MY APPROACH

I use the term Integrative Mindful-Somatic Psychotherapy to describe the way I bring together mindfulness and embodiment with relational, systemic, ecological, and transpersonal ways of understanding and working with human experience.

Integrative means attending to the whole of your experience rather than reducing what you’re going through to a single symptom, diagnosis, or part of yourself. It also means helping different parts of your experience come back into relationship with one another, supporting a greater sense of coherence, connection, and wholeness.

Mindful means noticing what is happening in the present moment with curiosity, rather than immediately trying to analyze, control, or change it. This kind of attention can help you develop a more spacious relationship with your thoughts, emotions, and inner experience.

Somatic means including the body as part of the therapeutic process—sensations, breath, tension, movement, impulses, and nervous-system responses, not just thoughts and stories. By becoming more attuned to what your body is communicating, you can begin to relate to your experience in a more embodied and integrated way.

The goal of this work isn’t to arrive at some brand new “healed” or “transformed” version of yourself. Rather, it’s about having more freedom to live fully and authentically as yourself as old patterns loosen their grip, less energy is consumed by protection and avoidance, and more space opens for what you truly care about.

THIS WORK MAY RESONATE IF YOU WANT TO:

  • Move beyond insight into embodied, relational change.

  • Meet difficult patterns and emotions with more compassion.

  • Explore how family, identity, culture, and systems have shaped you.

  • Make room for meaning, spirituality, consciousness, and growth.

  • Cultivate more presence, choice, connection, and authenticity.

  • Integrate complementary practices such as meditation, breathwork, ecotherapy, therapeutic touch, psychedelic-assisted therapy, and ritual or ceremony.

THIS WORK MAY NOT RESONATE IF YOU WANT TO:

  • Focus mainly on venting or processing the events of each week.

  • Follow a highly structured, skills-based, or symptom-focused treatment protocol.

  • Keep therapy primarily intellectual or focused on gaining insight.

  • Focus mainly on controlling, eliminating, or overcoming uncomfortable emotions.

  • Keep therapy strictly talk-based, without somatic, experiential, or expanded-state practices.

  • Pursue psychedelic- or medicine-assisted experiences without preparation, relationship, and integration.

COMPLEMENTARY PRACTICES

Depending on your needs and interests, our work may also incorporate complementary practices to support embodiment, deepen awareness, and create additional pathways for exploration and integration. Click on the options below to learn more.

  • Meditation can support greater awareness of thoughts, emotions, sensations, and inner experience without immediately needing to react to or change them. Practices may include mindfulness, body-based meditation, guided imagery, or other contemplative approaches tailored to what feels supportive and accessible. Meditation is used as a way of deepening presence and self-relationship, not as a strategy for escaping or suppressing difficult experience.

  • Breathwork uses conscious attention to the breath as a way of deepening contact with the body, emotions, and present-moment experience. Depending on what feels supportive, practices may be gentle and regulating or more exploratory, helping bring awareness to patterns that can be difficult to access through words alone. Breathwork is always invitational and adapted to your needs, rather than something to push through or perform.

  • We may draw on seasonal rhythms, nature imagery, sensory awareness, or your relationship with the more-than-human world as ways of supporting grounding, reflection, embodiment, and connection. For clients who want to work more directly with nature, Outdoor Ecotherapy sessions on accessible trails around Portland are also available.

  • Therapeutic touch can offer a way of working beneath words and verbal processing, where deeper attachment and nervous system patterns may be felt more directly. When appropriate, supportive contact can help bring awareness to how your body organizes around safety, closeness, boundaries, protection, and connection. Touch is always optional, discussed beforehand, and guided by ongoing consent.

  • Ritual and ceremony can bring intention, symbolism, and a sense of sacred attention to moments of transition, grief, release, or renewal. When meaningful to you, simple practices may help mark what is changing, honor what has been carried, or give form to experiences that are difficult to express in words alone. Ritual is always collaborative and grounded in your own beliefs, culture, and relationship to spirituality rather than imposing a particular tradition or worldview.

  • Psychedelic-assisted therapy can create opportunities for expanded awareness, emotional processing, and new perspectives within a carefully held therapeutic context. The medicine is not treated as a quick fix, but as a possible doorway into deeper contact with the body, inner experience, and patterns that may be difficult to access in ordinary states of consciousness.

HOW THIS APPROACH IS DIFFERENT

My clients are often thoughtful and self-aware—they understand their patterns, can name their triggers, and know their stories inside and out. But despite that insight, something still feels stuck. This approach helps you go deeper than words by shifting the focus from talking about your experience to actually being with it. You might notice how your shoulders tense when you’re setting boundaries, how your belly contracts in response to old wounds, or how your breath softens when a part of you feels seen. We bring gentle, mindful attention to these sensations—not to fix them, but to listen, feel, and respond with care. That kind of embodied presence opens the door to lasting change.

For example, if a client comes into session wanting to work with anxiety, we won’t just talk about what’s causing it or try to reframe the thoughts behind it. Instead, we might slow down and notice how anxiety is showing up in the body—tightness in the chest, a knot in the stomach, shallow breath. With mindful attention and support, we stay with those sensations, bringing curiosity and compassion instead of judgment or analysis. Often, these physical cues hold the key to deeper emotions or unmet needs. Rather than just understanding anxiety, you begin to feel and relate to it differently—creating space for new patterns, insights, and self-trust to emerge.

REFLECTIONS ON HEALING

What exactly does “healing” mean anyway?

I’m drawn to the definition of healing offered by Prentis Hemphill in What It Takes To Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World, a book I often recommend to clients and others interested in this work. Hemphill defined healing as “the process, often lifelong, of restoring and reawakening the capacities for safety, belonging, and dignity on the other side of trauma.”

Here, the word “trauma” doesn’t necessarily mean a single catastrophic event. It can also include the cumulative impact of experiences of loss, rupture, violation, exclusion, or disconnection. These experiences can shape our beliefs about ourselves and the world, our nervous system responses, and our capacities for safety, belonging, and dignity.

The goal of this work isn’t to arrive at some brand new “healed” or “transformed” version of yourself. Rather, it’s about having more freedom to live fully and authentically as yourself as old patterns loosen their grip, less energy is consumed by protection and avoidance, and more space opens for what you truly care about.

Through this work, over time, you may notice:

  • having more room to feel what you feel without becoming overwhelmed or needing to shut it down;

  • recognizing old protective patterns with less shame and more choice;

  • trusting yourself more, even when there isn’t a clear answer;

  • having greater access to rest, pleasure, intimacy, creativity, or connection.

Therapy is a deeply personal journey, and finding the right fit is important. If this approach resonates with you, I invite you to reach out for a free 20-minute consultation.