Services and Fees

Invite healthy patterns and boundaries into your life by integrating body awareness and working through trauma thought patterns with mindfulness. Work collaboratively using guided dialogue and therapeutic touch to transform your body and mind. Gain the knowledge and strength to create choices and intentional reactions, rather than fight-or-flight trauma responses to situations. 

This session is a good option for someone with physical or mental trauma, in their past. Some examples of traumatic experiences that can benefit from this type of session are: traumatic loss/grief, sexual abuse, surgical or medical trauma, accidents, infertility or birth trauma, and PTSD, just to name a few. This work also helps with less defined traumas linked with the feels of shame, worthlessness, or melancholy. 

This service involves hands-on touch that typically (but not always) includes the feet, legs, back, shoulders, head, face, neck, arms, and hands with special attention paid to areas needing relief. (These may be areas you specifically identify as needing attention, or areas discovered hands-on during your session to be holding tension and/or trauma.) 

The trauma work process generally follows the following pattern. Sometimes this happens over the course of multiple sessions, building upon previous progress, other times we may go through the process multiple times within one session. It is very specific to the client’s needs.

• Creating a safe space, safe boundaries: This step takes a long time with some clients, allowing time for therapeutic touch to feel safe. And this is also a step that many clients will return to at some point in their healing, as they are able to better integrate the tools acquired during their healing process.

• Settling and observing: Once you feel safe to continue, we will take some time to settle into the touch, and then observe. If we need to sit in this restful state for a while, we are working on building integration and restoration. If we decide to delve into places of unease within the body, then we are beginning the work of trauma-focused healing. 

• Processing trauma: Trauma can derive from physical trauma, emotional trauma, everyday stressors, or a combination of any of those. This process can be uncomfortable, but manageable, within the safe space and boundaries we have created. As you process, we are bringing your awareness to using the skills you established in the safe space and settling phases. And we are doing this together — you are not alone. You may experience a Trauma Release as part of this. See more information below. 

• Sorting out, integrating, restoring: After processing, a very important step is to gently come down from the processing and to integrate — the time and space to bring the body and mind back together, and allow your past and present to be reframed with new, healthy boundaries. 

More information about Trauma Release

When we give an inner voice to your body, the body speaks with sensation, movement and feelings. A Trauma Release is defined as the part of the process where your thoughts and body slow down and untangle enough that there is a transformation (renegotiation) from fight, flight, fawn or freeze in the trauma to more ease and space within you. Often right before this there is a gentle pause that feels different from a freeze.  Star will be observing you and your verbal and nonverbal/physical reactions; this is to ensure that you are safe, and not pushed beyond your boundaries. 

As Star moves around your body while you process through your trauma, you might experience a manifestation of one or several involuntary reactions, such as: shaking, twitching, crying, laughing, feelings like you want to run away, sudden sleepiness, feeling cold or heat radiating from the inside, or other unexpected sensations. These sensations would mean that you are having a Trauma Release. This is why we have set up a safe space, working to slow things down and bring you back to the present. You will be given the awareness and tools to help you listen to your own body and work through them, as you can have a trauma release during a session, or also in the hours or days following a session.

Because of the sensitive nature of this type of session, it is important and necessary that you are also working with a licensed mental health professional so that you are well-supported in all aspects of your trauma healing and recovery.