About Abby

Healing trauma, Awakening the body, Re-animating the world

Abby is a somatic psychotherapist (in-training) and a somatic movement teacher. She’s dedicated to helping individuals return to ease and aliveness in their bodies and a deeper felt interconnection with the animate world.

She supports clients to meet trauma stored in the body-psyche, uncovering unconscious conditioning and releasing burdens. She combines somatic modalities - Focusing, IFS, and Sensorimotor Therapy.

She also offers movement work in explorations of body consciousness, intuitive movement, and elemental animism. She finds awareness-based movement as a doorway to the sacred stillness - to awakening beyond conditioned selves and allowing life force energy to move through. With every shift in bodily felt experience, the sensory gates deepen, and perceptions shift to access awareness beyond one’s isolated sense of self.

Abby is a also a student and practitioner of Dzogchen and Bön Buddhism, inquiring into perceptual shifts from head to heart.

My Story

My path of seeking began unknowingly at age six with a near-death experience. After accidentally ingesting chemicals, I floated out of my body while lying in a hospital bed. This opened me to the world of the unseen.

Then the portal closed, and normal life took over — I hurried along like everyone else. It wasn’t until age 21 that the door cracked open again. Three months of relentless sciatica pain left me bedridden, begging for deliverance. As I laid there with tears and poems pouring out, life was calling me home.

This kickstarted a journey of seeking. I left my first job cold turkey and attended a Vipassana retreat. It was my first taste of silence and stillness, and my back pain significantly reduced. Around the same time, I was serendipitously introduced to my teacher, Lynn Preston, who generously opened the door to the world of the felt-sense and Focusing. The shifted me from the outer mental realm to the language of the body — metaphors, images, feelings, and process — initiating an inner revolution towards deeper knowing. I began to see our bodies hold truths that our minds can’t always access.

At 27, my entire world shattered from a psychedelic-induced energetic awakening. Numb parts awakened to be released in energetic form, and a flood of unconscious material surfaced, waiting to be met. This began a six-year period of dissolution and cocooning. Life stripped away all external ground to center the inner life’s unfolding. Old identities fell away, and many relationships shifted or dissolved. I was pinned to the ground to face the dark and making space for something new.

Over time, new sensitivities came online — a poroursness in my being. Like a naked snail without a shell and a newborn’s flesh, I was exposed and needed shielding from harsher energies. I began to resource deeply with nature, connecting to the elemental energies. With each layer of darkness shed, my perception shifted, revealing beauty, wonder, awe, and appreciation. The clearer my system became, the more I sensed interconnection - the aliveness and animacy of all things and the larger web of living.

It was a shift into living from not-knowing, entering into deeper trusting and surrender. The animal creature fears — the need to be safe, to know, to belong, and to control - continued to surface to be met. I wondered where I was going and what was becoming of me, and continue to allow those parts to be met.

My teacher Lynn always told me to wait and see what comes. And once again, I was serendipitously led to the womb-space of Continuum with Susan Harper, which became a refuge and anchor, guiding me from a socio-cultural map to a soul map. Susan’s work opened me deeper to the imaginal and animistic realms, teaching perceptual shifts and elemental intelligences. In an effort to anchor my sensitivities, I also studied with Lynda Caesara, who imparted universal energetic principles and how to be in right relations. Both of these teachers offered ritualized containers, holding depth and expansiveness.

This passage reorients, shifting from the mind to the heart, from a purely materialistic view to an expanded and subtle view, from object to process, from a meaningless world to sacredness and magic, and from an individual self to Soul. This is what my deeper urge was calling forth all along… and the journey continues to unfold.

I am forever grateful for this journey, and it continues to shape the work I now offer.

Guiding Inquiries

  • awakening through the sense gates and perceptual shifts

  • intuitive movement from stillness and the felt-sense

  • mapping psyche to nature processes

  • rituals and ceremonies to deepen reciprocity in all relations seen and unseen

  • embodying and resourcing through elemental animism

Training Background

There are 3 stages of personal transformation: hurting, healing, and helping.

A practitioner offers gifts from the path they’ve traveled themselves. I stand on the shoulders of giants, and my offerings are rooted in places where I’ve healed the most while walking the path. They’ve slowly become part of my being. I now pay it forward in my offering.

Trainings: