Read More Reviews of Abhainn Healing Arts

• book your appointment

• Cancel

• Home

Portland, Oregon | Chinook Justice | Land | Gaeilge

• mediation
• bodywork
• movement
• about
• resources
• office info
• Contact Me
• Blog
• Book Now

• Instagram
• Substack
• Bluesky
• Email
• Phone
• Location

• Cancel

Resources related to Irish language, cultural revival, diasporic reconnection, and land defense

• Irish/Palestinian Solidarity
• The Gaeltacht
• The Irish Treaty
• gaeilge northwest
• save our sperrins
• how the irish became white
• Irish History Podcast
• Rebel Matters Podcast

About An Abhainn & Muir

Somatic Bodywork

• Book Now
• What to Expect
• Evidence
• Structural Integration

Office & Accessibility

Click here for photos and detailed information about my office.

More info on my background and approach

Do you carry tension that your body won't release?

Maybe you find that you just can't relax no matter how hard you try. Maybe you feel as though a pane of glass lies between you and your body or the rest of the world. Maybe you've avoided touch due to past traumas, neurodivergence, or encounters with providers who didn't understand you and your needs. Maybe you're tired of spaces that assume a one-size-fits-all approach.I work with clients who have chronic pain. Tightness that returns no matter how much you stretch. A feeling of disconnection from your body—like you're living in a house you can't fully enter.Standard massage relaxes muscles temporarily. But, especially if the pain keeps coming back, the root often isn't just muscular: it's your movement, your habits, your relationship with yourself, and your holding patterns of stress, conflict, and trauma. Your body may struggle to fully let go if you haven't felt truly connected to your embodied boundaries or safe with a provider.

My Somatic Bodywork is rooted in deep listening and affirmation. Inclusive, trauma-informed care for every body.

This is trauma-informed, equity-informed, evidence-based, gender-affirming care designed for folks who need more than a standard treatment. Using gentle Structural Integration, myofascial release, and neuromuscular re-patterning, I help you break those holding patterns at the source. We start where you are—safety first. My goal is to reconnect you with your body at a pace that feels right, so you can take a full breath, feel your boundaries, and find rest that actually lasts.Whether you're navigating chronic pain, an old injury, trauma around touch, dysphoria, or the physical toll of systemic stress, we'll work together to create new patterns of movement and awareness. Each session begins with a centering practice and unfolds from there—addressing what your body is actually asking for.

The work I do is particularly designed for folks who:

A Note on Frameworks

My work draws from structural integration, pain gate theory, trauma-informed care, Hakomi, yoga, and many other scientific and wisdom traditions. During your session, it's up to you how much we stay in evidence-based territory and how much we extend into other frameworks and tools—runes, tarot, whatever works for you. While staying grounded in the evidence, we can make room for the mystery too. Read more about my frameworks, as well as my thoughts on pseudoscience, evidence, and making spaces for different perspectives here

• Book A Session or Consultation
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Structural Integration Ten Series

Structural Integration Ten Series

Please note that due to the commitment level involved in a Structural Integration ten series, I don't offer this service to first-time clients. Book a session of regular somatic bodywork with me first before proceeding with SI.Developed by Dr. Ida Rolf and arising out of the lineage of somatics (or, as I practice it, "The West's" attempt to reckon with its recent centuries of chronic and prolific personal, communal, and cultural disembodiment), Structural Integration at its core seeks to help you come into a closer, more integrated, and more free relationship with your body through contacting all parts of the body via ten series of targeted bodywork.We begin with three foundational sessions focused on the breath, the lower legs, and the capacity for reach. We then move into three deeper core sessions focused on the pelvic floor, the abdomen, the back, and the neck / face / facial orifices. We end with three free form "integration" sessions focused on helping you solidify and metabolize the work that we did throughout your body.The ten series can be used as a chance to explore and celebrate your body, as an opportunity to engage with and move through issues or traumas surrounding touch, or as a time of deep reflection and reorganization of personal energy.Structural Integration has, historically, subscribed to the heavy-handed "no pain, no gain" approach to bodywork. It is also classified as a pseudoscience in part because of its ideas about fascial molding. My approach to Structural Integration emphasizes gentle, deep, slow touch; mapping embodied boundaries; and nervous system regulation.If you are interested in ten series of Structural Integration with me, you can set up a consultation to learn more.

