Introduction to My Approach
Most of my interactions with clients include some combination of somatic (body) practice, exploration of the dominant societal paradigms that shape our challenges, and a dive into attachment styles. At 53, I step into the role now associated with the true prime of women's lives, and I love exploring the perimenopausal and menopausal journey--I feel more alive and vibrant as I age and revel in sharing that process with others.
Somatic (body) practice
Before we relate to another body, we are in relationship with our own. And for most of us, that primary relationship has been shaped by cultural messaging — about what our body should look like, what it's allowed to feel, what it's permitted to want.
Our body serves as both an entry into unpacking these dynamics and a highly effective ground for processing them.
Our stories — relational, sexual, developmental — are usually first translated as emotions and then become lodged in the body as sensation and tension (Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score illuminates this well.) Talk therapy can bring some clarity and relief, while deep modalities like EMDR, Brainspotting, and psychedelic therapies can shift what talk alone cannot reach.
There is also another path: working with the sensations in the body, bypassing the story and the emotion to meet what's alive in the tissue. Using sound, breath, movement, and touch, including modalities rooted in Somatic Sex Education, we work with the body's own intelligence to process and move emotional material in ways that can feel miraculous in their simplicity. What takes months to circle around in the intellect can sometimes shift in minutes of embodied practice.
Once internalized, this becomes an essential daily tool for processing emotion, for understanding your attachment patterns, for coming home to yourself.
Sex and Sexuality
Sex is still treated, in much of our culture, as a private matter, something contained, managed, kept separate from the rest of life. And yet sexuality is not peripheral. It is central. It is life force. It is the animating current behind our creativity, our connection, our capacity to generate anything new in the world.
My work in this area centers on body awareness and somatic (body) practices that help people develop a more intimate, honest relationship with their own sensations, which ultimately include pleasure. Many of us have never been socialized to focus on what we actually want, so this begins with developing real connection with the body, learning to feel and trust its signals, and from there, learning to communicate our preferences.
This is not the YouTube version of sexual coaching. It is more energetic, more intimate, and more authentically connected, with self and with other.
Perimenopause and Menopause
The story that we decline with age is a cultural myth.
Dr. Sharon Blackie and Dr. Mindy Pelz are among the contemporary thinkers doing vital work to document and destigmatize the experience of women in perimenopause and beyond. Neurologically, as we age, we actually improve. We become ready to discover our true desires and identities, and we develop increased brain power to manifest these ways of being into our communities. The story that we decline with age is a cultural myth. The opposite is true, and has been understood to be true by women's communities for centuries before colonization disrupted that knowledge.
This season of life can be one of the most potent entry points into the transformation work I do.
Orcas and humans have comparably long menopause phases.
Attachment styles
By now, many people have encountered the language of anxious and avoidant attachment. If you haven't, the short version: We come into our adult relationships carrying patterns from childhood, ways of reaching for closeness or bracing against it, that shape everything we do in partnership, often without our awareness.
One of the most common dynamics I see with clients is the anxious-avoidant pairing, which often creates codependence. A few things I want you to know about this:
• There's real relief in recognizing how many of us have created the exact same dynamics. You are not uniquely broken.
• These patterns can shift. There is substantial scholarship and practice around how to work with these tendencies — not by shaming ourselves out of them, but by developing enough awareness to stop acting from them automatically.
• With that consciousness, we can take responsibility for these dynamics, hold them as our own, and not act from them–effectively shifting the way we show up in relationship in order to create secure attachment.
• Two people from within the relationship can, in fact, become trusted witnesses for each other as we each untangle how our childhood wounds have been running our dynamics.