Healing on a Planetary Scale

You know that healing and liberation are as intrinsically linked as trauma and oppression. 

You know that the genius and leadership of the most marginalized and oppressed communities must be centered. 

You know that what we need in the world right now is big bold action. And the ability to take feedback, refine our action and try again.
 
And the idea of making mistakes is terrifying. 
It makes your guts cramp up.
 
You want to tear down the prisons. 
And the courts.  And the cops.
 
And when it comes to harm within your own communities, you’re at a loss.

How do you hold the humanity of folks who make big mistakes and do big harm? 

How do you hold your own humanity when you make  mistakes, both big and small, and hurt others? 

What does responsibility look like?  Should there be punishment? 

How does justice happen when cycle of ‘I wound someone else because you wounded me and then they wound someone else and get punished with more wounds’ goes on and on?
 
You believe that we can win and yet, finding hope right now feels increasingly elusive.

The world is on fire, and after dealing with the dysfunction and in-fighting in your organizing crew, you feel like throwing in the towel. 

You are so goddam tired. 
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And still, there’s so much to be done.
 
The meetings and marches don't take care of nor respect the limits of your body and often you can't even manage to get you in the door and yet you’re supposed to give and give. 

How can you keep on fighting for a vision of liberation that doesn’t include you?
 

You need tools that include you. 

You need tools that are systemically rooted.
 
You need tools that understand the brilliance and the devastation of our movements. 
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You need tools that address harm in order to reduce harm.

You need practice that is rooted in liberation in the here and now.

Imagine There Was More Than Just Survival

I like to remind my clients frequently that talking to an amygdala never works. The repeated mainstream attempts to reason with a traumatized nervous system is a setup and often results in failure.
 
Embedded trauma both happened within and lives on in the nervous system. And to unwind it and heal it, we need solutions that work on the
level of the nervous system.
 
I want to give you the tools to actually heal so that you can make
the impact on this world that you were meant to make. 

I want to give you the tools to actually heal so that you can have buoyancy when faced with adversity and also capacity to dive in when you encounter joy. 

I want to give you the tools to actually heal so that you can create a life that is beyond survival.
 
Often times when your nervous system is on constant blast and survival mode, it can be difficult to discern who you are and what is even possible beyond your trauma. I am here to help with that visioning.

Centered boundaries, balanced intimacy, bold extension towards your longings, recovery from triggers--these are tools that you deserve to have in your toolbox.


You are not what happened to you.  And as brilliant as your survival strategies were, you are also not just that survival.

Comfort and transformation do not live on the same block.  Often with trauma, we start to equate discomfort with danger.  This makes our lives and our worlds smaller and smaller as we risk less and less. 

What if you had tools so that your discomfort was not the worse thing ever? 

What if, with help, you were able to feel into the discomfort
and create a life of boldness and bigness and possibility?

You can have this.  You deserve this.  It's time to heal.

Building a little more space & a little more tolerability

You are so damn brave. 

I know that often and perhaps increasingly the hole seems endless. 

I know that that you might scoff at the notion that you are even a tiny bit brave.

AND being here, reading this, considering help, wanting something different is brave. 

You are brave.

And that bravery does not mean that you have to feel this way forever.

I want to give you some tools that can help.

I am invested first in not necessarily making things better (because let's be real, if it was that easy, you would have already done that) but finding immediate ways to make the depression and hopelessness a little less worse.

Generally clients who come to me with depression and hopelessness are in crisis and have been suffering and drowning for quite a while before they found the reserve to reach out.

Our first order of business then is to create a little more space and a little more tolerability in your life.

I want to shore up your reserve and your resilience immediately so that the suffering can be a little less loud. 

And with that reserve and resilience can come the space and the capacity to do some of the bigger and deeper work.

I'm not here to silver line your suffering or give you crappy strategies that don't address the real here-and-now crisis that is affecting your every minute.

I know that one of the things that both creates and exacerbates depression & hopelessness is how goddam lonely it is.

You don't have to be alone in it anymore.

We can build some tools to both address the immediate crisis at its root.

We can build some tools so that you can have more choices in how you live.

You get to have a different life.

I'm here to help.

What If Anxiety & Stress Didn’t Have to Determine Everything About Your Life

When I work with people who are coping with anxiety and stress, it’s important that we act fast.  Often times, folks have been overriding their limits and silencing the alarm bells in their body for some time before they seek out help. 

The truth is there's wisdom in your anxiety and stress and they are actually feelings that are important to have in your body.  And sometimes when they have taken over and are driving the bus, you need some help wrestling the steering wheel back.  They are welcome passengers but their driving skills suck.

So many folks dealing with anxiety and stress are professionals at minimizing their feelings and teaching themselves to just muscle through it. 

When folks finally seek out my help, it’s often because the minimization and muscling isn’t working anymore and the feelings are overwhelming. 

