Cultural Somatic Therapy
“The flesh is at the heart of the world”
— Merleau-Ponty
Soma, Somatics, and Somatic Practice
Somatics arises from the word Soma. Somatic Psychotherapy arises from the blending of Somatic Practice within the context of psychotherapy.
Soma is your direct, immediate, embodied lived experience of yourself, in your social-relational-historical-political context. Somatic practice and somatic psychotherapy are experiential.
Somatic practice is the project of building new ways of being towards personal and collective liberation that recognizes body and mind are integrally connected aspects of a larger whole. Somatic practices involve healing through kinesthetic-movement practice, proprioceptive intelligence, sensory awareness, postural analysis, nervous system regulation, and exploration of your immediate felt-sense embodied experience of breath, gesture, muscle, fascia, bone, impulse, balance, ground, connection, boundary, & integration.
Cultural somatic practice explores the intersection of culture and body, the mutual ways in which our ways of breathing, sensing, feeling, perceiving, relating, meaning-making, and acting influences and is influenced by the broader cultural, institutional, historical, intergenerational contexts, hierarchies, intersectional identities, and power dynamics.
By building your ability for somatic awareness, bodily intelligence, & movement exploration within the context of your life you can feel at home in your body and develop a visceral present moment sense of what is true for you. By being with your immediate bodily experience you can develop skills you need to access your own inner expert and more effectively navigate overwhelming experiences of stress, emotion, trauma, or adversity.
Cultural Somatic practice aims towards the reclamation of embodied cultural modes of being as a healing refuge and site of creativity, resource, resilience, integrity, connection, emotion, authenticity, and both personal & social transformation.
Somatic Psychotherapy & Culture
Somatic Psychotherapy is a body-oriented therapeutic modality and holistic approach to wellness and trauma survival that builds upon and integrates the diversity of somatic approaches within the context of therapy. Somatic Psychotherapy guides you in contacting and being gently with your embodied lived-experience of race, ethnicity, and socio-cultural identity.
Somatic Psychotherapy promotes embodied transformation and collective liberation that interrogates and interrupts toxic social forms of domination such as white supremacy, colonialism, and patriarchy.
As a BIPOC identified Iranian-American immigrant I offer somatic psychotherapy that centers supporting BIPOC, Iranian, & Immigrant communities to reforge connection to systemic, ancestral, intergenerational narratives of dignity, respect, wisdom, and healing.
I offer embodied practices to facilitate healing from colonization, internalized oppression, racial violence, intergenerational trauma, systemic abuses of power.
Resource Models of Somatic Psychotherapy for Trauma Recovery: Honoring the Bodily Wisdom of Trauma Survival Resources
My approach to somatic therapy is based primarily on the somatic resourcing models of Somatic Experiencing and Psycho-Physical Therapy.
One way to approach looking at somatic resources is that they exist on the spectrum from survival resources to creative resources.
Survival Resources are older, automatic nervous system habituated patterns of being, living, thinking, feeling, acting, embodying, and relating that we at a young age learned as a way to survive the overwhelming impact of personal, relational, and social oppression that resulted in a radical disruption to our bodily process.
Our survival resources are often primitive impulses to silence, fight, flight, freeze brace, hold on, cut off, dissociate, numb, hide, feign, fawn, appease, caretake, isolate, fragment, compromise, collapse in hypovigilance and/or escalate in hypervigilance. We do this instinctively when we “neurocept” (neurobiologically perceive on a sensory-instinctual level) danger. There is nothing wrong with any of these responses, in fact, we are blessed to have them because they help us survive overwhelming experiences that emotionally or physically threaten our very sense of self. Trauma can be a source of immense shame, but trauma is something that happens to us, and we are not to blame for either the traumatic event nor our neurobiological response to the traumatic event.
