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EMBODY
TRANSFORMATION

THERAPY & COACHING

Trauma Informed Care.
Somatic Therapy & Coaching.
Internal Family Systems.
Attachment & Relational Repair.
Earth-Based Wisdom.

Politicized Healing.

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Welcome to my practice.

I'm Jess (she/they) & I am so glad you're here. 

Taking that first step to reach out for support is a courageous act. You deserve to receive support. In my practice I work with clients who are looking to heal, improve their lives, and/or be resourced. Sometimes this can look like supporting people through difficult life transitions, relational conflicts, depression, anxiety, neurodivergence, climate anxiety, and/or traumatic stress. Sometimes this can look like supporting people to explore their internal world, to nurture mindfulness in their life, or to improve their communication.

I support you to reclaim wholeness, shed limiting beliefs, reconnect to your inner knowing, soften into presence, and reshape patterned ways of being that desensitize you from accessing your agency, choice and power in the face of oppressive systems.

LEARN MORE ABOUT MY APPROACH HERE

I CAN SUPPORT YOU WITH...

+ Harnessing your voice, speaking your truth, claiming boundaries, clarifying your needs, taking healthy risks, and expressing yourself in bold new ways.

+ Cultivating radical self love by investing more energy, time and resources into practices, people and places that nourish your radiance, confidence, aliveness and joy.

+ Nurturing self-compassion and trust through change.

+ Building resilience in the face of uncertainty.

+ Expanding your capacity to be with discomfort and 
hard emotions such as guilt, shame, grief, rage, fear, and anxiety.


+  Developing relational skills that deepen intimacy and trust.

+  Untethering from internalized systems of oppression and hetero-patriarchal beliefs that disempower you.

+ Unlearning conditioned/colonized ways of being that get in the way of authentic flourishing.


+ Making necessary lifestyle shifts to divest from the addictive consumer machine that's destroying our planet.

+ Disentangling from individualistic thought patterns that keep you stuck in fear and scarcity.


+  Strengthening your intuition by learning the language of your body.

THIS IS FOR YOU IF...

  • YOU ARE CHANGING and your lifestyle no longer reflects who you are becoming.

  • You are ready to ​​inhabit your body from a place of freedom, agency and power.

  • You are ready to lean into discomfort, make friends with fear, grow your capacity to be with change, and embody resilience in the face of challenges. 

  • You are ready to break out of normative roles and create a life that aligns to your values.​

  • You want to show up in your relationships with confidence and are done performing and pleasing.

  • You're ready to step into your voice, communicate your needs, claim your boundaries, and express your truth with care.

  • You feel the weight of these times and it's having an impact on your mental health and wellbeing.

  • You desire to contribute your creative energy to building a new world but don't know how or where to start. 

  • You long to feel connected to a sense of meaning but feel bogged down by the daily grind and stuck in the same old routine. ​

  • You are ready to face your colonial shadows and to heal the ancestral trauma that keeps you complicit in the colonial capitalist paradigm. ​

  • You're ready to step into your voice, communicate your needs, claim your boundaries, and express your truth with care.

  • You want to create a life of purpose, authenticity and intentionality - a life that nourishes your soul.

 Learn to listen to and honor the language of your body. Support and become a loving witness to your inner felt experience.  Befriend parts of yourself that seem intolerable. Compassionately engage with your shadow. Disrupt internalized beliefs that aren't yours. Disentangle from cultural conditioning. Align your actions with the deepest and most expansive parts of yourself.

SESSIONS

I approach sessions with great intention and care. I view each session as a powerful co-creative and collaborative process where absolutely anything is possible and magic abounds. With that said, my approach is process-oriented which means I come from a position of creative indifference to any particular outcome. This means that I’m not attached to you changing in any particular way. In fact, the more you try to be something you're not, the more you'll stay right where you are. Change is an organic process that takes place when we make full contact with our felt experience. In other words, we can’t truly change until we accept who we already are, and accepting who you are includes accepting your potential for being different. And that's where the power of somatic practice comes in.  

 

In our sessions, I create a warm and nurturing environment that supports you to slow down and make contact with your inner felt experience through present moment processing. This means that I will often invite you to pause so that you can practice noticing with curiosity what your body is saying. Part of the disconnection many of us feel on a daily basis is rooted in disembodiment. Many of us learn from a very young age to dismiss our emotions, ignore feeling cues, override certain impulses, and avoid discomfort for the sake of survival. This continues into adulthood and is why somatic practice is so important. Practicing new ways of being in relationships to self / life is what nurtures new neural pathways. These neural pathways are like grooves in the road maps of our brain. The more frequently we travel a road, the stronger and more second nature the behavior. We can create new pathways by participating in new activities and developing new behaviors.

 

I provide you with unwavering support to explore your inner world, get to know your physiological terrain, and uncover personal narratives, beliefs, impulses, memories, implicit biases, and reactions. I invite you to "be with" what is arising, nurture curiosity, pay attention to what lights you up, and magnify your wisdom and strengths. Through this process, you'll get to know your nervous system, develop vital skills in self-regulation, and embody new habits which will allow you to navigate life's challenges with greater trust and ease. 

