A LITTLE ABOUT MEHi, I’m Nikki
I’m a somatic practitioner, mother and deeply curious human living in Guelph, Ontario.
I’ve had an unusual number of difficult life experiences compared to the average soul. As the painful parts of those experiences loosened and began to give way, they revealed a gift for relating deeply to others.
I see the human behind the dysregulated feelings you’re afraid of being judged for. And I’m comfortable holding space for your unseen parts to express pain, excitement and longing.
Most people describe a session with me as gentle, soft, supportive, grounding and deeply held. Plenty of our sessions also involve laughter and swearing. And there’s a sprinkle of science and philosophy - only when it’s useful.
That is a little of what I bring into our time together.
I care about people having a life that feels like theirs.
A LITTLE ABOUT MY PHILOSOPHYYou are more than the parts of you that hurt.
Many of us have never known a safe human with whom to express our pain.
When we tried, people mistook our pain for us. They labelled us, urged us to hide it, tried to fix it or avoided it. So we quickly learned not to let those tender parts enter our relationships.
But it isn’t only our pain that we learn to hide.
In sessions, I’ve had women cry because they had never known a safe place to express their excitement and happiness. I’ve felt the relief of women finally allowing themselves to own the spiritual joy and wonder they kept locked inside.
The space we create together is one you can use to express whatever parts of yourself need to be seen, felt, worked with, integrated or loved.
I won’t mistake any one of those parts for all of who you are.
My space is pathology-free. I don’t believe there is something inherently wrong with you. There are simply skills you haven’t yet had the opportunity, safety or support to learn.
And safety is not the final destination.
It gives you somewhere to begin listening for what wants more life, and enough support to let what you find there begin shaping the way you actually live.
SAFETY → ALIVENESS → EXPRESSION
These aren’t stages to complete. You may recognize yourself in all three at once.
ABOUT SAFETYYou are allowed to take up more space in your own life.
When you’ve spent a long time paying attention to what everyone else needs, your conscious thoughts learn to completely organize as thoughts-about-others. You can literally forget to think about yourself.
You anticipate what people need, keep track of the schedules, remember the tasks, notice changes in mood, and try to prevent problems before they happen. There’s no thinking space left to remember your own needs, preferences and desires.
If this sounds like you, your body may have learned to use it’s threat-scanning system as the way to stay alert for other people’s needs.
Part of learning to feel safe is retraining that attention.
You learn to notice what you need, what you want, what feels like too much, and what matters to you, even when other people need things from you too.
You’ve probably been conditioned to believe that’s selfish. But when you’re honoring what you need, and feeling more settled, you’ll naturally feel pulled to behave in ways that will encourage others to pay attention to their own needs and feel truly settled inside themselves.
You connect, help and give because you genuinely feel like giving, not because your body’s threat system is sending a frantic energy and voice that insist you have to take care of others.
You take up more space in your own life, because you allow yourself to dedicate more time to filling your own cup.
ABOUT ALIVENESSYou are meant to keep becoming.
Once you begin paying attention to yourself, a funny problem can arise: you become more aware that you want things, and you have more time and energy to put towards pursuing them.
You have preferences. Curiosities. Ideas. Longings. Strong opinions. Things that energize you for reasons you can’t entirely explain.
And after years of organizing yourself around what is sensible, expected, useful or needed by someone else, it can be surprisingly difficult to know what to do with them.
You might wonder which desires you can trust. Whether wanting something is enough of a reason to move toward it. Whether excitement is wisdom or impulsivity. Whether the quiet little idea that keeps returning deserves any real space in your life.
And even when you know what you want, fear can show up the moment you try to claim doing or saying something that makes you feel alive.
Aliveness isn’t about chasing every impulse or manufacturing excitement. It’s about becoming familiar with what makes you feel curious, engaged, energized and more fully yourself.
You begin to recognize your own signals of yes. What pulls you forward. What you want more of. What makes being here feel interesting.
And eventually, simply knowing what you want isn’t enough. You need to pursue it.
ABOUT EXPRESSIONWho you are inside gets to shape your actual life.
Knowing what matters to you is one thing. Letting it change how you actually live is another skill set entirely.
Expression is what happens when that aliveness in you starts making its way into your conversations, choices and relationships with other people.
It can look like:
Sharing words you usually swallow.
Making a choice you used to fear being judged for.
Asking for help without knowing whether it will be received well.
Saying no instead of protecting the other person’s feelings.
Starting the project without knowing if it will succeed.
Changing how you parent, work, relate, create or spend your time.
You may be very familiar with fear, uncertainty and the feeling of, “I kind of know what I want, but how do I actually create it?”
These are excellent times to have the support of someone who can help you deepen your connection to what you want, notice what gets in the way, and turn that inner knowing into grounded action.
Over time, your values, desires, ideas and personality begin to have more real influence over the life you’re building.
And the beautiful part is that expression feeds safety and aliveness, which feed right back into expression.