Unlock your whole-body knowing
Cultivate embodied agency - that’s choice, voice & power.
And apply your agency to shift the conditions locking up your bodymind + community sovereignty.
The institutionalized norms I grew up around never set right with me. The radicalizing I experienced guiding countless others for a decade to create their own art, stories & movement via an art form with roots in political satire, gender & sexual liberation, body autonomy & positivity, seeded my transformation into the patriarchal norms-bucking somatic guide I am now.
…But even I had some underlying status quo conditions in my life I needed to table-flip...
I coped with my symptoms of lacking true, embodied sovereignty the best way I was taught how with the conditioning I grew up with— through substance use & escapism to drown out judgmental & shameful thoughts; avoiding feeling or even recognizing my feelings; and completely missing the boat on the well of deeper, patriarchal de-conditioning that life eventually handed to me along with my ass through a series of traumatic & utterly confining circumstances.
When the world was literally paused, and the ways I had been coping caught up to what I could no longer look away from in avoidance or distraction, I began to open up capacity to sense through the noise and access the deeper, obscured, root-healing transformation underneath. The space this opened up for me in learning how to respond rather than react was where I grew my sovereignty to take different actions that were previously unseen. And choosing to study healing modalities based in decolonial, revolutionary change with a diverse field of teachers is what alighted my embodied, transformation into revolutionary somaticist.
How can I help you regulate yourself enough to function within your circumstances?
What if regulation isn’t the endpoint? What if embodied sovereignty gives you enough capacity to perceive, imagine, choose, and change what previously felt unchangeable?
Unlike clinicalized therapy, the modalities at play in Sovereign Somatics go beyond simply helping you feel safer or healing your symptoms. Through compassionate curiosity, creative exploration, and your innate embodied wisdom, I guide you through the right practices & pathways to support you to transform the conditions in & around your life that taught your body to accept merely coping in the first place.
Your living body of experience as a source of wisdom, not merely a site of tending to symptoms.
Expanding what safety, trust, possibility, and choice can feel like in the body.
De-hierarchizing ways of knowing so intuition, sensation, lived experience, relational knowledge, nature, and context can sit alongside your intellectual knowledge.
Shifting from “How do I cope with this?” to “What becomes possible when I can change my relationship to—and potentially change—the conditions?”
Recognizing that the individual patterns you see in yourself & others are adaptations to larger cultural, institutional, relational, and ecological conditions.
Locating the self not as an isolated individual, but as an embodied being nested in relationships, community, culture, and nature.
For updates on offerings & thoughtful, counter-oppressive somatic wisdom made for challenging times.
“The welcome into the space immediately made me feel comfortable and safe to exist in any way I needed to.”
"Being able to give my soma a seat in my present moments and listening to the signals I can use in real-time for determining what actions I need to take (or not take) has been the most beneficial."
"The most beneficial thing I’ve learned so far has been not trying to fix. Creating a container that provides somatic safety to sit through difficult emotions and not seeking an exit from them has been a HUGE up-level for my practice."
"I have learned to use my breath and other senses to regulate my nervous system throughout the day which allows me to not burnout or use up all my energy with social interactions. At my job as physical therapist, I am open and receptive to my patients' concerns but do not take them on as my own. In personal life, I have more acceptance, humility, and ease...I don't have to have all the answers."
In addition to being a Somatic Guide, I’m also a plant parent, huge Star Trek nerd, retired performance artist, former sex worker, Aquarius Sun, Virgo Moon & Leo Rising. I identify as queer, nonbinary, a trauma survivor, in recovery and live with chronic illness. I’m based in St. Louis with my partner and our two cats Ben & Jerry (foster fails), and can usually be found reading epic, queer faentasy in a nearby park. I facilitate STL QUEER SANGHA a monthly, Radical Dharma & meditation group for all LGBTQIA+ folks and co-conspirators, and serve on the Advisory Circle at Empowered Spaces, a trauma-informed, holistic, healing collective.
I'm accredited to teach Vipassana through The Awareness Training Institute and the Greater Good Science Center of the University of California at Berkeley, with guiding, internationally recognized Theravada Buddhist teachers, authors & psychologists, Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield. I've studied politicized somatics with Staci Haines of the Stozzi Institute, and receive mentorship guidance from Saraswati Pottekkatt who is in Buddhist chaplaincy, is a Certified NVC Trainer, has studied Somatic Abolitionism (Resmaa Menakam) & Somatic Extimacyⓒ (Dr Kesha Fikes), and leads systemically informed mindful relating & conflict groups.
Somatics means more than just “a body based practice,” it is a field of relation involving the 5-senses, felt-sensations, emotions, thoughts, narratives, relationships with others, external conditions, actions & non actions, your historical timeline, our historical timeline, the unknown/unseen, and the void/chaos/potential.
What it is exactly is a collection of practices that invites us into relation & context with our body & lived experience. Or metaphorically, our body & nervous system’s own “GPS.”
I also utilize the definition developed by Politicized Somatics founder Staci Haines: "Somatics is a practicable theory of change that can move us toward individual, community, and collective liberation."
The power-over mind, body & nature version handed down to us with patriarchal standards not created by & for people with marginalized experiences.
Clinicalized therapy standardizes techniques developed out of pathologizing our very real & natural reactions to all encompassing, systemic violence & oppression. It also steals language, techniques & practices from Indigenous and other cultural healing modalities, passing them through purely scientific “evidence based” standardization, without directly naming & crediting the sources, or including the wider systems of cultural or ethical teachings it extracts from.
-Femmes, women & especially eldest daughters
-LGBTQIA+
-Neurodivergent/neuroexpansive
-white & european identified folks engaging in anti-racism
-Perfectionists, overthinkers, caretakers, fixers, outcasts
-Activists & justice seekers
-Trauma survivors, folks who experience anxiety, depression or addiction
-Folks who experience chronic illness & pain
- Folks exiting the nonprofit industrial complex or influencer capitalism
-Sex workers, eroticists, sensualists, and non-normative relationship & family structure folks
-Spiritually inclined but not religious folks
-Rawthenticity (imperfect realness w/out masking or pretense)
-Boundaries / agency
-Agency, choice, voice, power
-Intention / intuition
-Self esteem / deep connectivity
-Rage / despair / grief
-Shame / blame
-Generative conflict & abolitionist, restorative accountability
-Weaving systems theory into practical somatics
-Social media/electronic device detox
-Burnout recovery
-Cultivating life purpose & social impact
-Divine sensuality
-Revolutionary Astrology
I am committed to living in Right Relationship with somatic & Dharma methodologies that integrate sociopolitical analysis at their core. I am committed to co-weaving culturally transformative spaces that center radical inclusion, joy, and the grounded audacity to know that a better world is possible because we create it together. I will know this has been achieved when my community has 3rd spaces to connect, play, dance, eat, laugh, cry, rage, grieve and grow together, untainted by capitalism & imperialism.
Visit my Substack! I share writings that cover all kinds of topics related to somatics, embodiment, meditation, Radical Dharma, Revolutionary Astrology and social justice.
A good spot to start is my article "Meditation, Embodiment, Somatics: Your Decoder Ring, Interface & GPS System."