However, as we grow, adapt, and evolve in response to life’s myriad challenges, our survival resources often do not. Survival Resources are like the “break glass in case of emergency” response to a crisis. It is great they are there for situations that are truly life threatening. In therapy we honor these resources for their reliability. They are always there, and we can use them whenever they are needed. But not every situation requires them. Survival Resources are a hammer, but not every situation is a nail. Even though trauma would have us see every situation as such. While we may change, grow, adapt to new circumstances and situations, our survival resources remain the same. As such, over time our survival resources become more rigid, unattuned, unable to creatively adapt to our current situation, and we begin to outgrow them. A great deal of therapy is honoring & fine-tuning survival resources, while building experiential resources that you can feel in your body to help you respond to trauma in more creative, flexible, adapative ways.
“Though we may not always be aware of danger on a cognitive level, on a neurophysiological level, our body has already started a sequence of neural processes that would facilitate adaptive defense behaviors such as fight, flight or freeze. ”
—Stephen Porges
Building Creative Resources to Manage Trauma
In Somatic psychotherapy, we honor those ways our young cultural bodies have survived trauma and oppression, while also recognizing that patterns of feeling, thinking, being, acting, and relating with others formed at a young age to survive overwhelming trauma, may not fully serve us in the present.
Somatic Psychotherapy aims to help us to build creative embodied resources to respond to life’s challenges and social injustices with increased flexibility and resilience in ways that are more fully aligned with our principles and values.
Creative resources include building capacities for presence, awareness, boundaries, giving support, receiving support, finding our yes and our no, and increasing ability to tolerate bodily experience and live with the uncertainty, contradictions, not always perfectly lining up pushes, pulls, tensions of our complex social and racial identities as we navigate our social worlds.
The development of capacities for creative embodied resourcing helps us capacity navigate life in ways that are effective, nuanced, adaptable, up to date, aligned with who we are now, and fine-tuned to our actual situations now and not in the past. A survival resource may be a great hammer, but not every problem is a nail.
Processing Trauma Based Shame
As you first enter into therapy, yearning for a new way to respond to life’s challenger, you may contact layers of shame associated with your survival resources, with the ways in which you coped with suffering that did not fully serve you, or that resulted in harm to yourself or others.
However, I invite you now to offer a moment to acknowledge the terrible burden you, me, and many of us have carried, and to honor that our survival resources helped us navigate and survive what was far beyond our control, and to extend loving-kindness, compassion, or gentle acknowledgement to ourselves for doing what we could, with what we had, at a young age, to survive.
The Self of the Therapist
Of course, there are many ways to do somatic therapy. As a therapist I am not just the abstract embodiment of principle but a living, breathing social being committed to being socially present with you in my full racial and social self.
My style is authentic, reliable, transparent, empathic, compassionate, active, engaged, involved, and collaborative.
I provide psycho-education and name intervention strategies so you can be an active participant in make informed choices about your therapy.
I place a strong emphasis on active listening, building trust, and providing a secure, non-judgmental space and therapeutic relationship that aids you in naming, identifying, and calling into the room the diverse and myriad fullness and complexity of your embodied social identities within the cultural and intergenerational contexts of your life.
“Although the possibility of emotional trauma is ever-present, so too is the possibility of forming bonds of deep emotional attunement within which devastating emotional pain can be held…and eventually integrated.”
— Robert Stolorow
Integration of Embodied Transformation and Social Consciousness
Somatic Therapy aligns critical social consciousness with our patterns of embodiment through the development of creative capacities for resourcing. Thus, somatic therapy means we are called to practice identifying, creating, amplifying, and creatively adapting our survival and creative resources on an ongoing day to day basis to navigate life. Thus, while the project of healing may begin in or be supported in the therapy, it does not end there.
The Goals of Radical Somatic Psychotherapy
Somatic Therapy is an act of healing-insurrection that names the social violence done to our lived-experience and that seeks to reclaim the innate authority of bodily lived-experience of personal truths, social identities, and collective wisdoms.
Somatic Therapy helps center the narratives and stories of your lived-experience, ground in support from earth, deepen into core potentials, stretch out in connection with others, and envision and become the fullest version of you through manifesting your possibilities.
My Therapy Style
I am not the sit back silently and say “hmmmm” every few minutes kind of therapist. I believe, as Martin Buber says, that “all true healing takes place through meeting”.
I help you build concrete tools to help you navigate life’s obstacles while developing curiosity about your direct moment to moment experience of yourself in the truth of your social, cultural context. When you build enough internal & cultural resources, tools, and coping skills you can stretch beyond the familiar into a place of creativity, effectiveness, aliveness, meaning, & thriving. This work does not need to always be solemn, I endeavor to invite into therapy a spirit of inquisitiveness, curiosity, compassion, & creativity. The spirit of play can be profoundly healing.
However, let’s also be real here. As anyone who has been in therapy knows, therapy is not always easy!
Therapy can evoke both laughter and tears. As poets like Rumi and Hafez remind us, suffering and joy, love and grief, all that is within and without, are all inexorably intertwined. When you sit in attention with yourself, what emerges may be a surprise. What you tug at one aspect of the rug, the entire internal fabric can shift, and aspects of yourself you may be less familiar with may emerge and say hello, inviting in a dialogue.
I invite in a balance between control of experience and surrender to experience, a trauma-informed allowing for what wants to arise in the river of experience to arise, while making sure you still feel a sense of agency and are grounded in the present moment.
What arises in therapy may be a surprise, but it is always up to you how to respond. We go at a pace that feels safe to you. Sometimes this may mean moving closer to something, sometimes this may mean backing off, allowing yourself to sit, digest, ground, center. Sometimes this mean we sit together with your experience, creating a safe relational space where you can process it.
There is no one way to do all therapy. There is no one experience of therapy. Many traditional healing modalities that emphasize the true deep, relational, communal, and cultural nature of healing have been suppressed through colonial oppression.
I aim in therapy to decolonize, to support you in the excavation and rekindling of cultural, ancestral, traditional, multi-cultural ways of knowing, healing, & embodying that have been suppressed.
Therapy can mean so many things. Therapy may mean learning to compassionately be with uncomfortable feelings and parts of ourselves. It may mean shifting habitual ways of thinking, feeling, & acting towards ourselves & others. Old wounds can reopen requiring tender care, courage, patience, & support. Fear, self-doubt, or aspects of ourselves that don’t want to change may emerge. The road is not always linear.
As we heal we move away from roles that do not serve us and more fully become who we feel called to be. However, we may find that not everyone is supportive, and people may pressure us to resume our prior roles. As you change, you may find you draw in to your life different people than you did before. Sometimes this is amazing, but there is also often a sense of loss of familiarity, a grieving for the people that cannot accompany you on your journey, and the unease of uncertainty and newness.
All this is expected. What I offer is to be there with you, to offer my personal presence and professional training to help you navigate this journey of living with patience and kindness. My commitment is to see, hear, & affirm you for all your diverse aspects within your cultural context.
When we are affirmed, seen, & heard, we ease into acceptance of ourselves, and have opportunities to develop inner kindness, value alignment, efficacy, & flexibility in exploring new ways of breathing, sensing, feeling, acting, expressing, connecting, & being in the world.
Which is what all this is about. New ways of being. Personal healing. Collective healing. Cultural healing. Generational healing.
In a typical session you may:
Explore your emotions, values, and needs
Discover how earlier trauma-holding patterns of feeling, acting, and thinking live in your body
Develop capacities to respond creatively to life’s existential challenges, traumas, and systems of oppression
Reconnect with intergenerational, ancestral, and contemporary sources, stories, and narratives of racial respect, solidarity, worth, wisdom, & healing
Body-awareness, mindfulness, movement can all be used to facilitate this transformation. With a present-time experience of empathy and recognition, it is possible to find new meaning and discover well-being, integrity, and integration.
I look forward to hearing from you. Schedule Your 15 Minute Consultation Today to Begin Your Healing Journey.