Bodywork FAQs

Are you a mental health therapist / do you offer psychotherapy?
No to both!
I am not a licensed psychotherapist, and I do not provide psychotherapy to clients. However, I do think that the kind of awareness-oriented somatic bodywork I offer can be very complementary to the work that is done with a skilled psychotherapist (or an elder, spiritual advisor, etc), and vice versa. In fact, I recommend that clients who come to me for bodywork also be in some kind of therapy for extra support. If you are not seeing a psychotherapist but would like to be and want some recommendations feel free to contact me.

What is Somatics
Somatics is a tradition developed by thinkers like Wilhelm Reich, author of The Mass Psychology of Fascism. It arose in "The West" as a response to the chronic disembodiment and alienation from self, body, and community found in our context. It uses a variety of body and awareness-based tools to try and bridge spaces of disconnection and to re-forge a sense of fluid integration between mind and body.

Do you take insurance?
Maybe. I'm working on it. Send me your deets and we can see.

Will you massage me with your clothes off and/or perform other sexual services?
Nope.
The work that happens at An Abhainn is currently non-sexual in nature, for legal and ethical reasons. While it is perfectly normal and natural for many people to experience sexual feelings and physiological reactions during bodywork, acting on these feelings is not acceptable in this context and would be a violation that would result in a severance of our relationship.
Inquiries of a sexual nature will not be considered or responded to, and any potential clients who make such inquiries will be refused service at Abhainn Healing Arts. (Please note that requests to work intentionally with sexual trauma are perfectly fine and would not result in a ban.) Sexual misconduct will not be tolerated in my practice.

embodied movement

Currently on hiatus. If you're interested in attending a class with me, contact me and I'll be sure to let you know when they start up again~~~

These classes seek to help you connect with yourself so you can connect with others (and maybe even start to blur those lines). To help you calm down, relax, feel your feelings, get in touch with your boundaries, and befriend yourself and your life so that you have the space and integrity needed to be of service to the world.The embodied movement I teach is rooted in disability justice and accessibility: this means that everything we do is opt-in and designed with flexibility in mind so that almost anybody in any body can get something helpful out of the practice.
I also hold a weight-neutral space, meaning that the goal of our work isn't to lose weight, we don't uphold diet culture, and we aim to honor and work with our bodies, not critique and pathologize them.

Some Resources for Learning More

Resources and Readings

trade with me!

Things are hard out there, folks, and looking to get harder.
Right now we need each other more than ever.
If you think you would benefit from working with me, but the cost is beyond what you can afford right now, we might be able to work out a trade!In particular, I feel open to trading anything that I do for:
-bike mechanic services
-auto parts (as needed)
-groceries and cooked gluten free/pork free meals
-tailoring and sewing services
-baskets and other useful crafts
-spa time
-cool classes (currently interested in crafts like basketry and bow-making, as well as birding, sailing, fishing, plant identification, foraging, and animal tracking / hunting / processing)
-computer and tech support
-carpentry and building support
-free admittance to events / plays / movies
- house sitting services
-bodywork from trained / licensed practitioners (I’m mostly interested in receiving slower compressive/stretching styles of work like thai, myofascial, craniosacral, and gentle SI)
-herbalist and acupuncture services
-potentially something cool you have access to / know how to do that I haven't thought of yet.Contact me if you wanna trade something, and we'll see what we can work out.

Trauma-Informed Care

The term “trauma-informed” nods to the understanding that trauma (personal, historic, generational, societal) impacts our relationships with our bodies, our health, our communities, our healthcare providers, our ability to feel safe and calm, and our ability to heal and feel better. The word "trauma" here is referring to any event or series of events that a person struggles to process and integrate: this can be events from childhood or adulthood, things one directly experienced, things one has witnessed others experiencing, etc. People often feel the impacts of trauma through experiences like numbness, anxiety, anger, loneliness, relational dysfunction, addiction, physical pain, fatigue, hyper-vigilance, frightening alternate realities, and many other feelings and coping strategies.In all my work, I seek to offer a space where we acknowledge that trauma, in one form or another, is in the room with us. Knowing this, we do our best to work at the pace of felt safety, not pushing past our embodied boundaries. We seek to cultivate a space where we invite ourselves, at our own pace and in our own time, to move toward embodiment and agency and away from chronic numbness, dissociation, and fear. In bodywork sessions, this can look like slowing down and not pushing through embodied boundaries to "do a massage" in the way we might have been taught massage is supposed to look.Finally, in the spirit of trauma-informed care, I aim hold a space that acknowledges and works to minimize the power dynamic that arises between practitioners and clients in health care settings. In our session, I will seek to hold myself as an advisor and collaborator, not an authority, and I ask that you work to see yourself as the authority on your own body and to take ownership of your session.

