Presence Over Prescription: Reclaiming the Body in Mental Health

“In a world that rushes to treat, to diagnose, to prescribe—presence is revolutionary.”

Mental health has become a clinical industry. We’ve learned to equate wellness with symptom relief, and treatment with medication, productivity, and getting “back to normal.”

But what if normal was never truly well?

What if the healing we seek can’t be prescribed—only practiced?

What if the medicine is presence itself?

The Cultural Prescription for Disembodiment

We live in a culture of speed, numbing, and distraction. The body is often treated like a malfunctioning machine, and the mind like a problem to be fixed. Even in therapy, there’s pressure to arrive with insight, to “do the work,” to change, improve, optimize.

But true healing doesn’t come from bypassing discomfort. It comes from learning how to stay with it—in the body, in the breath, in relationship.

As a somatic therapist, I work at the pace of the nervous system, not the clock. We move slowly. We track sensation. We pause often. We practice being with, not doing to. This is not passive—it’s radical.

Why Presence Is So Hard (And So Essential)

Presence sounds simple, but it isn’t easy. It asks us to slow down in a world addicted to urgency. It asks us to feel what we’ve spent decades avoiding. It asks us to trust the body—even when it trembles, tightens, or feels numb.

But presence is also what allows:

• Trauma to metabolize instead of recycle

• Emotions to move rather than lodge in the tissue

• The nervous system to regulate, settle, and expand

When we reclaim presence, we reclaim agency. We learn to locate ourselves—not in a diagnosis, not in a plan, but in our own lived, felt experience.

From Practitioner to Witness

In this work, I don’t position myself as an expert who intervenes. I show up as a presence who attunes. That, too, is radical in a system that often privileges hierarchy over relationship.

I’ve spent over two decades exploring how the body stores memory, emotion, and intelligence—and how presence, not pressure, is the key to unlocking it. My training across somatics, Contemplative and Buddhist Psychotherapy, Gestalt awareness, East/West psychology, and years teaching at Esalen Institute and Naropa University has taught me again and again: being with someone in their body is more powerful than any treatment plan.

What Reclaiming the Body Looks Like

It might look like:

• Naming what’s happening in the body before analyzing it

• Orienting to the room, the breath, the support beneath you

• Noticing the impulse to dissociate, and staying present with that

• Practicing slowness, silence, and sensation as sacred

• Building capacity to feel more, not less

This is not about replacing prescriptions or dismissing medication when needed. It’s about reclaiming what has always been available: your body, your breath, your being.

Because presence isn’t just therapeutic—it’s transformational.

An Invitation to Slow Down

If you’ve felt over-medicated, over-pathologized, or simply overwhelmed, I invite you to return to presence.

No prescription required.

Just breath.

Just sensation.

Just now.

Because the body remembers.

And when met with care, it can also re-member us—into wholeness, into truth, into life.

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Want to explore this work more deeply? Reach out for a session.

Presence Over Prescription: Reclaiming the Body in Mental Health