WE CAN EXPLORE:

  • Personal, intergenerational, collective trauma 

  • Attachment wounds & re-parenting

  • Power dynamics in relationships

  • Interpersonal communication

  • Intimacy & trust (rupture/repair process)

  • Creative self-expression

  • Identity shifts & lifestyle changes

  • Emotional regulation 

  • Survival strategies & resourcing ​​

  • Climate anxiety, alienation, grief

  • Unpacking whiteness, power & privilege

  • Activism burnout

  • Boundary work​

TIME COMMITMENT

I offer 60 minute sessions on a weekly or biweekly basis.

SETTING

I work with folks online via Google Meet. In-person sessions are available for people living in the Triangle area of NC.

Rock Formations

RATES

60 minute sessions are offered on a sliding scale

$125 - $175 USD

TESTIMONIALS

If you're feeling lost in the in-between, adrift between who you were and who you're becoming, Jessica's Embodied Transformation Therapy & Coaching is a powerful lifeline. During a time of immense personal upheaval, her guidance was instrumental in helping me find a sense of belonging within myself. Jessica has a remarkable ability to ground you in the present moment, creating a safe space to explore the depths of your being.  Gone are the days of feeling like a jumbled mess of emotions – Jessica translates the chaos into beautifully woven words, helping you understand your complex humanity with love and compassion. For over a decade, I've delved into various therapeutic approaches. Embodied Transformation Coaching stands out as one of the most transformative experiences I've had.  It's not just about processing the past, but also about embracing the present moment and unearthing the potential of your future self. If you're ready to embark on a journey of deep, authentic transformation, I highly recommend connecting with Jessica.  She's a kind and insightful coach who will guide you with expertise and compassion. 

- F.B, 2024

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"Connecting with Jess is like connecting with an old friend that gets everything about you! Unlike traditional talk therapy, Jessica offers a mindfulness, movement and nature based approach to therapy & coaching. I found this therapeutic approach to be extremely practical, in both understanding my body’s nervous system (how my mind/body responds to emotions, memories and stimulus) and in how to intentionally integrate tools that allow for opportunities to be connected to my natural state of being. I also learned that you do not need to relive trauma in order to heal from it. Jess facilitates a network of modalities that support your overall healing and way of being; creating new pathways of thought, feelings, and ways of relating to self and the greater universe. I didn’t realize, until working with Jess, how disconnected I was from the things in nature that settle my nervous system and help me feel safe. I will continue my life long journey of finding peace within myself and appreciating the space that I take up in order to nurture my growth. Jess is compassionate, insightful, authentic, and inspiring. I look forward to continuing our journey together."

- B.T, 2023

ABOUT JESS

I am a queer, trauma informed, mind-body therapy practitioner, somatic-based coach, and politicized healer. I offer a  relational approach to healing and holistic well-being. I support women, trans and non-binary folks, activists, artists, entrepreneurs and creative beings re-inhabit their own bodies and express essence of their true self through deep soul listening rooted relational care. 

I also work at the intersection of personal healing and collective liberation. Issues that arise in personal healing and development work are often symptoms of broader social structures, narratives and power dynamics. 

Outside of my practice, I am an eco-somatic researcher, multidisciplinary artist, nature spirituality guide, and community ritualist. I  facilitate the Sacred Grove, which is an online ancestral healing program and community dedicated to radical remembrance and reclaiming earth-rooted cultural lifeways. I believe that ancestral recovery is an integral part of healing because it addresses the root causes of intergenerational trauma patterns that arise from colonial fragmentation and begins the process of repairing the roots of disconnection and dis-ease. 

Part of my mission is to support intergenerational and collective healing by supporting "white" folks to: wake up to how we unconsciously participate in, benefit from, and perpetuate systems of oppression; untether from internalized messages and worldviews passed down from the dominant culture; and reclaim life-giving, communal modes of relating through lifestyle changes and embodiment practices. I believes that personal wellness cannot be achieved without a material commitment to liberatory praxis and embodied activism. 