Your body is screaming out at you, and you’re about to loose it from the near constant screaming and nothing you do seems to help.  It feels like you’re right on the edge of an abyss, and things do not look good.
 

The good news is that I can help.
 

Body-based healing is so effective at addressing anxiety and stress because it works on the level of the nervous system where anxiety and stress often are battling from. 

I can help you build tools so that you can stop tip-toeing around your life avoiding the ever growing mountain of triggers, so that you can understand what your body is asking for and start to practice building the muscle memory
​of showing up for it.

Your sensitivity and empathetic nature are gifts, and I want to help you figure out how to wield them in a way that takes better care of you.

Together we will figure out a plan so you can notice the alarm bells before they are landing you on the edge of the abyss, build tools so that your only option isn't to muscle through and start living. 

I want to help you figure out how your world doesn’t have to be such a place of suffering because
we need you and all your gifts in it.

Ten Ways That Sensations Changed My Life

1) For a long time, I proudly identified as a 'head on a stick'. As an overworked, underhealed organizer, I could break down definitions of hegemony on the spot, but couldn’t identify a sensation to save my life. So much of my survival was about being a very quick, very adept thinker. And that way of being was reinforced and celebrated by a lot of the movement cycles that I was involved with. But, as I began to move away from these circles and entered a process of growth and healing, I noticed that this very cognitively based understanding and discernment wasn’t enough to truly change my patterns and broaden my life.

To get nerdy on you, neuroscientists have found that the greatest concentration of neuro synapses — contrary to popular belief — is in your gut, not your brain. Why does this matter? Well, when I started to broaden the information I was relying on and incorporate information from my gut or my ‘second brain’, my healing changed profoundly. Sensations were a key to unlocking levels that I didn’t even know existed!

2) When I have grown my capacity to neither fixate on nor avoid my feelings, be they emotions or physical sensations, it feels like I have more options — particularly ones where I can align my actions with my values.

3) When I’ve relied solely on my cognitive thoughts and interpretations of a situation, particularly a loaded situation, I’ve notice that the time frame for those thoughts is often… slippery. As if transparencies of what’s happened in the past are laid over the present moment, making it unclear what’s *actually* happening right now. When I’ve been able to be with my sensations, I have more tools to discern between the past and the present. I more easily access real-time information about my boundaries, my wants, my needs, etc. Sensations make ‘what is’ much more accessible for me.

4) Simply put, when I avoid my sensations, they don’t go away. Generally they sit around and fester. Or they build and build until they start popping up unannounced in all kinds of ways that don’t take the best care of me. The things that I am most afraid of and most try to avoid have tremendous power over me. When I have practices in my life that encourage acknowledging and leaning into those sensations of fear or avoidance, there is more movement and more change in my life.

5)Grounded accountability; principled conflict; leaning into greater intimacy; sitting with the unknown; being able to show up both for ourselves *and* for others; responding to stresses and hurt from a place of collective liberation — all of these are great ideas that I hold dear. When I have a greater capacity to feel my sensations, these honorable grand concepts can actually become kinesthetic practices that change my relationships and my engagement in community on the daily.

6) Getting to know my sensations has given me a basis from which I can recognize and honor and feel into all the brilliant ways that I have survived up until this point —something my cognitive brain and our dominant culture often disparages — and has also given me a springboard from which I can build brilliant new skills for how I want to live in the here and now.

7) When I feel my sensations and practice leaning into them, I better notice when I'm triggered. When I feel my sensations and practice leaning into them, I can recover from that state. When I feel my sensations and practice leaning into them, I have a lot more

discernment skills to figure out what’s actually happening versus what I think or interpret is happening. When I feel my sensations and practice leaning into them I have myriad options about how I can respond.

8) I have found that life, as a human, on this planet, is a hot mess of brilliance and devastation. When I can be with that complexity and contradiction, I don’t have to constrict myself or uphold binaries that don’t take care of me/us.

9) When I sit with my feelings without having to react out of them, collapse under them, try to get away from them, or spend all my energy wishing they were different, I discover I have tools to open myself up to other humans and myself in liberatory, transformative ways.

10) I have observed and experienced that the work of combating and unlearning oppression (pivotal to building the world I want to live in) requires me to be uncomfortable. That work requires me to have the capacity to make big bold actions. It requires me to have the capacity to make mistakes — and to be accountable for those mistakes. To recognize my mistakes, and then to learn different ways of DOing and BEing. To hang in, and also to speak out. That work requires me to sit with the impact and implications of historic and current-day oppression that I am both implicated in and implicated by. That work requires that I build my capacity to hold onto hope. The cost of not being able to feel uncomfortable in my life has been enormous and far-reaching. Sensation-based practices give me concrete ways to increase my capacity to truly and wholly and sustainably show up for the work in service of liberation.