In-Person First Session (read about virtual sessions below):
Before your first session we will start with a phone conversation or email exchange to make sure I think I can reasonably help you. If we decide to move forward, I will send you the Intake Forms to fill out and send back to me. I will read these before your session.
Please arrive to your session up to 10 minutes early.
As my practice is expanding into a teaching clinic for other qualified practitioners (because we need a lot more people doing this work!), there may be a practitioner shadowing me during your session. I will never surprise you with this! You will also have the opportunity to decline.
For the hands-on part, you may remain clothed or disrobe as you would for other therapeutic massage. If you prefer to remain clothed, please wear soft, flexible clothing with a minimal waist-band.
We will spend time talking, getting clear on your history, and discussing what you can expect from the work. I will give you time to get comfortable on the table and will do my initial assessment and get started with the hands-on work.
My goal in every aspect of this work is to not add in any additional trauma to you or your tissues. You’ve been through enough already. I work slowly, steadily, and with great care to track when you need a break or want to stop altogether. You ultimately determine our pace and we are in dialogue about this throughout each session. It is useful to remember, however, that this work will access areas of pain and distress in your body and releasing those areas is often uncomfortable. Even in those times, however, I am working to sneak under the radar of your fight-or-flight system so we can start to establish new patterns of response in your tissues and nervous system. Your emotional responses to this work are welcome and encouraged.
Finally, I leave time in session to teach you hands-on work to do at home, if that is interesting to you. I recommend this because it helps build momentum in the work so you get the most you can out of each session with me.
Follow-up Sessions:
We will spend several minutes at the beginning of every session reviewing how you feel and what changes you are noticing in your body. This is also a great time for any questions you may have.
Especially in our first several sessions, I will teach you new techniques to use at home between sessions or perhaps focus on fine-tuning what you are already doing.
I also enjoy using my skeleton with soft organs and tissues to help show you what we’re working with!
Virtual Sessions:
The success of virtual sessions were a surprise to me! It turns out that after so many years of doing this work in-person, I have built an ability to visually see areas of resistance in tissue through video sessions. I started offering these sessions around 2016 and I have received consistently positive feedback about them over the years.
These sessions work similarly to in-person sessions in that there is focused intake and discussion time at the beginning of each session, followed by hands-on assessment and work. The big difference, of course, is that you are the one doing the hands-on work on your own belly.
Generally, the flow of the hands-on time is that I point my device camera at my belly and demonstrate and verbally explain what I want you to do. (If you are familiar with my Recover Program videos, this will feel very familiar to you.) Then, you point your device camera at your belly and I visualize your work while talking you through it. We discuss what you are feeling. Then, based on what I am seeing and what you are reporting to me that you are feeling, we go through this guidance process repeatedly to accomplish the work.
As with in-person sessions, I make sure we end the session with you feeling confident you know how to keep moving the work forward between our times together. Based on the work we did in-session, I make sure you have a clear understanding of what techniques to use and a general order in which to use them.
If this kind of work seems interesting to you, my online programs may be a good fit for you as well (and significantly less expensive). That link will take you to my other website which is dedicated to at-home learning.