Relational Somatic Therapy
I offer Somatic Transformation Counselling and Coaching to clients around the world. As a Registered Therapeutic Counsellor, I work with the whole being, honouring the body’s own intelligence alongside the mind, the emotions, and the deeper self beneath the patterns.
Change the imprint trauma has made
Sequoyah offers somatic counselling and coaching to clients anywhere in the world. As a Registered Therapeutic Counsellor, she works with individuals, couples, and teens, welcoming people of every background and every stage of life. Whether you come carrying grief, uncertainty, or simply sense that something in you is ready to shift, there is a place for you here.
Her work is grounded in Somatic Transformation, a body-centred, relational approach that draws on interpersonal neurobiology, ancient wisdom, and the lived experience of the body and its emotions. So much of what we carry from painful or traumatic experiences is held in the body and the nervous system, long after the mind has tried to move on. Sequoyah works with that directly, trusting the body’s own intelligence rather than talking past it.
A good deal of the work is educational. Sequoyah helps you understand what is happening inside you: how your nervous system learned to keep you safe, and how the patterns it formed still shape the way you feel, relate, and respond today. As that understanding grows, those patterns become something you can meet with choice, rather than something that quietly runs the show.
Depending on what each session calls for, she draws on a range of approaches alongside somatic work, including parts work, attachment-focused work, the exploration of core beliefs, dream work, and spiritual inquiry. The work tends to unfold through six steps, each one resting on the one before, so that depth arrives only as you are ready to meet it.
No two sessions look quite the same. The work shapes itself to what you need on a given day. Some sessions stay in seated with inquiry. Others move to the table for hands-on somatic work, or into gentle movement, breath, or expressive arts. We follow what is alive in you, rather than a fixed protocol.
My Specialties
• Individuals, couples, and teens, welcome from every background and stage of life
• People carrying the imprint of trauma
• Those moving through life transitions, grief, death, and loss
• Anxiety and depression
• Addiction, OCD, and disordered eating
• The changes of perimenopause and menopause
• Those drawn to explore dreams and the inner world
Relational Somatic Therapy meets each of these where it actually lives, in the body, and there the healing can happen. The imprint of trauma is met exactly where it is held, and what has long been carried can finally soften and move. The healing can be profound. You do not have to move through it alone.
The 6 Steps of Somatic Transformation:
Embodiment
In order to help others, Somatic Transformation practitioners develop the art of embodying their lived experience. When we are able to feel deeply into our present moment experiences of joy, wonder and gratitude, we can then open to embody the painful, disconnected aspects of life. I will spend time helping you to start this process of embodiment. I do this first by finding resources that will help support you through your process. Before we travel into the territory of trauma or high emotions I will first teach you how to feel and embody joy and vitality.
Somatic Awareness
Our body is the primary source of information and energy for living with wellness, connection and interconnection. Our time together will have you deepen into the presence and felt sense in your body. Somatic skills in perceiving and discerning sensations, feelings and images allows us to touch into natural healing elements of the human experience. When we are able to feel our lived experience in the present moment a whole new world of healing starts to open up.
Somatic Empathy
Somatic empathy moves beyond understanding, seeing and hearing another and involves “feeling with” another. In our session I sit with you as an embodied witness, helping you hold different states of being. Often our strong emotions are scary and we don’t want to feel them, I am present to feel with you and help you feel safe and connected. From here we can attune, resonate, align and synchronize with the innate vitality and wisdom that the body is offering us.
Somatic Inquiry
As a therapist I will bring a sense of safety, caring, curiosity and wonder to your inner world. When you start to truly feel felt and seen the defences from trauma begin to soften, and you will be invited to join in on this exploration of your inner world. Somatic inquiry slowly uncovers the core wound. We will work with encouraging the restoration of your body-mind-soul and your innate growth and development.
Somatic Interventions
Somatic interventions are exercises and meditations designed to interrupt the cycle of despair, dissociation, aggression, anxiety, withdrawal and fatigue from trauma and to re-organize inner patterns in restorative ways. I will work with different interventions as we work together. This will depend on what is happening with each person in the present moment.
Somatic Reflections
Somatic Reflection is an important process when working with trauma. We will work with integrating the innate wisdom of your body with the knowledge of the mind and intellect. This will allow you to make sense out of your own experience and find meaning in your life.
“I have struggled with clinical depression and anxiety for many years, have seen numerous therapists and have tried many modalities. Sequoyah is by far the best therapist I have found to treat the developmental trauma I have dealt with most of my life. She is trauma informed, extremely competent and extraordinarily compassionate. I especially appreciate her authenticity and genuine care and concern. I am so grateful to have found her.”
Joan
—Somatic Transformation Counselling Client