I believe in awareness, function, and comfort as the guiding sources of interest and energy for our growth and wellbeing. The demands of daily life can take us out of ourselves: to find ease with ourselves involves learning to listen to the body and attuning to the non-verbal information that arises. It is difficult to overcome our habitual patterns alone because we are social creatures, and our nervous systems and the construction of meanings emerge out of interpersonal neurobiology. I am here to be a partner with you in the healing process, using all the skills and knowledge developed over years of study, training and my passion for this work.
Choosing physical therapy (PT) as a career path many years after getting a degree in Anthropology allows me to combine academic knowledge and study about physical experiences in order to facilitate the pleasures that can come with movement. These can be even the tiniest of movements. Physical Therapy can expand our appreciation for the biological and physical experiences within our culture, our society, and our individual life spans. It is a form of embodied cognition.
After PT school I worked for two years at the Upledger Institute. During this time I refined the skill to listen to the body with my hands and became a certified CranioSacral Therapist. I also internalized the osteopathic values that the body has the capacity to heal itself and learned to trust the embodied process unfolding in the present therapeutic moment.
When I joined the VA in 2001, I quickly became aware of the impact of trauma in the presentation of chronic pain and chronic dysfunction. This led me to the study of Somatic Experiencing, for which I became certified as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) in 2009. Pain is information about threat to the organism and the perception of threat can arise from internal or external sources: it can be physical, emotional or traumatic. The contribution of the Somatic Experiencing model to the treatment of pain and trauma is the understanding that trauma resides in the nervous system and physiological processes of the body and not in the contents of the traumatizing event.
The VA has been a crucible for integrating all these many therapeutic skills and modalities. I now meet you, the whole person within your cultural matrix, whether you are curious or distressed, to help you access the impulse towards health.
I welcome the opportunity to work with you to restore your resilience and capacity to listen to and understand your own body. The goal is for you to integrate these skills into better overall health that is physical, emotional and spiritual. The path to healing waits.