Contact

• Email
• Phone
• Google Maps Local Guides

Appointment Booked!I look forward to seeing you soon.Go raibh maith agat
(Thank You)

Message sent!
Stay tuned for more.Go raibh maith agat
(Thank You)

Testimonials and Reviews

To see more reviews, check out my google listing.

community conflict mediation

• book a free consultation

Not Court-Adjacent, Court-Mandated, Arbitration, or Psychotherapy

I am not a licensed psychotherapist and I do NOT provide arbitration services or court-adjacent mediation at this time (business contracts, housing, divorces, small claims, etc.). For ongoing relationship therapy or legal arbitration, see my referrals below. The work that I do is specifically for friends, family members, partners, neighbors, and community members experiencing relational ruptures who want a collaborative, equity-informed path forward, outside of the court system.

More on my background and approach

Conflict is normal, natural, and potentially healthy.

But when you're entangled in conflict, sympathetic nervous system arousal—fight/flight/freeze—can make reflection, connection, and reason physiologically inaccessible. You end up saying things you regret, cycling through painful patterns, or withdrawing completely. Most people try to "talk it out," but when nervous systems are dysregulated, talk alone doesn't reach the root. We've all been there.

My Community Conflict Mediation goes deeper than standard conversation.

Using trauma-informed somatic practices, insight methods, deep listening, rigorous conflict and power analysis, unflinching honesty, and decolonial anthropological frameworks, I help you navigate conflict in a way that preserves both your health and your relationships. We don't avoid the hard stuff—we use it. When held well, conflict opens space for greater intimacy, reveals the edges of your comfort zone, and clarifies your values. Each session begins with centering and unfolds from there, addressing what your body and relationship actually need.

My office

2031 SE Belmont Street Portland, Oregon 97214

• Email
• Phone
• Google Maps Local Guides

Accessibiliy Snapshot

More Accessibility Details

Covid
While I do not require masks in my private office, the building I work out of is a health collective that requires masks in the common areas of the building and provides them at the front door. I will ask you about your masking preferences when you book and let you take the lead from there in terms of masking in my office. I am willing to mask for any client who wants or needs this. I keep an air purifier in my office.Physical and Sensory Accessibility
I work out of an office that is low-scent, low-lit, and wheelchair accessible. There may be scents from botanicals and botanical components present on any given day. For seating, I provide armless chairs with a 400lb weight capacity as well as cushions on the floor. I do bodywork off of a futon mat on the floor: if this won't work for your body, contact me and we can find an alternative arrangement.Trauma-Informed Care
I start with a consultation call and extensive intake process for every new client. I'll ask you about your goals, desires, things that can upset you, and how to best support you when you're stressed. We'll work directly with your bodies boundaries and responses as they arise. My goal is to keep you in touch with your body during our time together and to help you have experiences you can integrate.Other things
As with most things, I'm open to feedback re// accessibility. If you see something important that's missing please let me know!

Photo Gallery

Pseudoscience and Evidence-Based Practice

Many of us are aware that the field of massage therapy is rife with pseudoscience: from debunked claims about cerebrospinal fluid blockages in Craniosacral work to the ideas about manual fascial stretching and realignment present in Structural Integration (my original training, which is generally considered a pseudoscience by those who care about such things), and many more.Now, many of these nominally pseudoscientific therapies still consistently outperform placebos in the literature. One of the pivotal questions emerging in the manual therapy world over the past few decades revolves around how we account for real clinical effects when the proposed mechanistic explanations are biologically implausible.
Over my decade of clinical practice, I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t need to endorse every theoretical claim to use a tool. If gentle manual work helps someone shift out of chronic sympathetic arousal, that’s physiologically real and experientially valuable regardless of how I may or may not understand the causal mechanism.
When it comes to manual therapy, pseudoscientific explanations for phenomena are frequently simply outdated ones. Many of these therapies are truly ancient (e.g. craniosacral therapy’s typically unacknowledged roots among the Cherokee/Tsalagi people, who have had their own epistemic traditions and explanations for describing the efficacy of their therapies), and ideas about manual fascial stretching might have been more understandable in the early twentieth century when the words “neuromuscular” or “nociplastic” hadn’t even been invented. For many of these therapies, more plausible causal mechanisms have emerged and continue to do so at the pace of new research. Of course, It’s worth mentioning here that manual therapy tends to suffer from a lack of fresh research because there’s much less money to be made from studying a massage technique than from investigating other health interventions like a new drug formulation.While I practice work that is consistent with styles and traditions of manual therapy often associated with psuedoscience, like the aforementioned craniosacral therapy and structural integration, my usage of these traditions is rooted in recent research and available evidence as much as it is also rooted in anecdote, tradition, and lineage. Below, for the excessively curious, I’ll highlight some pieces of the evidence profile that informs my work.

Fascial Glide

refers to the ability of fascial layers to slide smoothly against each other during movement. “Fascial restriction” or “adhesion” means the gliding has become impaired.Historically many manual therapists, including structural integration practitioners, believed that they could manually stretch and mold fascia and that this fascial manipulation accounted for the clinically significant improvements in movement, posture, and pain e they saw from working with their patients. This idea has been thoroughly debunked and we, as manual therapists, need to stop telling our clients that we’re stretching or molding their fascia: it would take almost two tons of force to achieve a 1% lengthening of this type of tissue (Chaudry 2008). No manual therapist is exerting that kind of force on their clients, and it would cause catastrophic musculoskeletal harm if they did.So what’s actually happening?Enter fascial glide. Fascia isn’t one sheet—it’s multiple layers with liquid in between: skin, superficial fascia, fascial planes, hyaluronan, and deep fascia. Hyaluronan is a viscous gel that acts as lubrication. It allows the layers of fascia to slide against one another and its consistency determines how easily these layers glide. When therapists feel like the fascia is moving or stretching, we’re probably feeling a combination of this glide and muscular responses.Why does glide change or improve in response to manual therapy? A clear answer to this question is still in the works, but for now a few explanations are plausible and not mutually exclusive. One is neurological modulation wherein pressure results in mechanoreceptor activation that reduces motor output (guarding, tone) and actives the parasympathetic nervous system (more on that below), meaning that the release is actually a muscular phenomenon wherein the nervous system reduces muscle tone. Another explanation holds that the hyaluranon becomes more fluid when agitated (ground substance fluidity or the “thixotropic” effect), resulting in better glide and that soft tissue deformation allows for a “creep” effect where the tissue slowly expands before bouncing back.

In my years of clinical practice I have found it true that many of us have a misconception regarding what pain is, how to effectively manage it, and how to not inadvertently make it worse. Pain science is an entire vast field of study, and I’ll mention a few pieces of that vast field further below. But foundational to this science are the three (as of 2017) functional categories of pain: nociceptive (pain from actual or threatened damage to non-neural tissue), neuropathic (pain from nerve damage), and-- most recently-- nociplastic (pain with no direct physical cause often resulting from a process called “central sensitization. Examples include fibromyalgia, chronic tension headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic back pain without clear pathology).While massage and manual therapy can and do play a role in managing all of these types of pain, nociplastic pain management is where these methods truly shine. I will add here that the “no pain no gain” approach people frequently take to massage therapy is exactly the opposite of what will therapeutically benefit a person experiencing significant nociplastic pain: and utilizing this approach in response to the other types of pain— in my clinical experience— seems to lead more often to injury and exacerbation than to resolution of the underlying issues. It’s also worth pointing out here than many of the pain types listed in the “nociplastic” category are traditionally feminized presentations and were often nested under the label “hysteria:” funding for research involving these types of pain is still much more scant than funding for other types of pain.The gate control theory of painbasically boils down to: rub it and it feels better, even if you haven’t resolved the underlying issue. This is one reason why a massage can resolve pain temporarily, only to have it creep back minutes to hours later— which is not to entirely denigrate massage therapy here, because gating pain can be a completely reasonable part of a pain management plan. Example: When you stub your toe, your first instinct is to rub it. Why? Because the large-diameter A-β fibers carrying touch/pressure signals fire faster than the slower A-δ/C pain fibers. Activating these “large fibers” closes the gate, blocking or reducing the pain signal before it reaches conscious awareness.Endorphin-mediated analgesiadescribes the “hurts so good” feeling that people often chase via deep manual therapy. Conditioned pain modulation, wherein the pain felt from one stimulus inhibits perception of pain from another, can also play a role here. While there is some evidence that this kind of deep tissue therapy performs better than no treatment in regard to pain reduction (Law et.al. 2008), the risk of harm more than outweighs the benefit.While I’m on my soapbox, a few choice quotes:“Massage doesn’t have to be painful to be therapeutic.” (Harvard Health 2014)“There is no clear justification for painfully intense ‘deep tissue’ massage, and it’s actually hazardous to many patients” (Paul Ingraham/PainScience.com 2025) (I’m going to spend my entire career hollering this into the void)“Massage reduces pain regardless of pressure preference (when matched to client tolerance” (Mak 2024)In case I’m not being clear enough: painful manual therapy re-enforces patterns of tension blunts capacity for the experience of subtle interoception that is so much more transformative and healing to people’s tension patterns than the feel-good high that lasts a few hours after a painful massage triggers endorphin-mediated analgesia.Per lessons learned from the field of somatics, when we work with your body by working together to keep your session as deep as you want, but relaxing and non-painful, you’re actively participating in a neuromuscular reeducation process that allows your body to release and re-pattern its relationship to pain and tension. In fact, ultimately, it’s often the case that we will be able to do deeper work in the long run because we’ve moved at the pace of your body, provided non-nociceptive inputs that can be integrated by your neuromuscular system, and built embodied trust. This, as opposed to fighting your body with massage that produces pain and tension and triggers the release of endorphins and ultimately creates more layers of tension and pain in the long run. When the nervous system isn’t bracing against anticipated pain, you can achieve deeper physiological effects without actually applying more force.So all y’all need to stop asking me to grind you into paste and go find a dominatrix instead. No shame or shade to the masochistic among us, but I’m actually not a meat grinder and you want a different kind of therapy than the one I’m offering. But also: how did our relationships to our bodies become so fractured that we equate pain with therapeutic value?Emotional regulation and muscular tone are bidirectionally linked.Therapeutic Alliance, Narrative Reauthoring, and Parasympathetic ActivationTherapeutic alliance describes the feelings of trust, collaboration, and attunement between practitioners and their clients. When clients feel more therapeutic alliance with their providers, they consistently experience more satisfaction and more improvement in symptoms. Solid therapeutic alliance can support clients with “narrative reauthoring” i.e. moving from narratives like “I have a bad back” to narratives like “I can learn how to build relationship with my back to reduce my tension and pain.” Therapeutic alliance is more predictive of positive outcomes than any specific modality or technical approach. Ruptures in or failure to adequately establish therapeutic alliance are linked to client dropout and poor outcomes.“The quality of the client-therapist alliance is a consistent predictor of positive clinical outcome independent of the variety of therapy approaches and outcome measures.”(Flückiger et al. 2018)Another result of therapeutic alliance is parasympathetic activation (rest/digest). Your stress levels go down. Your body relaxes. Curiosity can flourish and learning can happen in a way that’s much more difficult during sympathetic arousal (fight/flight/freeze states). Chronic tension patterns and nociplastic pain often come hand in hand with chronic sympathetic arousal.The Window of ToleranceThis concept describes the states of sympathetic activation, but it also points to some important context: surrounding the “window of tolerance” are sympathetic nervous system states of hyper- (fearfulness, jitters, panic attacks) and hypo-arousal (dissociation). Emotional regulation and muscular tone are bidirectionally linked. When I work with clients my goal is to keep them in the window of tolerance, or to bring them there if they chronically live outside it. I encourage them to notice their body’s boundaries and respond to resistance instead of overriding it (which, frankly, can be very difficult to do because so many people are so deeply trained to override the signals of their own bodies.) in order to build interoceptive capacity and reduce dissociative responses. Encouraging clients to build alliance with their own bodies in this way also contributes to a sense of autonomy, a greater capacity for relaxation, a decrease in threat response, injury prevention, and better tolerance toward stimuli. In fact, I’ve noticed that clients who are responsive to their own pain signals can often take significantly deeper pressure without pain than the vast majority of painful deep tissue massage lovers.I’ve had many clients tell me that they had never had anyone else work on tender parts of their body in a way that wasn’t painful. This isn’t a brag about my skill as much as it is an indictment of how we as manual therapists sometimes further alienate our clients from their bodies and contribute to the problematic, untrue, and deeply unfortunate ideas our clients have about the inherent therapeutic value of pain.

Neurological Modulation- The release is a muscular phenomenon wherein the nervous system is what reduces muscle tone.

Pain Studies

The Gate Control Theory of Pain