Integrative Bodywork
Reconnect to your body.
Resolve lingering patterns from traumatic events.
Recover stability and manage pain.
Why should we connect with our bodies?
We have been socialized to control feelings and develop intellect over intuition.
Unfortunately, over-thinking creates chronic under-feeling.
It turns out that when we avoid feelings, they don’t just disappear like a fleeting thought, they nestle in our tissues, postures, and movement patterns.
This is where intuitive, body-centered practices and care come in.
These feelings could be stored from prior traumatic events like an impact injury, relational conflict, or illness. Either way, these emotions collect, as do the patterns they create.
As amazing as our bodies are for adapting through life, unprocessed experiences can lead to physical pain, limited range of motion, a weakened immune system, poor sleep, and overwhelm of the nervous system.
Integrated Bodywork provides a way of processing undigested experiences through the physical body, but does not view the individual as compartmentalized parts.
As complex and dynamic creatures, we are not just a bag of bones, or a mind in a container. The way we experience this world, events, and feelings are intertwined in our tissues and apparent in our expression. We can not seem to address one engendered pattern without tending to the whole.
Here, it is understood that your bodily experience is not worlds away from your thoughts, emotions, and spirit, rather integrated with it all.
With the awareness that all of our experiences are with us at all times, this offering is based in practices that acknowledge the discomfort in noticing and processing sensations, especially if they’ve been stored for some time.
In this work, you will always have choice in depth of processing, and will never be invited to experience outside of your capacity.
We may be a good fit if you’re looking for:
curious inquiry and compassionate validation
I bring my curious and playful nature into each session in hopes of finding an easeful path towards clarifying and highlighting your own inherent wisdom. I also know very well how difficult it is to dig deep and find compassion for the parts of our selves that feel like the culprit. In those moments of facing a challenge, I am right there to remind you that your body holds far more than the “score”. Joy, pleasure, and ease are just waiting to be noticed.
responsive attention and trauma awareness
Your sense of safety and comfort are my top priorities. All of my offerings are aimed at tending to the nervous system with awareness of the individual’s experience, needs, and boundaries. In addition, I want to meet you where you’re at in each moment. This means we can adapt our plan to suit your needs before, during and after session. I bring various props, tools, techniques and approaches to a session so that we can create a container that looks like care, to you.
a steady presence that centers relationship
I think you might already know how incredibly important relationship is in a therapeutic space. With the right person, we feel like co-regulation is a breeze, a sense of safety might be more accessible, and we feel hopeful that we can finally settle and soften with a witness. This sense of being seen and heard, is key to our growth. I think you might also know that relationship building and growth takes time. Please know, I am here for the slow and steady.
“Rachel is the most thoughtful practitioner I’ve had the experience of working with! It’s refreshing to find someone who integrates movement with body work, and introduces healing practices in this particular way. They are clearly knowledgeable and at the same time they are creative and kind in their work. I honestly couldn’t recommend them more.”
-Carly F.
Session Payment Options
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Standard Rate
Pay $150 for a 75 minute session, if you can pay the middle way, but not more.
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Supported Rate
Pay $130 for a session, if you need a bit of financial support to access this offering.
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Supporting Rate
Pay $170 for a session, if you can pay for more without without worry.
Ready to work together?
Step 1: schedule your initial session
This meeting provides the opportunity to define your goals and co-create a plan that meets your needs. We’ll also have some time to practice and get a feel for where your nervous system is at in the moment.
Step 2: return for regular sessions.
Our work begins with sessions aimed at building a strong support system for the work ahead with resourcing, boundary, and preference work.
Each session after will vary in order to meet you in each moment, but for the most part our time together will align within this structure:
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When we first meet and settle, I’ll join you in an exercise that invites us both to arrive in the room together.
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An assessment can include body scans, a check in of movements and shapes held in your body, and a revisit of your goals to be sure we are on the right path for you.
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This care includes everything we planned on and many alternate choices available when we need to adapt.
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After your session, we can reflect on our work together and create personalized rituals and practices that will carry you long after our session.
“Rachel is sensitive, intuitive, informative and comforting. They offered movement that I could carry with me outside of our session to continue to support my body. I’m so thankful that healers like this exist and grateful to have been the recipient of her care.”
