I call my approach “depth somatic” because it integrates somatic healing modalities with the teachings depth psychology and practices of poetics. I have a deep reverence for the mysteries of the personal and collective unconscious and the sacred dimensions of the healing process. I also believe in placing our faith in the body and its innate intelligence to guide the healing process. I draw on a wide array of professional trainings to tailor each session to the individual and what’s needed in the moment.

Modalities you can explore with me include:

Somatic Experiencing®

Somatic Experiencing® is a body-based, intuitive, and naturalistic approach to healing trauma at the foundation of Mindy’s practice. It was developed by Peter Levine in collaboration with other neurobiologists, traumatologists, bodyworkers, and psychotherapists who have all focused their life’s work on radically improving our understanding and treatment of traumatic stress. Its practices help us begin to access the body’s own deep intelligence for how to move through stuck or thwarted survival responses to stressful events and environments to bring the nervous system and other systems of body back into states of balance, regulation, coherence, and flow.

SE®-informed sessions may initially focus on learning tools for regulation and coming to understand how your individual nervous system works and why its responses makes sense. Through a gentle collaborative process, we will begin to learn the language of your body, discover what it needs, and attend to creating the right conditions for those needs to be met, so healing can happen. As trust and capacity are established, we find ways to process and complete defensive responses from past experiences, so that you can move more fully into the present with greater ease and aliveness. As capacity and resilience are restored, we may complete our work and learning together, or we may turn our attention to furthering and supporting creativity and expressive endeavors, including the big questions of vocation.

Sessions are offered in-person in SE Portland, OR, and remotely to those around the world. Mindy is especially passionate about supporting humans healing from the impacts of developmental trauma and CPTSD that are compromising their ability access their full creative lifeforce. This includes those who have experienced religious trauma, grew up abusive or high-control households, or have been in relationships or situations where self-expression had to be carefully inhibited to stay safe. It also includes those who have experienced traumatic events or injuries connected to their creative work, and those intentionally using art to transmute personal and collective trauma. She has completed additional master classes with Peter Levine and Betsy Polatin on trauma and the performing artist, and her own doctoral research focused on the how trauma impacts the voice and expression, and how we use our voices to heal.

Narrative & Poetic Methods

Traumatic experiences are characteristically difficult and, at times, nearly impossible to express in words. Yet fully healing may ultimately require us to give voice to our experience, to communicate our truth to an empathetic witness. Coming to the field of trauma healing work from a career as a poet and creative writing teacher, I know this territory intimately. I’ve also come to learn that the sensing, embodied voice and poetic modes of languaging can repair what trauma disconnected, reintegrate our exiled parts, and restore us to the field of belonging. Whether you are in the deep middle of healing your core trauma; working to integrate years of healing work so you can move forward; or on a journey to make the kind of art you long to make, it would be my honor to support you in using the imaginative, poetic, and storytelling modes of language to deepen your understanding of yourself and make your process more potent and more beautiful.

Somatic Movement & Meditation

Somatics is a large and exciting field of practices devoted to the lived experience of the body, and going deeper into our own subjectivity. Rather than teaching us repertoires of poses and movements to practice by rote, somatic practices invite us to slow down, get present, and notice what is arising in our field of conscious attention. We move only as we feel a genuine impulse to move–we move as we are moved–and we learn to fully explore our sensing and perceiving selves. Movement in this context can include stillness, and curling up in a ball on the floor. When we are new to this kind of practice, we may feel a great deal of self-consciousness. We might encounter internalized rules about how we are “supposed to move and look and act, ” learned from childhood, or certain kinds of movement training. But over time, we get to experience a deep kind of freedom. We learn how to suspend the mind-body split, enter nondual states of consciousness, and have a direct encounter of our unsplit Self. Specific methods I’ve practiced and draw upon include Authentic Movement, Body-Mind Centering, Thinking Body Feeling Mind, and Clinical Somatics.

Dream Work & Ritual

I was introduced to the power of dream work in my time at Pacifica, studying Depth Psychology and Jungian and post-Jungian methods of active imagination. The methods that most directly influence my own are Marion Woodman’s Body Soul Rhythms work, and Stephen Aizenstat’s method Dream Tending®. Dreams are a primary forms of communication from the whole Self, and can support you in working with their symbolic intelligence to deepen the field of healing and creativity in your life. The teachings of depth psychology also stress the importance of the sacred in healing processes, and the use of ritual to reciprocally communicate to the embodied, spiritual dimensions of our beings.