Come home to your essential self.

Many of us suffer from a profound sense of disconnection we experience as depression, anxiety, loneliness and despair. Personal and collective trauma can lead to alienation from our spiritual core, our own instinctual bodies, the earth and each other. As we heal, we regain our direct experience of ourselves as part of the whole. We become quieter, open-hearted, able to give and receive love. We reclaim our capacity for joy.

For me, time in nature, Somatic Experiencing and other body-centered practices have been the path of returning. I've been able to witness the wisdom inside each of us that understands how to let down, rest and be held by something unshakably strong and steady beneath us. With safety, we sink in. Long held griefs let go, old fears tremble through, anger is reclaimed. In the end there is a sense of softness and ease, a quieter internal state. When we look around from this space of belonging the world appears clearer, more magical and more benevolent. This is the feeling of home.

Our present-moment awareness is our most powerful tool for transforming our lives and finding a felt sense of relatedness. Our ability to turn toward feeling in its rawness allows us to change. As we receive unconditional acceptance, we grow the ability to witness ourselves. In this way, we weave together the disparate pieces of ourselves, meeting ourselves with kindness.

Through a lot of inner practice and fifteen years of holding space for others, I've learned that where we choose to put the focus of our awareness creates the stuff of our lives. This work of healing is as much about choosing our course as it is about allowing what is. While we have to give our emotions their moment, pain can't be our primary focus. Bringing awareness to gratitude, slowness, ease and playfulness is the other potent medicine for healing the heart, mind and body. Happiness is something the brain can learn. Our neurochemistry follows our paths of awareness, so what we think about becomes how we feel, how we behave and who we ultimately become.

I look forward to practicing with you!

Learn to live from a solid and secure sense of connection to Self.

Create loving attachment bonds with close people, community and earth.

Shift patterns of isolation, depression, loneliness, anxiety and fatigue.

Heal through practices that create joy, embodiment and self love.

Develop the ability to slow down and be more truly present in your life.

"Bonnie Freestone is a master at creating safety and facilitating transformation. The process is gentle, enfolding, and empowering. Bonnie approaches this work with kind curiosity, unconditional acceptance, and consistent compassion. Because of this my truest essence is guided to emerge. Bonnie's work has been the best medicine I've found in a lifetime of searching for help."

-B.J., Asheville

Somatic (Body-Centered) Sessions

Listening closely to the language of the body, I hold space for my clients to find a sense of themselves within their own physicality, helping them move from anxiety, depression and emotional overwhelm to ease and resilience. Somatic Experiencing is a gentle trauma-renegotiation modality that offers clients the power to manage challenging emotions and nervous system states as they regain their sense of safety in the world and within their natural selves. In a session, we slow down, dropping out of the thinking brain, and pay close attention to what’s happening, moment by moment, in the realm of feeling, intuition and impulse. This compassionate witnessing of our inner sensations, memories and imagery allows the nervous system to have its organic unfolding process, helping it come back into balance. SE, recognized all over the world for its efficacy with healing trauma, gives clients back their confidence, self-protective instincts, bravery and trust.

Early-Attachment Focus

As mammals, we have a core need to connect with each other and feel safe being held within bonded, caring relationships. We need to feel included and valued. We all have patterning around how or if we try to get our needs met in relationship. Some of our strategies, often learned in childhood, keep us feeling hurt and lonely. And the longing turns to despair, isolation or rage. To me, some of the most tender, rewarding work has been supporting clients to repair their relational selves, express their feelings and needs and feel safe being seen and touched. Working with early-attachment patterns and relational trauma allows us to experience true nurturing and connection and create authentic intimacy in our lives. For most people, this is one of the biggest rewards of inner work.

Neural Repatterning

To me, the most incredible aspect of healing is seeing the transformation that happens when we practice happiness, exhilaration, calm, satisfaction, gratitude and wonder. Expansive joy and positive thinking don’t come naturally to everyone, but with gentle, body-centered practices, they can emerge. As someone who suffered for years with depression and fatigue, I’ve been amazed how I’ve been able to teach my brain to favor happiness and hopefulness, and my body to feel stronger and more energetic. I now blend neural repatterning into my work with clients and I love to see the results! This is why I strongly encourage daily practice. The more time we spend experiencing serotonin-producing states, thinking new thoughts and staying out of old threat-response loops, the more our neuroplastic brain changes, responding to life from a whole new place.

"Bonnie shares a loving support, a deep sensitivity and a creative spirit I've never found in anyone else. In her presence emotional guards are lifted away, leaving only the opportunity to come from a place of authenticity."

-Noelle Adamo, NY

Nature-Based Somatic Sessions

What do you feel standing at an overlook miles from town, silence and sky surrounding you, a turkey vulture catching an updraft over a sea of mountains?

What’s it like to nestle in the roots of a huge tulip poplar, letting your back soften, watching the images that come as your mind settles, feeling a sensation that draws you to the part of you who knows how to be small with someone you trust?

What happens when you lie on the ground, surrendering to gravity in a place you’ve grown to know deeply: each fallen tree, each protruding rock, the curvature of the hillside? What if you let the earth hold you?

My true passion is to reconnect humans with our most essential place of nurturing, protection, play and homecoming: the natural world. For me, mountains, forests, rivers and deserts give me profound experiences of being truly alive. I feel so much gratitude for the living world, and I know, in the hidden recesses of our hearts, we all do.

Our industrialized, indoor and screen-based culture leaves us more and more wanting for a true experience of life. Most of us don’t even really know what’s wrong most of the time. We just feel a vague sense of dis-ease, running on adrenaline, living as a character in the movie in our mind. For some of us it’s been generations since we directly contacted the sacredness in a leaf or spent time with a caterpillar. We’ve lost our sense of wonder, our sense of adventure, and our sense of moment-to-moment awareness of the living, growing, moving being that breathes all around us.

In nature-based sessions, I guide clients to experience this deep presence with the world and with themselves. I find these interweaving processes easily inspire and inform each other. The more we pay attention inside the more we notice in the world, and the more we are drawn to wonder, beauty and expansion around us, the more we feel that same experience inside. It’s such a treat to hold a space where clients can access the superpower of the natural world to heal from trauma, isolation, depression and anxiety.

When possible, sessions are held outdoors, and when not, outdoor homework is given, and the session is integrative of that solo nature time. My approach with sessions is always body-centered, mindfulness-based and deeply compassionate. I hope you’ll come join me in the woods :-).