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EDUCATION & TRAININGS

MY STORY

I was in my mid-twenties when I committed to my soul's path which led me on a journey of radical transformation. Everything in my life changed after that. Of course, the impetus to do so was only after many years of higher education burnout, chasing some typical version of success that society deemed appropriate, and dating people who were emotionally unavailable (and with whom I repeated the same old toxic patterns that naturally arise between hurting people). So much of what I struggled with was the result of developmental trauma and shame-based C-PTSD. I wasn't self-referenced. I was boundariless. I was a shoppoholic, struggled to find a healthy relationship with food, and fawned my way through relationships. I was living in a metropolitan city at the time, working a 9-5 job,  bartending in the evenings, and fitness competing as a hobby. I was miserable and finally hit rock bottom.  I remember how anxious I used to feel, how addicted I was to the highs and lows, the constant feeling of not being or having enough, and the feeling of insecurity that plagued me.  I remember the ways I used to perform confidence as a means to feel validated and yet how willing I was to compromise my truth and the things I valued to please others, how I kept myself small so as to not take up too much space. In so doing, I abandoned my true self, neglected my desires, suppressed my authentic expression and presented a lifeless version of myself. I gave away my creative power not because I wanted to, but because this is what I learned. I didn't know my inherent value and because of that I attracted oppressive life circumstances that would exhaust and deplete me. One day I recall looking at myself in the mirror unable to recognize who I was anymore. My face was covered in makeup (I could barely look at myself without it on). I was exhausted and dis-enchanted by the daily grind. My external life no longer reflected the internal beauty and complexity of my inner life. My relationships took on a monotonous tone, my lifestyle didn't reflect the richness of my value system and nor did either fulfill my soul's longing.  I felt deep sadness when I realized that I had compromised myself out of fear, and that I was living a status quo life simply because it was familiar, and yet this moment of realization was a wakeup call. It motivated me to go after the life that I knew I was deserving of and that reflected the richness and beauty of my truest self. It was time to take back my power. I came to the conclusion that I had to leave the environment I was in and it had to happen as soon as possible. I knew in my heart that another life was waiting for me. Something had to change and only I could make it happen.  That’s when I decided to travel (which my privilege afforded me). At the time I only had $2000 in my bank account and didn't have a plan. I gave myself to the wind without a clue of where it would lead me. I learned to pay attention to my curiosities and to the things that made me come alive. I learned to trust myself as I surrendered to the flow of life.  I was no longer willing to settle for a life that wasn't mine and challenged all of the parts within me that felt comfortable with a status quo life. I committed to investing my time and energy into discovering my true self, the things I love and considered most sacred. I began to create a life of my choosing, one that nourished my soul, though one that was deeply aligned to my values of justice and liberation. This led me back to nature where I fell in love with a woman and became re-enchanted with life. I moved through many soul initiations that challenged me to claim my truth and to live it boldly, despite the disbelief and confusion it brought up for many loved ones. This meant confronting all of my limiting beliefs, inner self critics, feelings of failure and all of my fears surrounding unworthiness. I had to look at all of the ways I was conditioned to seek approval from others as a source of validation, and how it kept me small. Coming out and claiming a same-sex relationship brought to the surface the trauma I endured under the violent repression of the church and I had to move through and integrate layers of shame, guilt, repression, denial and other intergenerational wounds.  Returning to earth was absolutely fundamental in my transformational journey. Earth as guardian and teacher. Earth as playmate and lover. Earth as nurturer and caretaker. I continue to integrate, evolve and become more of who I am  through this deepening love affair with the living Land, Waters, and the spirit of place. It is from this very personal and immersive relationship to the living world that my work unfolds and the lens through which I support others in my coaching practice.

MY APPROACH

Embodied Transformation Therapy & Coaching is an integrative healing approach that addresses the relationships between mind / body / soul / earth / culture. It integrates whole systems thinking, mind-body therapy, phenomenology, earth-based wisdom, ancestral recovery, decolonial theory, liberation theology, Black and Indigenous feminisms, disability justice, among other threads. 

 

This approach flips traditional western therapies on their head by challenging notions such as "pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps" and the idea that "mental health" is a personal issue. Instead it emphasizes the historical nature of trauma and the role that systems and institutions play in shaping the material reality of our lives (through social hierarchies based on gender, race, class, etc.) which impacts how safe, free and at home we feel in our bodies and the world. 

 

Grounded in a social justice framework, this approach serves to disrupt the modern mental health industrial complex. Most Western therapies taught within institutions of higher education are steeped in larger cultural ideologies like individualism, which emphasize ableist notions of self-reliance, independence, and productivity, thus negatively characterizing and pathologizing any form of struggle, resistance, weakness, disability or dependence within this context. 

Industrial growth society and the systems that uphold it (individualism, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy) inflict a style of complex trauma on the relationship between our ecological, relational and individual nervous systems. Western culture relies upon domination, disconnection, fear, and scarcity to drive the growth of our economy while compromising the health of life systems in the process. We are born into and shaped by these interlocking systems that are designed to keep us in survival, further dislocating us from source of our true health and power: the land, our bodies, and one another.

 

My approach to nurturing wholeness addresses these systemic issues that most traditional therapies ignore. I believe that the healing necessary to fully re-inhabit our own bodies and ecosystems is the healing that will ultimately transform oppressive systems.

My Approach

DISCLAIMER​

By participating in my coaching sessions, you acknowledge that I am not a licensed psychologist, medical doctor, or health care professional and my services do not replace the care of psychologists, doctors or other healthcare professionals. Embodied Transformation Coaching is in no way to be construed or substituted as psychological counseling, psychotherapy, mental health counseling, or any other type of psychotherapy or medical advice.

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