Sessions

Therapeutic Somatics for Individuals

Therapeutic somatic sessions offer a non-hierarchical, body-based expressive therapy for individuals to restore their innate power, intuition, and wisdom. Sessions are guided by a collaborative relationship between client and facilitator. The client is sovereign in their experience and unique quality of truth, directing their own journey through body impulse, pleasure, and discovery. The facilitator provides a gentle container to support, witness, and offer guidance as needed into non-didactic structures for exploration.

The wounds of disconnection are stored in our tissues, bones, and cells.. Centering the body's insight and expression, individuals gain access to the psychosocial and psychospiritual realms of their conscious and subconscious, allowing patterns to transform through creative expression.

Sessions can include talking, stillness, eyes-closed movement, eyes-open movement, dancing, sounding, singing, writing, drawing, guided meditation, consent-based touch, physical releasing, role and character play. Clients and facilitators determine together which structures and forms to employ.

Therapeutic somatic sessions are non-linear and process-oriented. Animism, ancestral work, and prayer can be incorporated as desired.

“The body is the home of feeling; the house of memory. To heal, we need access to it.” — Tina Stromsted

Currently Accepting Clients
*First session free!

At BEspace: 20 N 2nd Ave E, Duluth

  • In 60-minute therapeutic somatic sessions, clients and facilitators ask the body, follow, and respond with curiosity and compassion. Any and all forms of self-expression are welcome. Each step is collaborative and consent-based.

    Sample Session:

    • Opening / Check-In

    • Sensing / Exploring

    • Reflecting

    • Deeper Sensing / Expressing

    • Processing

    • Closing

  • Clients are encouraged to wear clothes that are comfortable to move in, and bring a water bottle as well as writing and/or drawing supplies.

  • Suggested price: $30-90 per session (first session free). Payment can be made via cash or Venmo @thomlinswan. Please pay what you're reasonably able to afford and consider paying extra to support those needing financial assistance.

"Awakening is not a capitalist enterprise. It's nothing to be achieved, apprehended, grabbed, stolen in the night. It's something that's constantly and always available to you. Which must be disconcerting to find that actually you have it with you all the time. And by the fact of your breath you have not only the right but the responsibility to do the uncovering that is necessary for you to become intimate with that Truth." —Reverend angel Kyodo williams

Values & Principles

Therapeutic somatic sessions are grounded in somatic abolitionism, meaning health and care are defined by the celebration and affirmation of an individual’s ever-evolving truth (rather by any prescribed definition). In sessions, we work to actively unlearn oppressive patterns and thoughts, and relearn our connection with our bodies, original cultures, and earthly belonging.

Therapeutic somatic sessions are also grounded in reindigenizing, meaning original cultures are honored, and mind, heart, body, and spirit are engaged as interconnected entities; as are person, community, land, and ecosystem.

Therapeutic somatic sessions are trauma-informed, meaning memories and sensations are engaged with to the degree and in the manner that feels safest for the individual. Gentleness, intuitive self-healing, boundaries work, and body-systems support are employed throughout sessions.

Therapeutic somatic sessions are a collaborative exchange between a client and unlicensed facilitator. They do not include diagnostics, medication, mandated reporting, or institutional involvement.

Therapeutic somatic sessions are not a crisis support service. If you are in need of crisis support, please call or text 988, Minnesota’s Mobile Crisis Mental Health Line.

Affirmations

  • Every body is beautiful and equipped with the innate knowledge to make choices in the best interest of that body's health and wellbeing.

  • We show up as culture and context; all our identities are always at play and there is no neutral.

  • Taking risks, learning from experience, becoming comfortable with discomfort, leaning into the unknown, and transforming without expectation all challenge the status quo of white-body supremacy and heteropatriarchy.

  • Growth occurs in relationship; healing can’t be done alone.

From Amber McZeal:

  • I see the relationship between the small and the large, the individual and the collective.

  • I am responsive and adaptive to this new insight. I do not practice denial.

  • I value interdependence and promote agency in self and others.

  • This transformation that we seek is not linear but circular; there's no destination, only practice.

  • I long to tend the roots of this issue—whatever issue is happening—and understand that deep work happens in small places with collective impact.

  • I believe my political healthcare should reflect life-affirming values and actions.