Approach to Care

I am a multi-modality practitioner with over three decades of experience with integrative health practices. This work brings unique restorative practices together to support personal empowerment, honoring intuition, conscious embodiment, and whole-person being-ness. This gentle approach tends to resonate with those who have sensitive nervous systems, those who identify as neurodivergent or empathic, and those who have experienced trauma or other difficult circumstances. Sessions are part intelligence-based and part intuition-based to offer you the benefits of my experience plus the holding of space for other forms of wisdom to emerge. 
This process-focused bodywork can be helpful during times of stress or transition, when you want support accessing your own inner wisdom, before and after surgery, when working towards recovery from trauma, when processing emotions or difficult circumstances, and whenever you want a sense of being supported and witnessed.     
Heart-Centered Care & Co-Regulation
  • Building physical, emotional, and energetic understanding & resilience 
  • ​Supporting those who are highly sensitive or empathic
  • Accessing your sense of inner knowing 
  • Supporting post-trauma growth
  • Enriching your sense of vitality and purpose 
  • Deep restoration and stress reduction
  • Support with life transitions including end-of-life
  • Contemplative care in support of alleviating suffering​ ​
If you desire holistic support in your process of personal growth, transformation, creating a sense of deep inner connection, and increasing self-awareness, I look forward to collaborating with you.

Elements of this work

My approach embraces the concepts of slow medicine, relaxation, receptivity, and the gentler, "yin" aspects of healing work. In a society that pushes a go-go-go  mentality which can lead to over-stimulation, overwhelm, and stifling of our inner wisdom, I encourage you to soften, become quiet, slow down, and access the inner knowing that you already hold within you. I collaborate with you as the expert of your own life and honor your lived experience. We work together to bring a sense of safety, support, and peace to areas in the body that are holding sensations such as tension, bracing, armoring, fatigue, collapse, and overwhelm. We listen for the subtle messages from the body and integrate them into consciousness awareness. 

I offer the holding of time and space for you to practice presence in order to access your own inner knowing. I offer witnessing and undivided attention. My practice is intentionally process-focused and non-clinical. That means I don't chase symptoms or seek to fix anything. What I do is remind you that you hold great wisdom within you and support you in finding your own way. Together, through this process, we work to inspire a sense of wholeness, connection, integration, and transformation through bodywork, movement, attention, and intention.  ​

I have a special interest in integrating somatic practices (body-focused therapies) with biofield therapies (energy medicine). Somatics has been beautifully described as the study of the self from the perspective of one's lived experience, encompassing the dimensions of body, psyche, and spirit. Through practices focused on interoception, proprioception, and sensation-based awareness, somatics-based modalities help bring unknown parts of yourself and your experiences into the known realm. It is a process of tapping into a fuller range of human experience. Somatics embraces inner sensation, curiosity, pleasure, inner beauty, wholeness, and wonder.  It is the art of inner listening to our wise selves with curious awareness.

I support those who have a desire to learn, explore, and lean further into the depths of the human experience. My approach honors your beliefs, practices, traditions, preferences, and experiences. I offer support and witnessing as your path unfolds. The work I do is eclectic and integrative. If this slow, quiet, sensitive style of practice resonates with you, I would be happy to support you on your personal journey. 
Somatics studies the body-mind-soul interface, the relationship between our physical matter and our energy, the interaction of our body structures with our thoughts and actions, and conscious embodiment of mind and spirit. 

Techniques from CranioSacral Therapy and NeuroAffective Touch®, are highly emphasized in my practice due to their abilities to deeply support the body and nervous system.​

What is a session like?

Sessions are always gentle, integrative, and collaborative. They allow you to rest, unwind tension holding patterns, gain personal insights, and encourage your own intuition and self-healing capacity to emerge. Sessions generally consist of a combination of bodywork, guided somatic (body awareness) practices, dialogue about your present moment experiences, and integration time.

Note: the somatic practices I offer work in present moment timing. Conversations are focused on sensations, experiences, and what is arising in real time versus talking about old patterns, past experiences, etc.   

During bodywork, you will be relaxing on a soft, heated table. As we work, I listen to your both your words and to the messages from your body as we collaborate, intuit, and weave in supportive modalities that will bring you one-of-a-kind, highly personalized care. You stay fully clothed so it is important to wear stretchy, comfortable, non-restrictive clothing that allows you to breathe and move freely, similar to what you might wear for yoga. It is important to avoid thick seams (such as those in jeans), belts, and restrictive clothing. We always tailor each session to what is showing up for you on the day of your appointment.

​I bring decades of experience with multiple modalities to your session.  Biofield therapy is an umbrella term for modalities that focus on working with the body's energy system. Somatic therapies help us integrate and bring forth the subtle changes in the energy system, the nervous system, and the body into awareness and fuller conscious embodiment. I integrate working with the entire body-mind-soul being. This work is intentionally slow and gentle, in order to allow for unwinding holding patterns, supporting the nervous system, and integrating the shifts experienced with the work. 

When our systems have experienced chronic stress, dysregulation, and long-term sympathetic activation, it can take time to help the body remember how to orient towards safety and increase capacity for processing life's experiences, including learning how to hold a sense of joy and aliveness. Because this is process-focused work, there is no set amount of sessions that are recommended. That is up to you to decide as you do your own processing and navigate your own sense of capacity, personal growth, integration, and healing.  

I highly recommend that folks include others on their care teams who are well informed about trauma healing, somatic therapies, neurodivergence-affirming care, etc. Please note that while this work is often called "therapeutic" by those who experience it, it is not therapy in the traditional sense. It is important to have the additional support of appropriately licensed professionals when there are concerns around physical or mental health.
How does a session feel? Everybody will have a different experience and every session is different, but here are some common experiences. 
  • Deep relaxation or light sleep
  • Noticing thoughts or sensations such as warmth, heaviness, or lightness in the body
  • Gentle twitching in the body as the nervous system releases tension
  • Unwinding sensations where parts of the body may want to move such as in the neck, shoulders, or hips
  • Memories or dream-like visualizations and images
  • Discharge of unprocessed emotions such as crying, laughter, or feelings of anger  
  • Feeling both calm and energized after a session
  • Feeling more comfortable in and aware of your body
  • Reduction in pain and feelings of stress
  • A concurrent sense of expansiveness, centeredness, and feeling well grounded
The intention of this work is to create an experience of support through touch and deep listening. While relaxation is often experienced, it is not the intention of this work. Through cultivating a sense of safety and co-regulation, this kind of process-focused work is meant to support body-mind connection and healing around unprocessed experiences. 
I most frequently work with:
  • Supporting personal transformation and growth-work
  • Supporting awareness of nervous system states
  • Body-mind-emotion connection
  • Supporting post-trauma growth
  • Stress and tension reduction
  • Concerns related to neurodiversity or sensory processing​​
  • Fibromyalgia and chronic pain conditions​​
  • Conscious dying support and end of life care​​

Through our work together, we seek to:
  • Explore patterns of tension and stress including sensations of physical and energetic "stuck-ness"
  • Notice and support areas of the body that hold a sense of fatigue or exhaustion
  • Become aware of the power within the subtle and imaginal realms
  • Enhance proprioceptive and interoceptive awareness
  • Bring unconscious holding patterns into conscious awareness
  • Nourish the body-mind-spirit system as a whole
  • Support healthy responsiveness in the nervous system
  • Trust the self-healing wisdom of the body  ​ 
Artema Somatics LLC​
800 Wilson Avenue, Suite 51
​Menomonie, WI 54751