Queer & Trans Healing

Somatic Bodywork

Our bodies create ingenious protective patterns to adapt to stress, oppression, trauma, and overwhelm. These precise strategies are designed to preserve our humanity and spirit until threat has passed. After an acute trauma, prolonged stress, and continuously surviving marginalization, these patterns can get stuck and rigid blocking off our full access to aliveness, agency and ease. This tension can create barriers to expressing and receiving love, exploring our creativity, setting boundaries, speaking our truth, and relaxing and enjoying what is most precious to us in our lives.

Somatic bodywork helps us notice places where we are more—or less—connected to our body. We can update our body and nervous system to the present moment, re-inhabiting places that we once left. We get to keep the armor we need to live in this world yet with more choice and fluidity. We can let go of any tension we don’t need— even as we work hard to create a more just society. This can deeply benefit our energy, sleep, health, immune system, and connection with others.

This form of bodywork takes place fully clothed face up on a bodywork table with ongoing explicit consent. First, I support you in gaining increased awareness of your present time somatic sensations. We will attune to your breath, temperature, pain, pleasure, or ease that may be present. We will listen to your body in order to connect to your longings, needs and wisdom. Through breath work and/or intentional touch, we will collaborate to bring attention and release to parts of your system that may have been working really hard for a long time. We can let suspended life-preserving energy that we didn’t get to fully express move through and complete. This resolves past fight, flight and freeze states.

No touch is required as we can also utilize breath work, sandbags and wraps to work with chronic muscle and organ contractions. With your consent, here are some options of the types of touch you can choose between: gentle or firm, back of your head, tops of your feet, heart, belly, shoulders, tops of your things, sides of your calves, ribs, forehead, cheeks, and back.

This work has the power to deeply calm the nervous system, restore resilience and support us to increase our inherent life force. Somatic work offers practices to align your thoughts, body and actions with your ideals and values. As we practice new ways of responding to stress, triggers and life changes, we can take generative action for positive change in our chosen families, communities and social movements.