— Brea Y.
Each session is created to meet your needs in the moment.
In our work together, we have many elements of a practice to integrate that include but are not limited to:
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Somatic exploration is an experiential inquiry of sensation, visualization, patterns, emotions, and beliefs.
This work is deeply influenced by the Somatic Experiencing method.
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Manual therapy or hands on support, provides an opportunity to feel into sensation to determine what needs might be present in each moment.
Unlike massage therapy, this work is always done fully clothed and invites intention setting, boundary work, and most of all safe and affective touch.
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Neuromuscular bodywork is an active practice aimed at body awareness and re-patterning limiting shapes and movements.
This modality is also available when an individual is not ready for or does not desire touch.
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Therapeutic movement is curious action that invites exploration of static posture and expressive motion with:
responsive movements that meet you exactly where you’re at with invitation to expand
foundational postures that build relationship with stability
dynamic exercises to further develop joint range and expansive patterns
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There is a vast world of research for the nervous system and approaches to health. In our sessions, I center Polyvagal Theory and additional supporting claims aimed at whole system integration
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Resources brought into each session enhance experience and lead back to sensation, to include:
myo-fascial tools
aromatherapy with hand crafted botanical infused products
and more
“It is amazing how much ease I feel in my body after an Integrative Bodywork session. Compared to massage therapy, this reaches a much deeper level of healing.”
— Private Client
FAQs
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That is an option!
With Integrative Bodywork, I bring many tools and techniques to meet you where you are. This means, if manual therapy or movement is not desired, we can absolutely stay within the Somatic Experiencing container of focus.
The same goes for someone who does not want to do Somatic Experiencing techniques.
This offering adapts to the individual.
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The duration of your commitment is dependent on your needs, goals, and expectations.
However, I recommend committing to at least 3 months of weekly or biweekly sessions.
This allows us to create a foundation of resources and tools you can take for ongoing emotional care.
One-off sessions can be of value for emergent support needs, once you feel stable in your practice.
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While bodywork is a great compliment to traditional talk therapy, it does not replace clinical attention. Licensed psychotherapists treat individuals based on their assessment of a person’s history, behavior, and symptoms.
Additionally, clinical treatment is highly valuable for those experiencing mental illness and seeking diagnosis, and/or medicinal therapies.
In contrast, bodywork does not aim to analyze cognition rather discuss lived experience and educate the individual on helpful methods of intervention. With Integrative Bodywork, body-based practices and methodologies are centered, with the implementation of tools and resources to support your goals.
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The root of the word “somatic” is “soma”, which translates to “body”. So, one could say that a somatic experience is of the body, or a bodily experience.
When someone is describing their work as “somatic” like myself, they are describing the orientation of their approach. For example, somatic work is not a top down, or mind centered approach.
Somatic work focuses on current experience of sensation, feeling, emotion, visualization, and meaning.
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I can not, and I do not believe trauma is something to release, rather resolve.
I feel it is important to note that there is a vast amount of misinformation swirling the internet about what trauma is and how to “release” it. What I know from my training and experience is that this is not possible. There is no tool, button, or hip opener that can cure any one, let alone everyone. Otherwise we would have a better sense of what world peace might look like.
What I am hoping to offer you is support through feeling the hard things, guidance through integration, and practices that help you keep connection to sensation in this world.
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Short answer: yes and no.
I believe the words “regulate” and “release” to be pretty attractive outcomes when it comes to wanting to rid oneself of uncomfortable feelings. Of course I want this for myself and others, but I just don’t think it’s that simple.
The work “regulate” reminds me of the social narrative that expects us to control ourselves and “get it together” in order to get back to work.
While most of us need such resources in order to function, and work to survive, I like to reframe emotional regulation, as emotional relationship.
This describes the act of being able to sit with the difficult and notice choice. This means that your anger, sadness, resent, disgust and all of those other bigger feelings are welcome and valid.
With a somatic practice, we might better hold ourselves with compassion, recognize our emotions, patterns, and activations.
Whereas before, they possibly ran the show and brought shame along.
Emotions will always be here with us on this ride of the human experience, but acceptance of that might be a good first step to noticing them.