Certified psychosomatic practitioner, Integrative Psychology Institute (California)

Psychosomatic work is about reading the body's signals rather than overriding them.

You already know some of your own. Where stress collects, whether that's the jaw or the upper back. What your breathing does when you're anxious, and how high in the chest it goes. These patterns run without being asked.

The skill is felt sense: knowing something is off before you can say why. Most of us learned to override it early because of the fear that the feeling would overwhelm us or derail us from getting on with what was required. Sometimes, you white-knuckle through the feeling; you push it aside because now isn’t the time, or you tell yourself a version of the story that makes it pass faster.

The better you get at not feeling it, the wider the gap gets between what you say and what your body does. You say you're fine and mean it. Your voice is flat, your shoulders are up, and the person across from you has already noticed.

The practice is catching that as it happens, and staying with the felt sense longer than you normally would. Seated or reclined, with me guiding where your attention goes and sharing what I notice from the outside. Observation, not analysis.

Through this, you build range. Each time your system goes toward something difficult and comes back, it can hold a little more than it could before. That's what capacity is. Not feeling less, being able to hold more.

Elemental Breathwork and Somatics teacher training (Bali)

Controlled, rhythmic breathing that works directly on your ability to self-regulate. Some styles are activating, some are relaxing, and the experience varies widely from person to person.

I think of it as an active form of meditation. Your mind normally loops and wanders. Here it has a fixed pattern to follow, which allows a more relaxed kind of focus, and whatever comes up comes up.

Knowledge work keeps attention in the head, planning and looping, and over time that compounds until the signals coming from the body get faint. You forget to eat, or you eat past full. You stay busy because slowing down feels worse. You're exhausted and still can't get deep rest. The feedback loop is distorted, not broken, and this is one of the ways back into it.

In session, breathwork is usually combined with slow somatic and mobility work first as a primer. Same idea as warming up before exercise. It gives you a runway rather than asking you to drop in cold, and it puts your attention on the breath before you start working with it: where it’s restricted, where you’re bracing, what changes when the depth changes. The slowness is the point, and it's also why most people skip it on their own. You're not stretching to get anywhere. You settle into the tension and watch what your body does with it.

It gets intense in stretches, on purpose. I practice conscious connected breathing, which is circular, with no pause between the inhale and the exhale. I'm shaping the arc of the session while tracking how you're responding, and within that you set your own rhythm. Nothing is forced.

Parts therapy certification, Integrative Psychology Institute (California)

Parts work starts from the idea that you're not one voice. You're several, and they don't always want the same thing.

We already talk about ourselves this way. Part of me wants to rest, and part of me feels guilty about resting. There's a version of me that wants to leave the job and another one that's terrified. Parts work gives that a framework and a language so you can work with it on purpose.

The core idea is that no part is bad, even when you don't like what it makes you do. Parts and their behaviors develop as a reaction or coping strategy to an event. The part that white-knuckles through everything got you through something real. Sometimes, you hang on to these reactions and behaviors long after you need them.

In session, we pick one and get curious about it. What it's protecting, what it thinks would happen if it stopped, when it first showed up.

It sounds strange written down.

In practice, it's a conversation with yourself, with me moderating. The moderating matters because the usual response to a part speaking is another part shutting it down. My job is to keep the space open long enough for it to finish.

What you're building is enough distance to be with a part rather than run by it. Not getting rid of anything. Some of these don't need to change at all once you understand what they're doing. The frustration usually comes from fighting them, not from having them.

Usui lineage, Level II, trained in Tokyo where the practice originated

Reiki is traditionally described as channeling energy through light touch, or hands held just above the body. That's the tradition it comes from, and it's how most practitioners talk about it.

There's also a physiological account, and I find both useful. What's happening is co-regulation. Two nervous systems in a room, one settled, and yours borrowing the state. It's the same mechanism that makes an infant calm down when held by a calm adult, and it doesn't stop working when you grow up.

In person only. You lie down fully clothed, and the only thing being asked of you is to let yourself settle. No talking, no working through anything.