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.

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, somatic touch therapy, 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.

HOW THIS APPROACH IS DIFFERENT

In conventional talk therapy, much of the session may focus on describing what happened, making sense of it, and talking through what to do next. We do some of that too—but we don’t necessarily stay there.

At any moment, we might pause and notice what is happening right now. Where do you feel that in your body? What happens as you say those words out loud? Do you notice an impulse to pull away, brace, explain, laugh, disappear, or take care of me? What changes when we stay with that experience for a few moments instead of immediately moving past it?

Sometimes we may work with a sensation, an image, a protective part, a movement, or something happening between us in the therapeutic relationship. The aim is to give you an opportunity not only to understand your patterns, but to encounter them differently as they are happening—with more awareness, support, and choice.

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. Learn more about Outdoor Ecotherapy.

  • Somatic Touch Therapy uses skilled, attuned touch to work directly with the body and nervous system in ways that can reach beneath words and verbal processing. It can help bring awareness to how your body organizes around safety, closeness, boundaries, protection, and connection, while supporting new experiences of regulation and embodied relationship. Touch is always optional and collaborative, with careful attention to consent, pacing, boundaries, and what feels appropriate within the therapeutic relationship.

  • 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.

  • Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy can create opportunities for expanded awareness, emotional processing, and new perspectives within a carefully held therapeutic context. Ketamine 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. Learn more about Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy.

REFLECTIONS ON HEALING

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.