How can we come closer to the people we love?

“Many things I have been trying to do and let go of for YEARS are just solving themselves because of the sessions with you. It has been life changing. I am still burned out, but I actually feel I’m starting to function and build up my energy again. I can’t even explain it really, but something big has happened. I haven’t thought of placing the same amount of energy and attention inwards and outwards, and since you showed me, I have felt SO grounded and at home in my body. What has been really important is learning that my body isn't wrong or broken. I am so grateful for it hanging in there with me, and I see that it always works in my favour to take care of me and protect me.”

-Amanda Sjögren

"I am a therapist in the US trained in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and am working through an AASECT sex therapy training program. Your Polyvagal Orgasm course is AMAZING! It has made all of the things I'm learning from both styles click together in such an organized way that it totally changes my felt sense of understanding it. I really appreciate all of the work you put into this course (and look forward to starting the Relationship course soon!)."

-- Andrea Bezaire, MS, LLP

"Laura has an incredible ability to help you shift inside. Through what seems like simple voice exercises, she helps bring about insights, healing and expression as you’ve never experienced it before. Thank you for giving me the gift of discovering my voice, me, again. The door is now open for me to take this journey of breaking through the layers to be visible as the authentic and true me."

-Tanya Lochner

"Your workshop was quite an experience. I trust my partner quite a lot to begin with, and it was both thrilling and comforting to feel it so tangibly, falling even deeper into gushy love and calmer intimacy at the same time. It also made me feel more trust in the ability to keep connecting and feeling the love even after the romantic phase wears off, like everyone tells me it will. A big takeaway from the workshop happened afterward. There was the moment during sex when I decided I wasn’t going for the orgasm because it felt too far off and like too much work. After a while, he stopped and checked if I was still in it. I readjusted, reconnected, and went back to looking him in the eyes. The feeling changed, and the orgasm came flowing. Wow! The power of intimacy, of connection!"

-Betty Morgan

I work with individuals, couples, and families to cultivate a deep and reliable capacity for authentic connection. Because healing happens within relationship, we must relearn how to orient toward each other, how to find safety in numbers rather than in withdrawal. Both personal and collective suffering thrive on a destructive cocktail of individualism, intellectualism, and independence. We have elevated the self and the mind above all else, and our survival as a species depends on how deftly we occupy the body (the physical body, the cultural body, the ancestral body, and the ecological body).

I do this through an approach that addresses multiple layers of consciousness and experiences of self. I work at the foundational level of the nervous system through neurodevelopmental repatterning and primitive reflex integration, at the experiential level through embodied rhythm and play, somatic inquiry, and voicework, at the level of cognition through education and dialogue, and at the intuitive level through ancestral work, Akashic (fifth-dimensional) clearings, and mystical metaphor.

Trauma and stress dysregulate the nervous system such that our threat responses become either constant (hypervigilant) or binary (all/nothing, on/off). Our experiences in life have rewired us to appear to prefer isolation to relationship, addiction to connection, and checking out to checking in. These preferences are maladaptive, meaning they are unhealthy coping strategies that do further damage to our systems and run counter to our physiology and our evolution. We are meant to find comfort, meaning, safety, growth, healing, and pleasure in relationship.

Some struggle with a particular person (child, partner, or loved one), others find it difficult to be vulnerable, intimate, and playful in general, and many people want to deepen their capacity for reliably safe connection and communication. Most of us physically embody inherited and cultural trauma, and all of us have a responsibility to contribute to the healing of the collective body. The micro feeds the macro and vice versa. White people in particular have a responsibility toward their own embodiment in part to be able to support the anti-racism work they wish to undertake, to recreate or reunite with their long-abandoned somatic ancestral identity, and to interrupt dissociation-into-privilege.

The most cutting edge neuroscience supports collective somatic expressions of joy as potent sources of brain health and healing, while the most popular Western healing modalities (from psychotherapy to Somatic Experiencing) are often colonized and fragmented versions of the healing practices from Indigenous cultures around the world.

The answer to the question, "How can we come closer to the people we love?" lies buried in plain sight, in what all of our ancestors did best: song and dance.

Move your body in the pleasurable company of others. Communicate with your hips more than your lips. Use your voice in ways that bring you out of your head and set fire to the space around you. Touch each other. Play. Learn the way your body speaks. Learn to speak back to it. Allow yourself to exist in the liminal spaces. Know less. Feel more. Let science inform the path but let the path be traveled by your undulating spine and circling pelvis. Surrender to the rhythm that calls you.

Rhythm is what the nervous system craves, what the brain understands, what dissociation struggles to feel, what makes individuals into a group, what triggers orgasm, what soothes an infant, what organizes the sensory system, what facilitates ecstasy, what underlies human physiology, and what connects us to the beginning of time. Fortunately, rhythm is a benevolent teacher, longing to become an intimate friend. What is required of you is steadfastness. You gotta show up. You gotta come to play.