For lots of services you might have a pretty good idea what to expect before you go (e.g. massage therapy, doctor appointments, psychotherapy) but working with me can feel a little less straightforward; it’s a collaboration with a little bit of discussion and negotiation that has to happen beforehand. How a session will look depends on what your needs are. We’ll start with a free conversation, up to 30 minutes, where you’ll tell me about where you’re feeling stuck or what you want to work on, and I can tell you a little bit about what kinds of things I might suggest we try.

Here’s a few things to expect:

I don’t do extensive intake paperwork, unless you would like the experience of doing an in depth biopsychosocial spiritual assessment. All of those things are important, but my experience working with people in real life is that those details unfold in sessions over time, and often the things most relevant to what you’re experiencing never made it onto the paperwork in the first place. I like to focus on what you’re experiencing NOW and find experiential ways to draw connections between that and the past. This means that the first several sessions are a kind of assessment so I ask that you commit to at least 3 sessions before making a final decision about whether it’s a fit.

The first few sessions might feel awkward. In many professional settings there is a leader and a follower, but part of embodied practice is about you learning how to tailor sessions to your needs. We will be exploring how long sessions might need to be and how much time between, as well as the balance between talking and practicing experiential exercises. This looks different for everyone so there isn’t a formula I can give you.

If we will be working with touch in our experiential sessions or somatic experiencing related to specific sensations in your body, I might request that we do a massage assessment first so that we have the structure.