Mindfulness practices
You can incorporate simple awareness and calming practices into your busy life. Find the places in your body where difficult emotions and dysfunctional habit patterns live. Cultivate the natural qualities of your heart to be able to meet the challenges of life.
Everyday mindfulness
Mindfulness is the simple, heartful intention to notice what’s showing up in our mind and body and how we affect others. Learning mindfulness teachings in sessions, you can build capacity to be in the present moment for authenticity and healing. The somatic approach is mindfulness of the body.
Foster resilience
You can connect deeply with your inner voice and body wisdom to relieve physical tension and emotional stress. Somatic practices and bodywork helps us to respond more fluidly with change.
We can live wholeheartedly within ourselves and with those near and dear to us. As well, we can find ourselves in relationships with all the others in our worlds of work, family and community, whether dear or difficult!
Grow your bubble of peace
The natural homes of the heart are loving kindness, compassion, equanimity, and joy. Specific practices can help you strengthen your heart qualities, growing your bubble of peace. Nurturing your capacity to unwind stress in the mind and body, you can return to deep calm and compassion to meet challenges.
Unwind deep imprints
You can draw on the somatic approach to bring mindfulness to processing your emotional life as you directly live it in your body. When difficult experiences are held in tissue memory, light touch and witnessing are most effective.
Early childhood creates deep imprints that shape all of our characters. Harsh events and conditions may overwhelm the capacity of our nervous system to process experience. We may have developed early coping or survival strategies that now trip us up. Habituated patterns based in fear or despair create troubling limits and behaviors. These can be dismantled through movement and gentle attention. Your own deep inner resources can be developed to bring to your healing journey, at your personal pace.
If a woman has experienced birth trauma or abuse history, we can visit these vulnerable places with your courageous presence and compassionate respect. Babies and children may also have experienced birth trauma or shock from medical procedures.
Awaken to life loving life
The somatic approach enters mindfulness in movement, as well as in stillness. When we bring our attention to our breath moving through us, and other physiologic rhythms, we know ourselves deeply. This is the source of direct experiential knowing of oneself and one’s world. You can foster your own well being.
Movement is life, and in mindfulness we awaken to life loving life. Mindful movement encompasses a full range of practices. Small self care movements can be incorporated into busy lives. Unobtrusive practices can be carried into the workplace. The fullness of qigong can stabilize the day with 20-40 minutes of flowing movement, resourcing from nature and your inner world.
What to expect in a session
What Catherine brings
Catherine brings a warm, empathetic presence to women along with broad experience. She has provided somatic therapy and education for over 25 years. Catherine is a Registered Somatic Movement Therapist ISMETA in the lineage of Body-Mind Centering®.
She draws from many traditions and teachers to offer skillful means of mindfulness. Catherine has trained and practiced for decades in Buddhism (Zen, Vipassana and Tibetan), qigong, yoga, chanting,
Hakomi
and Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). Her somatic support upholds women throughout the arc of life stages. For great challenges mental health professional therapy is also recommended and may be required.