not as promises, but as invitations — to sense what might be possible when you bring your whole self into the room.
You Don't Have to Have It All Figured Out
A consultation is simply a conversation — a chance to sense whether this feels like the right next step for you.
Ambivalence is a natural part of this moment. Part of you may be curious — perhaps even quietly hopeful — while another part wonders whether you're ready, whether it will work, whether now is the right time.
That uncertainty doesn't need to be resolved before you reach out. It can come with you into the room. In somatic work, we begin exactly where you are — with what you're noticing, what you're feeling, what your body is already carrying.
A first conversation is an opportunity, not a commitment. It's a space to ask questions, to sense the quality of connection, and to let your body — not just your mind — have a say in what feels right.
Sessions held in San Francisco. Virtual appointments available throughout California.
No pressure, no obligation — only a quiet space to explore what feels true for you.