What are Somatic based and mindfulness based therapies?

“The Body Keeps The Score” –Dr. Bessel van der Kolk

Mindfulness

Mindfulness in therapy isn’t about meditating, clearing your mind, or achieving some blissful state of calm. In a clinical context, it’s a practical skill — the ability to notice what’s happening inside you right now, without immediately reacting to it or being swept away by it.

That gap between stimulus and response is where everything important happens. It’s where choice lives.

Most of what brings people to therapy involves automatic patterns — thoughts, reactions, and emotional floods that feel involuntary and relentless. Mindfulness works by interrupting that automaticity. When you can observe a reaction rather than be the reaction, something shifts. You’re no longer just running the old program. You have options.

In sessions, I weave mindfulness in as a practical tool rather than a philosophy. That might look like slowing down to notice what’s actually happening in your body before we dive into content, learning to sit with discomfort long enough to understand what it’s telling you, or building the capacity to stay present with hard material without flooding or shutting down. The research on mindfulness-based interventions is robust — consistent reductions in anxiety, depression, rumination, and PTSD symptoms across hundreds of clinical trials. It works. And more importantly, it’s a skill you keep — something you can use outside of the therapy room, in your actual life, when things get hard.

Polyvagal Theory

Polyvagal theory, developed by neuroscientist Dr. Stephen Porges, gives us a roadmap for understanding why you feel and respond the way you do — and why willpower alone often isn’t enough to change it.

Here’s the short version: your nervous system is constantly scanning your environment for signals of safety or danger. This happens automatically, below conscious awareness, before your thinking brain even has a chance to weigh in. Based on what it finds, your nervous system drops into one of three states.

When you feel safe, you’re in the social engagement state — calm, connected, curious, open. This is where healing happens, where real conversation is possible, and where you have access to your full self.

When threat is detected, you shift into fight or flight — mobilized, activated, anxious, reactive. Your body is preparing to act.

When the threat feels overwhelming and inescapable, the nervous system can drop into shutdown — numb, frozen, disconnected, collapsed. Many people know this as depression, dissociation, or just feeling “checked out.”

Here’s what this means for therapy: if your nervous system has been shaped by trauma, chronic stress, or a history of feeling unsafe, it may be stuck in one of those lower states even when your life is objectively fine right now. No amount of insight changes that — because the threat detector operates below the level of thought.

This is why I don’t just talk about your nervous system — I work with it, in real time, in session. We build safety in the body first. We track what’s happening physiologically, not just cognitively. And we help your nervous system learn, at the level where it actually lives, that it is safe to come out of survival mode.

That’s where real change begins.

Somatic techniques

Your body has been in the room this whole time. Most therapy just hasn’t been talking to it.

Somatic techniques are body-based tools that I integrate into sessions to work with what the nervous system is actually holding — not just what the mind is able to articulate. Trauma, chronic stress, and unprocessed emotion don’t only live in your thoughts and memories. They live in the tightness in your chest, the shallow breath, the way your shoulders creep toward your ears when certain topics come up, the gut feeling you can’t explain.

Somatic work pays attention to those signals and treats them as information, not noise.

In practice, this might look like tracking physical sensations as they shift during conversation, using breathwork or grounding techniques to regulate your nervous system before working with difficult material, noticing where in your body a particular emotion or memory shows up and working with it there, or slowing down to complete a physical response that got interrupted during a traumatic experience.

None of this is about forcing memories to surface or doing anything dramatic. It’s about developing a relationship with your body’s signals rather than spending your life overriding them. When the body finally feels safe enough to release what it’s been holding, healing moves faster than talk alone can take it. That’s not a theory — that’s what I see in the room, session after session. More in my Blog Here. 

Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) is a modality similar to EMDR that used the same eye movements seen in REM sleep to reprocess memory and trauma. Don’t wanna talk about it? Many people struggle with talk therapy and don’t want to talk about their trauma. This modality might be right for you because you clinician doesn’t even need to know what you are working on for it to work. For those who feel “stuck” with regular talk therapy, this modality clears trauma in appoximately 1-3 sessions for most people. Sessions can be booked for ART stand-alone only, or integrated with your ongoing therapy. I am a certified clinician for this modality that I call “The Magid Wand of Brain Science”.

Most people have never heard of ART. That’s a shame, because for the right person it can do in one to three sessions what years of traditional therapy sometimes can’t.

Here’s the honest version of how it works: traumatic memories get stuck. Not just emotionally — neurologically. When something overwhelming happens, the brain doesn’t always file the memory the way it does with ordinary experiences. Instead it stays live, loaded with the original emotional charge and physical sensations, which is why a smell or a sound or a tone of voice can throw you right back into something that happened years ago. The memory isn’t in the past. Neurologically, it’s still happening.

ART uses guided eye movements — you follow my hand or a ball moving back and forth while holding the memory in mind — to shift the brain into a state where it can finally process and reconsolidate that memory differently. Then, through a visualization process called rescripting, the emotional and physical charge attached to the memory gets replaced with something you actually choose. The facts of what happened don’t change. The grip it has on you does.

The part that surprises most people: you don’t have to tell me what happened for it to work. You hold the memory internally. Your story stays yours. Many clients find this is the first approach that makes it possible to work on things they’ve never been able to talk about out loud.

The research backs it up — studies show roughly 79% of participants who screened positive for PTSD screened negative after an average of fewer than four sessions, with results holding at follow-up.

I am trained in ART and offer it via telehealth for Nevada residents. If talk therapy has stalled, this is worth a conversation.

Click to learn a lot more on the ART page HERE.