Putting Your Emotion into Motion
As an outdoor enthusiast and rock climber with 20+ years of experience, I know that movement can be a grounding, regulating and calming force on the nervous system. This balanced momentum allows us to center ourselves and make moves towards good and sustainable change; I am excited to integrate Walks and Talk and Climbing therapies into my practice!
In some forms of therapy, therapy can mean overstuffed couches or chaises where you will sit and look to an external person to tell you what’s wrong with you. In my traditional therapy work, I bring you into the driver’s seat and we collaborate and brainstorm together. In my movement therapy work, we will work to center your nervous system and then guide you to make tangible and visible progress.
I firmly believe this is attainable for even the most tentative and cautious of us (because it takes one to know one, right?). I have followed my own advice in creating this new arm of my practice. After being a rock climber strictly for fun for so many years, I underwent specialized training with the American Mountain Guides Association to earn my Single Pitch Instructor certification as well as the National Outdoor Leadership School for my Wilderness First Responder certification.
What better time than now to see where you can go and what you can do?
Let’s take this outside!
Walk and Talk Therapy
Can’t bear the thought of one more screen or holding yourself still for a therapeutic hour? Let’s get outside. We can meet wherever we’ve agreed upon, with our trainers on, and just start walking. Left, right, left, right, left, right– it’s a comfortable, known and expected rhythm that provides the support for surface and then deeper discussions and explorations. People were not made to sit still for 9 hours a day; let’s get out there.
Climbing Therapy
Imagine you (maybe you identify as anxious, depressed, neurospicy, a trauma survivor– or all of the above) have never gone climbing before and we go out to a beautiful crag above the San Francisco Bay or walk through the doors at that local climbing gym. The noise of the terrible day at work, the tense situation with friends, the silence at the dinner table– it all fades away as you breathe in deep, quiet your mind and make the intentional moves with your own two feet and your own two hands. Slowly and then suddenly, you find yourself at the top of the climb – something you didn’t think possible, not in a million years and certainly not by the end of a therapy session.