Too much thinking go you here. It won’t get you out.
Somatic therapy for anxiety and chronic stress, serving adults and teens in Marin County and throughout California.
You know the feeling too well. The low hum that never fully stops. The tightness in your chest before you've even gotten out of bed. The way your mind runs ahead to every possible thing that could go wrong, cataloging, preparing, and catastrophizing even when things are objectively fine.
You've tried to manage it. You've breathed through it, journaled about it, talked about it, rationalized it. And it helps, at least for a little while. But the anxiety keeps coming back, because the anxiety isn't living just in your thoughts. It's living in your body.
Chronic stress and anxiety are as much nervous system experiences as cognitive experiences. While the mind can observe and understand them, it often can't resolve them on its own because resolution requires working at both levels: your mind and body need to partner for relief.
Why somatic therapy for anxiety
How I work with anxiety and chronic stress
We begin where anxiety actually begins: in your body. Together we learn to track the physical experience of your anxiety: where it lives, how it moves, what activates it, and what helps it settle. This awareness alone begins to shift your relationship with it.
From there, we work to build what I think of as an embodied foundation for safety. We’ll develop your capacity to feel genuinely present and grounded in yourself, even when life is demanding. This draws on somatic practices, mindful movement, and the Rhythms of Resource framework, which offers a body-based path through five states of being: safety via Presence, possibility via Play, direction via Purpose, resilience via Persistence, and Peace.
I also draw on Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) skills for distress tolerance and emotional regulation, and Internal Family Systems (IFS) to work compassionately with the anxious, hypervigilant parts of you that are working so hard to keep you safe.
What clients often discover
This might be for you if:
Anxiety is your nervous system's response to perceived present or future threats. Sadly, your nervous system doesn't distinguish between a real danger and a thought about danger. When your body is chronically in a state of activation, no amount of cognitive reframing fully reaches it. In fact, rationalizing can lead to more anxiety. The mind and body are stuck in feedback loops that reinforce the prescription of threats.
Somatic therapy works directly with the nervous system via your mind/body connection, helping you build the capacity to move between activation and ease, to recognize the body's early warning signals before they escalate, and to develop genuine, embodied resources for regulation. While coping strategies are important, a somatic approach can fundamentally shift how safe your body feels in the world using real-time regulation.
This is the difference between knowing you're okay and actually feeling okay. Somatic therapy helps you close that gap.
Clients working through anxiety and chronic stress frequently experience:
A nervous system that can actually settle, not just temporarily, but as a new baseline.
More capacity to be present in their lives without constant anticipatory dread.
The ability to feel stress without being consumed by it, moving through difficulty without losing themselves.
A quieting of the inner critic and the harsh self-talk that so often accompanies chronic anxiety and stress.
A deeper sense of trust in themselves and their ability to handle what life brings.
Anxiety feels like your constant companion even when there's no clear reason for it.
You live in a high-pressure environment — professionally, relationally, or both — and your nervous system never gets to fully relax.
You've tried other approaches and found relief, but not resolution.
You're managing anxiety with strategies that are increasingly exhausting or no longer working.
You want to feel genuinely at ease in your body and your life, not just less activated.
