Welcome everyone to the quest for safety. The basic, essential mission of every organism.

By “safety,” I mean the felt sense of being whole; a complete being belonging to the whole. Those rare, wonderful moments when we touch or intuit that we are part of something cohesive and larger than us.

It was the newsletter of my friend Nathan, who owns Reber Rock Farm in Essex County, upstate NY, that made me feel it’s necessary and timely to do this. His ability to balance the difficulties and successes of running a family farm has inspired me to put this foot forward. It probably helps that he is also a trained somatic practitioner.

Patients, friends, and family often ask how I would describe what I do and what I call it. They ask during or after experiencing my approach to this broad and rich field of touch medicine. I can sense the curiosity, but conversation rarely lets us wander into the depth of these topics.

This episodic newsletter is an attempt to shed light on the techniques and philosophy underwriting this work that I practice.

My passion has always been learning: how I learn, how others learn, how learning constitutes us. Learning is expansion. It invites more variability and more vulnerability.

How do we make learning our focal point? Can it feel easy? Should it? Can we keep curiosity alive across a lifetime? These questions have their own memory, and I hope to explore them with you.

As a massage therapist, I hold that when a patient comes in for a session, they are there to teach me how they perceive their body-brain processes and their emotional-cognitive states. My role is to reflect what already works — to support movements, sensations, thoughts, memories, and feelings that serve them — and to help them renegotiate what has been mis-used, with as little interference as possible.

The challenge is restraint. How do I avoid interfering with a person’s natural gravity toward wellness, goodness, and life-force while helping them expand their level of tolerance for sensations, emotions, and thoughts that don’t feel good?

I keep learning. Reducing interference. Increasing support.

What feels good for one person may not feel good for another. A dog companion may be a nervous-system resource for one person and utterly unsettling for someone else. Massage makes this clear: some need the lightest touch; others crave deep pressure. And preferences shift from session to session.

My work orients the patient not just to pressure and technique, but to the internal forces shaping desire, aversion, and permission. Balance is the first relation we negotiate — the way the body situates itself in the world.

This requires time-stretching: offering long enough spans for the nervous system to settle and curiosity to take hold. We must have time to feel how we feel, even if it is unbalanced states, pain, negative sensations. My task is to help you expand how long you can stay with that inner inquiry. When you sense that you have support, you are able to tap into your own resilience and resources to deal with these often-difficult physiological states instead of being overwhelmed by them.

This type of work offers long-lasting change since each person who experiences it is rewiring their own nervous system.

It may have been a while since we worked together. Maybe something I mentioned has piqued your interest and you’d like to continue your exploration.

Let’s schedule a complimentary 5-10-minute consultation and see what might unfold together.

Learn more

In future letters, I’ll borrow a little inspiration from Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon, exploring my practice as something seen through shifting perspectives, and discuss clinical approaches and models such as Polyvagal Theory, Somatic Experiencing, Safe and Sound Protocol, scar therapy, manual lymphatic work, and many other avenues of research and intervention.

And if you’ve worked with me, I would love to hear how you describe our sessions. Your language often opens doors for others.

LINKS & FURTHER EXPLORATION

For those drawn to explore the influences and modalities mentioned:

Reber Rock Farm — “On our family farm, we believe in doing what is best for our animals, our customers, and our soils.”
https://reberrockfarm.com

Somatic Experiencing® developed by Peter Levine, PhD
https://traumahealing.org

Safe and Sound Protocol created by Stephen Porges, PhD
https://integratedlistening.com/ssp-safe-sound-protocol/

Rashomon Trailer (Janus Films) — “One crime, four truths.”
https://youtu.be/0VZpw-QGO2o

Sometimes a short conversation is enough to sense whether the work is calling you right now.

Thank you, and I look forward to supporting you on your quest for safety.

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The Road to Safety