Tend to the roots of emotional, relational and physical health. Nurture your body’s innate ability to heal.
Somatics in Ottawa and online
somatic experiencing
It can be exhausting trying to change old patterns by thinking, willing, and doing it alone. Sometimes it feels like we are asking our body to relate and be in ways that we never learned, or have lost our ability to do. This can set us up to feel stuck and isolated.
Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body-oriented approach to healing trauma. It is useful for metabolizing overwhelming experiences; when an event or stressful condition is too much to process. When something difficult happened too fast or we weren’t supported and given what we needed. When something stressful has been going on for too long. Survival stress gets stuck in the body, impacting our ability to regulate and feel safe.
I work with adults, sharing presence and capacity to observe and find new patterns. During one-on-one sessions, you will be invited to notice experience in an embodied way. We will work with responses in your nervous and other body systems, accessing them through conversation, emotion, memory, sensation, imagery, breath, silence, stillness, gestures, touch or movement. Sessions are an opportunity to find out more about what is showing up for you and to experiment. I will be present with you in a non-judgmental and curious way to discover what is regulating and generative and also what might be stuck or no longer helpful.We start with what is working, even if all that feels like it’s working is that you are breathing and that you showed up. By starting here we don’t ignore what might feel broken, we honour and respect the patterns that have gotten you this far.
Both SE and the touch work I do, can be potent as a stand-alone treatment, or can complement other therapies. It can be particularly helpful if you find you have reached a point that you’re not progressing in talk therapy, or that your physical therapies are not resolving issues. It may be that what needs to be listened to are the responses to traumas that are stored in your body.
Somatic Experiencing was developed by Peter Levine and it’s lineage is important to name. The roots of the work grew in indigenous and cultural healing practices, mammalian nervous system study, neuroscience, psychology, and stress physiology.
I am not a psychotherapist or registered counsellor.
contact and location
I invite you to connect. Let’s nourish what wakes up curiosity, nurtures regulation, makes connection possible – and notice what happens.
Janis Dahl
427 Gilmour Street, Suite 1 Ottawa, Ontario K2P 0M8
janis at janisdahl.com
My office is on the main floor of a building accessed by stairs or AODA compliant ramp. The doors are not motorized. Once inside the suite, there are no changes in elevation.
427 Gilmour is 100 metres from route #6 and #7 bus stop at Bank & Gilmour or Lewis. It is also a 15 minute walk from Parliament O-Train Station
I live and work on Algonquin territory, just South of the meeting of the Kichi-Sìbì and Pasapkedjinawong rivers, ancestral and unceeded lands of the Anishnaabeg. Land acknowledgements are words, and in action I try to not turn away from the layers of truth these words bring. Learning to notice the responses in my body so that I can have more of me available outside shut down or overwhelm to live towards what I cannot currently imagine, but that we all desperately need. In these days, I aim to share resources in addition to continuing my learning with Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective
Janis Dahl 