When to Work with Me :

1. You’re committed to personal and collective healing, and have spent enough time in therapy unpacking how your childhood and social location shape who you are today.

2. It’s time to deepen and embody what you’ve learned - in the context of your nervous system, and how it creates your embodied and relational patterns.

3. You’re interested in a long-term, slow, and relational approach to healing fragmentation, disembodiment, self-abandonment, lack of agency, attachment difficulties and more.

What is Somatic Coaching?

Somatic coaching is a non-clinical approach that combines somatic exploration, trauma-informed coaching and psychoeducation.

Somatic exploration includes relational attunement, nervous system co-regulation, embodied consent, feeling for right distance, meeting implicit memories, discerning and soothing younger parts of self, tracking sensory information and more. Example: Sensing what your no feels like in your body, and learning how to identify, name and hold it in the moment.

In turn, trauma-informed coaching is an opportunity to translate the learning from somatic practice into action. Example: Turning the experience of feeling your body’s no into an actual spoken boundary that you’re able to communicate.

I offer personalized psychoeducation to help you understand what might be happening in terms of your nervous system, attachment patterns, internal fragmentation, your life experience and more. Example: We may put the difficulty you have articulating healthy boundaries in the context of childhood development, offering you more compassion and patience with your process.

All of this is done in the context of your real life, the places of privilege and oppression each of us occupies, what you and your people have survived, the systems that shape our world, our relationship, and a commitment to being with rather than problem solving your experience.

My Clients Are:

• Adults who experienced an emotionally painful childhood and well on their way on a long-term healing journey to develop a whole sense of self and an embodied experience of safety, especially in relationships.

• Talk therapists and coaches seeking to deepen their own capacity for embodiment, both in their personal lives as well as in client relationships.

• Queer and trans folks, folks living with chronic pain, those who’ve left evangelical christianity, and folks who have experienced parental estrangement - social locations I share and know the intimate landscapes of.

My Training and Lineages of Practice:

My coaching work is shaped by a multi-disciplinary and politicized approach to care that combines my training in somatics, Gestalt psychotherapy, co-active coaching, and spiritual care.

Relevant certifications include:

• Foundations in Embodied Ancestral Inquiry
  January - June 2023 (70 hours)
  Marika Heinrichs

• Alchemical Alignment: Bodywork for Trauma Resolution and Embodiment of Spirit
  Levels 1-4 2021, (100 hours)
  Modules 8 - 14, 2023 (105 hours)
  Brigit Viksnins MAT, SEP, RCST®, BCTMB, LMT

• Coaches Training Institute
  Co-Active Coaching Fundamentals, 2015 (17.75 hours)

• Certificate in Gestalt Psychotherapy Theory and Methodology
  One-Year Training Program for Professionals, 2012 (170 hours)
  Year Two - Introduction to Field Dynamics , 2013(170 hours)
  Gestalt Institute of Toronto

• Foundations in the Psychology of Counselling
  As part of a Master’s of Divinity, 2011 (45 hours)
  Dr. Marsha Hewitt, Trinity College, University of Toronto,

• Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Philosophy
  York University, 2005 - 2009
  Toronto, Ontario

My deepest gratitude is extended to my own lineage of practice, built first and foremost on the foundation of my own well-being made possible by the long-term support and encouragement of Katarina Maatta-Hebdon and Marika Heinrichs. I also extend my deepest thanks to my teachers in healing, Brigit Viksnins and the faculty of The Gestalt Institute of Toronto, as well as Tele Darden and Steph Jagger who offer me private practice supervision and mentorship respectively. My approach is also shaped by the public teaching work of adrienne maree brown, Lindsay Mack, Brené Brown, Janina Fisher, Kathy Kain, Janina Fisher and Rob Bell. My deepest bow goes to each of them, as well as to the ancient traditions that shape the lineage of teachers I belong to, including the teachings of the Buddha, Indigenous spirituality, Christian mystics, and earth based worship, ritual and magic.

My Story and My Values :

I come to my work first and foremost as a person who sought healing and support when I needed it the most, and gratefully found it. Like many practitioners, I am passing on the gifts of healing that are offered to me.

After a difficult childhood during the fall of the USSR, undiagnosed ADHD, teen years marked by immigration, conservative religion, homophobia, bullying and a desperate search for belonging, I arrived to adulthood scared, closeted, hurting and lost.

It took me over a decade, and the care of many talented practitioners, friends and teachers to understand and begin to heal from complex developmental trauma, the effects of religious and cultural homophobia, and the resulting depression and anxiety that made life feel impossible.

My healing journey shaped my life and my career as I trained in psychotherapy, coaching and somatic trauma healing. I founded Be With in 2015 with the intention of providing holistic, anti-oppressive and approachable care.

I see myself and my work in the context of a complex world - one shaped both by the resilience and goodness of all living things, as well as the oppressive systems we’ve inherited. Ableism, racism, patriarchy, classism, colonialism and other systems of oppression are powerful shaping forces - ones we internalize in order to survive them. As both oppressor and oppressed, I see the way people and systems act as mirrors for one another.

In order to thrive and to create liberation for all, we must heal from and unlearn these oppressions. Personal and collective trauma go hand in hand, but so do our personal and collective healing. Queerness, immigration, class struggle, and lived experience of trauma orient my work towards justice for all.

I am a white genderfluid queer, a Russian immigrant, a cat mama and a wife to Tanya Neumeyer. I live in what is colonially known as Toronto in Canada, but has always been Indigenous land. As both a settler and an immigrant in my lifetime, I hold the privilege, complexity and harm by which I get to call this place home simultaneously. The land I live on is part of the Dish with One Spoon Treaty Territory - a treaty between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee that bound them to share the territory and protect the land. Subsequent Indigenous Nations and peoples, Europeans and all newcomers have been invited into this treaty in the spirit of peace, friendship and respect. I look to this treaty as a guiding principle for how to live on the land, working towards decolonization through solidarity, education and action.

Words from Clients & Colleagues: