1-1 Somatic Care

Live with emotional and embodied presence.
Develop capacity for connection with yourself and others.
Transform longstanding patterns.

 
 
 

Hello dear one,

I’m so glad that you’re here.

I’ve created this page to give you a clear picture of the coaching I offer, what I can be of support with, and how we can work together.

I’m cheering you on and walking the path of embodied transformation beside you.

May you and I become free. May all beings be free, and may we be part of making that both possible and inevitable.

xo,
Varia

 
 
 

When to Work with Me :

  1. You’re committed to personal and collective healing, and have spent enough time in therapy unpacking how your childhood and social location shape who you are today.

  2. It’s time to deepen and embody what you’ve learned - in the context of your nervous system, and how it creates your embodied and relational patterns.

  3. You’re interested in a long-term, slow, and relational approach to healing fragmentation, disembodiment, self-abandonment, lack of agency, attachment difficulties and more.

 
 
 

What is Somatic Coaching?

Somatic coaching is a non-clinical approach that combines somatic exploration, trauma-informed coaching and psychoeducation.

Somatic exploration includes relational attunement, nervous system co-regulation, embodied consent, feeling for right distance, meeting implicit memories, discerning and soothing younger parts of self, tracking sensory information and more. Example: Sensing what your no feels like in your body, and learning how to identify, name and hold it in the moment.

In turn, trauma-informed coaching is an opportunity to translate the learning from somatic practice into action. Example: Turning the experience of feeling your body’s no into an actual spoken boundary that you’re able to communicate.

I offer personalized psychoeducation to help you understand what might be happening in terms of your nervous system, attachment patterns, internal fragmentation, your life experience and more. Example: We may put the difficulty you have articulating healthy boundaries in the context of childhood development, offering you more compassion and patience with your process.

All of this is done in the context of your real life, the places of privilege and oppression each of us occupies, what you and your people have survived, the systems that shape our world, our relationship, and a commitment to being with rather than problem solving your experience.

My Clients Are:

  • Adults who experienced an emotionally painful childhood and well on their way on a long-term healing journey to develop a whole sense of self and an embodied experience of safety, especially in relationships.

  • Talk therapists and coaches seeking to deepen their own capacity for embodiment, both in their personal lives as well as in client relationships.

  • Queer and trans folks, folks living with chronic pain, those who’ve left evangelical christianity, and folks who have experienced parental estrangement - social locations I share and know the intimate landscapes of.

 
 
 

Somatic coaching creates a relational container for you to build emotional and nervous system regulation, develop an embodied understanding of your patterns and move towards agency and choice.

 
 
 

My Training and Lineages of Practice:

My coaching work is shaped by a multi-disciplinary and politicized approach to care that combines my training in somatics, Gestalt psychotherapy, co-active coaching, and spiritual care.

Relevant certifications include:

  • Foundations in Embodied Ancestral Inquiry
    January - June 2023 (70 hours)
    Marika Heinrichs

  • Alchemical Alignment: Bodywork for Trauma Resolution and Embodiment of Spirit
    Levels 1-4 2021, (100 hours)
    Modules 8 - 14, 2023 (105 hours)

    Brigit Viksnins MAT, SEP, RCST®, BCTMB, LMT

  • Coaches Training Institute
    Co-Active Coaching Fundamentals, 2015 (17.75 hours)

  • Certificate in Gestalt Psychotherapy Theory and Methodology
    One-Year Training Program for Professionals, 2012 (170 hours)
    Year Two - Introduction to Field Dynamics , 2013(170 hours)

    Gestalt Institute of Toronto

  • Foundations in the Psychology of Counselling
    As part of a Master’s of Divinity, 2011 (45 hours)
    Dr. Marsha Hewitt, Trinity College, University of Toronto,

  • Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Philosophy
    York University, 2005 - 2009
    Toronto, Ontario

My deepest gratitude is extended to my own lineage of practice, built first and foremost on the foundation of my own well-being made possible by the long-term support and encouragement of Katarina Maatta-Hebdon and Marika Heinrichs. I also extend my deepest thanks to my teachers in healing, Brigit Viksnins and the faculty of The Gestalt Institute of Toronto, as well as Tele Darden and Steph Jagger who offer me private practice supervision and mentorship respectively. My approach is also shaped by the public teaching work of adrienne maree brown, Lindsay Mack, Brené Brown, Janina Fisher, Kathy Kain, Janina Fisher and Rob Bell. My deepest bow goes to each of them, as well as to the ancient traditions that shape the lineage of teachers I belong to, including the teachings of the Buddha, Indigenous spirituality, Christian mystics, and earth based worship, ritual and magic.

 
 
 

Somatic coaching will support you to feel into your innate wholeness, develop a sense of embodied safety and live into greater alignment with yourself and life.

 
 
 

The Practical Details:

  • Somatic coaching is an ongoing relationship, with the minimum length of work being six months but usually extending longer. I meet with clients weekly or every other week depending on your needs.

  • Sessions are an hour long and happen over video on zoom. I do not offer e-mail or phone support between sessions other than re-scheduling or the sharing of resources addressed during session.

  • Somatic coaching is an intentionally non-clinical and non-pathologizing approach to embodied healing. This is not trauma therapy nor a replacement for psychotherapy or clinical care. Somatic coaching can be an excellent complimentary support to clinical care if you are managing complex needs or CPTSD.

Fees:  

One on one support is a significant financial, emotional and energetic investment on both our parts. Fees are sliding scale and range from $150 - $250 USD per an hour-long session depending on your financial capacity, and whether I have spots open at that tier. Canadian clients are welcome to pay between $150 and $250 in CAD in order to to make 1-1 support more financially accessible and sustainable.

Exploring Working Together:

The first step towards working together is to set up a free half an hour video consult. The consult is an opportunity for you and I to get to know each other, for me to hear what you’re looking for support with, for you to ask questions and for both of us feel into if we are a good fit to work together.

April 2023 Update: My 1-1 practice is currently full, though you are welcome to email me at contact@bewith.org to be added to my newsletter list to hear about when I have openings.

 
 

My Story and My Values :

I come to my work first and foremost as a person who sought healing and support when I needed it the most, and gratefully found it. Like many practitioners, I am passing on the gifts of healing that are offered to me.

After a difficult childhood during the fall of the USSR, undiagnosed ADHD, teen years marked by immigration, conservative religion, homophobia, bullying and a desperate search for belonging, I arrived to adulthood scared, closeted, hurting and lost.

It took me over a decade, and the care of many talented practitioners, friends and teachers to understand and begin to heal from complex developmental trauma, the effects of religious and cultural homophobia, and the resulting depression and anxiety that made life feel impossible.

My healing journey shaped my life and my career as I trained in psychotherapy, coaching and somatic trauma healing. I founded Be With in 2015 with the intention of providing holistic, anti-oppressive and approachable care.

I see myself and my work in the context of a complex world - one shaped both by the resilience and goodness of all living things, as well as the oppressive systems we’ve inherited. Ableism, racism, patriarchy, classism, colonialism and other systems of oppression are powerful shaping forces - ones we internalize in order to survive them. As both oppressor and oppressed, I see the way people and systems act as mirrors for one another.

In order to thrive and to create liberation for all, we must heal from and unlearn these oppressions. Personal and collective trauma go hand in hand, but so do our personal and collective healing. Queerness, immigration, class struggle, and lived experience of trauma orient my work towards justice for all.

I am a white genderfluid queer, a Russian immigrant, a cat mama and a wife to Tanya Neumeyer. I live in what is colonially known as Toronto in Canada, but has always been Indigenous land. As both a settler and an immigrant in my lifetime, I hold the privilege, complexity and harm by which I get to call this place home simultaneously. The land I live on is part of the Dish with One Spoon Treaty Territory - a treaty between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee that bound them to share the territory and protect the land. Subsequent Indigenous Nations and peoples, Europeans and all newcomers have been invited into this treaty in the spirit of peace, friendship and respect. I look to this treaty as a guiding principle for how to live on the land, working towards decolonization through solidarity, education and action.

 

Words from Clients & Colleagues:

I have worked with coaches over the years and have found them all helpful in different ways. But I’ve found that I can only go as deep as the coach has gone themselves. I hired Varvara because I was finding myself at a place where I needed to go deeper than I had ever gone before (to a place I was utterly terrified to go myself). I felt comfortable knowing that Varvara could hold such a tender space for me as I worked through generations of pain. Because of our work together, I’ve been able to soften in ways that never felt safe or comfortable to do so previously - all which have greatly benefited both my personal relationships and my ability to hold space for my own clients. I truly believe that healing is a spiral - without a beginning or and ending - and that Varvara shares that belief with me. I appreciate her willingness to follow the spiral with me, holding space in the easy times as well as the challenging ones. In Varvara I have found a coach, a teacher, a friend, and a fountain of never-ending support.
— Amy Kuretsky
I discovered Varvara on Instagram, joined a webinar of hers, and within moments connected more fully with my body and intuition than I had in months, if not years, maybe even decades. I was fresh off several years of talk therapy that was helpful to a point and not really looking to work with someone else one-on-one. I’m so glad I did, because working with Varvara was like adding rocket fuel to my journey of healing and growth. Trust Varvara when she says that you can speed up be slowing down. You can and you will. We shifted more for me in six months than three years of traditional talk therapy. It was like she had a direct line to my intuition even though I thought I could no longer hear it, and she taught me to tap into it too. Her playful, multidisciplinary, and intuitive approach was exactly what I needed to reframe and finally shift tired old mental, emotional, and physical patterns. Varvara’s radical kindness paired with firmness ended up teaching me what true self-compassion looks, and for that I cannot thank her enough.
— Keriann Kohler
Varvara is a deeply embodied practitioner. I was honored to get to co-lead a retreat with Varvara, witnessing firsthand how she uses her skills and whole presence to coach people into deeper connection with their bodies, their feelings, their lives and one another.  Her masterful use of somatic knowledge combined with her ability to facilitate difficult, nuanced, and deeply feeling conversions leads to genuine transformation in groups and individuals. Witnessing Varvara embody her work, and how that impacts her ability to self-regulate and facilitate powerfully reminds me of the importance of my own deep work as I lead. She has the gift of taking people to the primal, uncomfortable places within and support people to bring back their own medicine. Varvara is willing to go to her depths without forsaking play, a living model of liberation from the inside out. 
— Madison Morrigan
 

Read more client & student stories here.

 

Client Video Interviews: