Come home to your natural self.

As a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, my work has become focused on repairing our crucial capacity to experience connection, both inwardly and outwardly, through the wild, instinctual vehicle of our bodies. It's through direct contact that we come to know ourselves. When we're touched, we know we exist. When we're seen and reflected, we learn to love ourselves. And when we're part of a healthy family or interdependent community, we see our value, both intrinsically and in relation to the needs of others. It's through relationship that we're formed, and it's through relationship that we heal.

There's a natural wisdom inside each of us that understands how to let down, rest and be held by something unshakably strong, kind and steady beneath us. We sink in. Even our bones settle more fully into their easier places. Long held griefs let go and flow like rivers, old fears tremble through like wind shaking trees. In the end there is a sense of peace, the quiet of ancient mountains. When we look around from this deep space of belonging the world appears clearer, more magical and more benevolent. This is the feeling of home.

Many of us suffer from a profound sense of disconnection that we experience as depression, anxiety, loneliness and despair. Generations of alienation from our own instinctual bodies, from the earth and from each other have created a unique and challenging pattern of trauma which can only be healed in loving connection to both the human and non-human worlds. This work helps access our primary "deep attachment" in authentic human relating and in communion with the natural world and spirit.

Through body-centered and nature-based modalities focused on connecting to each other, to earth and to our individual sense of the spiritual dimension, the trauma of these inherited divisions and ancestral patterns of relating can begin to repair. This process of creating a healing relationship with other powerful and loving beings is profoundly transformative and reaches to the very core of us. Finally, a felt sense of safety, belonging and trust can emerge, opening a space for a sustainable and balanced way of life.

Learn to live from a deep, joyful felt sense of connection.

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

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

Heal through bodymind practices and time in the natural world.

Develop ease, freedom and inner strength.

"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

Our wise mammal body is the pathway to reconnection. 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 :-).