What I Work With
People come to see me for many different reasons. Sometimes something hurts. Sometimes movement feels restricted or uncomfortable. Sometimes stress, trauma, or years of pushing through have changed how it feels to live in their body. And sometimes they know something isn’t working particularly well, but aren’t quite sure how to describe it.
These aren’t separate categories of people or problems. They overlap, often considerably. You don’t need to figure out which one you belong in before coming to see me.
Physical pain, tension & movement
A large part of my practice is still very straightforwardly about the body. Something hurts. Something feels tight. A movement that used to be easy no longer is. One side feels different from the other. Breathing feels restricted. Your jaw won’t stop clenching. Your back, neck, hip, or shoulder keeps asking for attention.
I work with people experiencing chronic or recurring pain, persistent tension, changes in mobility, posture and asymmetry, scoliosis, jaw and TMJ concerns, headaches, breathing and rib-cage restrictions, and the lingering effects of injuries.
Other people aren’t particularly injured or in pain. Musicians, athletes, yoga practitioners, dancers, and people who simply enjoy moving may come because something in their coordination or movement doesn’t feel as easy, supported, or adaptable as they would like.
Stress, trauma & overwhelm
Our physical experience doesn’t exist separately from the rest of our lives. Stress can show up in how we breathe, move, brace, rest, orient, respond to touch, or experience our own body.
I work with people living with anxiety, chronic stress, burnout, trauma histories, overwhelm, and experiences of feeling disconnected from or uncomfortable in their bodies.
There isn’t one bodily response to trauma or stress. Some people feel constantly activated or vigilant. Others feel shut down, distant, or difficult to reach. Many move between different states depending on the situation.
The goal isn’t to make you calm.
Calm can be useful, and it isn’t always what someone needs. I am more interested in helping create enough room to notice what is happening, experience more choice, and find ways of being with yourself that don’t require forcing a particular state.
Touch may be part of this work, and it doesn’t have to be. Movement, conversation, orientation, attention, and simply taking time to notice what is happening can all be part of a session.
When things aren’t so easily separated
A lot of people don’t fit neatly into a physical category or an emotional one. In reality, very few of us do.
Your jaw may tighten when you’re stressed. Your back pain may change depending on sleep, workload, or how supported you feel. You may understand exactly what you’re supposed to do in physical therapy and still find yourself returning to the same pattern. Or you may have spent years trying different approaches and still feel that something important hasn’t quite been addressed.
None of this means that physical symptoms are secretly psychological, or that every difficult experience has created a physical problem. It means that bodies are part of people, and people are complicated.
Sometimes the useful question isn’t which category a problem belongs in. It’s what we can notice when we stop requiring it to fit neatly into one.
You can come because your neck hurts. We can start there and remain curious about what else becomes relevant.
Sometimes we can understand ourselves remarkably well and still find that understanding only takes us so far.
When you’ve already done a lot of inner work
I often work with people who have spent years in therapy, meditation, contemplative practice, yoga, or other forms of personal exploration. Many are therapists, meditation teachers, bodyworkers, or other practitioners themselves.
They may have developed a great deal of insight into themselves and their patterns. Therapy may have been enormously helpful. Meditation may have changed their relationship with their thoughts and experience. And yet they sometimes reach a place where something they understand very clearly doesn’t seem to be changing in the same way.
This is often where our work begins. The body can offer another way of encountering something that has already been thought about, talked about, or observed many times. We can become curious about how that understanding is actually lived through sensation, movement, effort, attention, and relationship.
For practitioners, this can also include noticing how their own patterns show up in the work they do with others. The focus remains on their own experience rather than on analyzing or treating someone else’s client.
You don’t have to decide what kind of work you need.
The different things I’ve studied—Rolfing, craniosacral therapy, somatic movement, yoga therapy, visceral work, meditation, pain science, and trauma— aren’t separate boxes that I ask people to choose between when they walk through the door.
They give me different ways of paying attention and different possibilities for how we might work. Sometimes a session is primarily hands-on. Sometimes movement becomes important. Sometimes we spend time noticing something that keeps happening. Often the boundaries between these ways of working aren’t particularly important.
Bring what you’re experiencing. We can begin there and figure out together what might be useful.
You don’t need to have the right explanation before you begin.
You may know exactly what you want help with, or you may only know that something doesn’t feel quite right. Either is enough to start a conversation with the body you have today.