If you work with me, here are some things that are likely to come up:
Who are your people?
I don't believe in individual healing separate from community healing any more than you might believe water exists separate from the rivers or seas. I'll be curious about who the people/groups in your life are and how they support or inhibit the growth that is wanting to take place. Dinners with friends, sports, workshops, activism, hobbies, movement/dance: how are these present already and how might they be if they aren't right now? I'll also ask you to relate to the larger systems of belonging/exclusion in our culture: culture/race, gender, sexuality, religion/spirituality, and economics are all worth our deep and tender curiosity. Our people show us who we are.
What does your body have to say?
Fundamental to the work I do is the idea that there’s nothing about us, no sensation, no idea, no breath, no emotion, no story, no sense of anything that doesn’t take place within our bodies. Our whole bodies. Numbing out happens there. Sexuality happens there. Drive happens there. Wonder happens there. Self happens there. Lostness happens there. Race and gender happen there. And, meaningfully, inquiry can happen there too. Through awareness and movement practices, we'll turn to your body over and over again to learn what is known without words.
What's happening between you and me?
When we seek help around matters of the heart and soul, much of which is shaped by the families and cultures we grew up in, there's a tremendous benefit in the structure of one-on-one work. My aim is to offer a quality of attention, attunement, and affection that parts of us always need. And I expect that in our connection we will also reenact old patterns of relationship: avoidance, distraction, fawning/pleasing, intellectualizing, anger, narcissism, etc. I'll bring attention to this and will help draw the lines to how this might show up more broadly in your life. One-on-one work can be a corrective experience of closeness, but only if we are willing to treat our relationship with the same curiosity we treat others.
What's bigger than this?
In a time where our species is actively moving towards the destruction of our own habitat, modernity has reached its endgame. Me as separate from you, bodies as separate from the Earth, economics as separate from ecology, god as separate from the living world. These axioms of the last few hundred years, and the incredible harm to life on Earth that has resulted, are the deepest form of supremacy. They signal an extreme loss of connection to what is larger than us: the non-human systems of this world and the even larger systems beyond our planet. Respect and humility are due to that which created us and will also take us away. In our time together, we will make space for this vastness and find ourselves right-sized within it.
What is a session like?
We meet by preference in-person (SF Bay Area) or, if needed, on Zoom for an hour each time. The session is completely yours. That means I’ll ask you questions to figure out what the best use of our time is, and we’ll find a path together. So there’s talking (words are definitely useful for bringing things out into the world), but at the heart of it there’s somatic practice: using our bodies to learn. Standard and improvised movement and touch practices are adapted to your needs, requests, and boundaries. I typically meet you in your space or at a designated space outdoors that offers reasonable privacy and containment. If neither of these are good options for you, we can discuss other options.
I charge on a sliding scale from $80-110/hour. We can discuss payment in more detail during an initial consultation.