Intuitive Counseling and Somatic Healing for Amazing People

 

Please visit Jacks McNamara Healing Arts for complete information.

Through intuitive counseling, somatic healingand the creative arts, I support the healing and transformation of survivors, change-makers, and visionaries. My goal is not to help people adjust to a sick society–it is to help all of us connect to meaningful life work, loving communities, and the possibility of liberation. Together, we will work through the body and the imagination to develop the insight, practices, and tools necessary to bring your life closer to your own definition of health. Currently, I see individual clients and offer groups in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, as well as offering these services across the world via Skype.

Why Somatics?

Generative Somatics is a path of embodied transformation that integrates the mind, body and spirit into healing from stress, trauma, and oppression. We work with the wisdom of the body, not just the understandings of the mind, as in traditional talk therapy. We begin with a deep respect for who we are now, and explore what embodied transformation might make possible. Embodied transformation is fundamental change that shows in our actions, ways of being, relating, and perceiving. It is transformation that sustains over time. Somatics views the strategies we have used to survive until now as adaptive and smart–we talk about post traumatic stress intelligence rather than posttraumatic stress disorder. In our sessions together, we develop awareness of the body's current patterns and shape, why they formed, and learn new practices that will serve us in the long run, helping us shift what is stuck and make possible what we long for.

What Is a Session Like?

A typical session will include talking about current challenges and progress in your life, trying out different somatic practices together, and exploring mindfulness or awareness-based exercises. Sometimes we use bodywork to access deeper levels of experience and deeper potentials for change. Sometimes we bring art and writing into the room. Depending on your body's abilities and needs, we may sit, stand, lie down, walk around inside or outside, and try out all kinds of experiments. In the process, parts of your story will come up– the past will reveal itself when it's relevant, and the exercises we do will teach us more about the stories and patterns you carry inside you. Generative somatics includes practices aimed to develop bodily and emotional awareness, increase skills in areas like boundaries, allyship, and centered accountability, and promotes opening in our old shapes and armoring to allow for new options in how we experience and respond to our lives.

Background

I have been seeing clients since 2012. I completed 3 years of somatics and trauma practitioner training with Staci Haines and Generative Somatics. I have been peer counseling, facilitating support groups, teaching art and writing classes, and leading workshops around mental health, trauma, and resilience since 2004. I have also studied meditation and other mindfulness practices since 2002. In my healing work, I have specialized in working with queer and gender variant people, artists and activists, and those who experience the emotional distress and extreme states that are often given labels like “bipolar disorder” and “PTSD." I am also particularly interested in working with survivors of abuse and people living with chronic illness and/or disability. I take a sex-positive, poly and kink friendly approach.

Community Healing Groups

I am planning to begin offering a series of small community healing groups with focuses like living with chronic illness and/or disability, resilience building for queer and gender variant folks, & writing and transformation for people living with the extreme states commonly labeled as “mental illness.” If you would like to be notified when these groups get going, please send an e-mail to healingATjacksmcnamara.net.

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