the horizon leans forward,

offering you space to place new steps of change.

—Maya Angelou, “On the Pulse of Morning”

a portal into connection*

So many of us wait for a direct invitation to share our story. Whether this means touching into big feelings, approaching and integrating change, exploring family and ancestry, or tugging at life’s most existential questions. Therapy is an invitation to go there.

Somatic Therapy is noticing your body’s response to this invitation, and engaging accordingly….

  • I am essentially guided by practices that nourish the nervous system and bring about a greater sense of agency and care when responding to stress, be it personal, socio-cultural or ecological. Through somatic therapy, you will:

    1) learn to identify your body’s natural and learned reactions to stress and threat.

    What happens when you become stressed or sense danger? Do you tense up? shut down? begin to tremble? float away?…

    2) begin to implement practices - generally body- and earth-based - that can bring about a state of relief and connection.

    how might you take in more nourishment though breath, movement, gesture, and other here-and-now sensory input?

    This approach is paired with traditional talk therapy to deepen awareness and insight while fortifying the body-mind connection for meeting life at it’s lowest and fullest points.

  • Somatic therapy normalizes and celebrates working at the pace of each body’s unique capacity to metabolize, feel and ultimately heal from the impacts of acute and chronic stress. This must take into account the ways in which social privileges and marginalizations, traumatic experiences and cultural/ecological factors in their many expressions and intersections, shape our nervous system, and therefore our lived experience.

about hannah

I hold our relationship as our strongest asset to this work. When we meet, we will engage in ways that first and foremost build trust. Sometimes this will entail weaving in parts of myself that feels, remembers, imagines, and heals alongside you, allowing us to relate across our shared humanity.

work with me

  • I am a mother, a movement artist, a land steward, a mestiza*, a dog AND cat person….

    I find regular connection in raising a young human, living multi-generationally, attuning to the birds, the weather, the shifting of seasons, exploring the movement arts—specifically martial arts and improvised dance—, and spending extended time among the Sonoma coastal mountains.

    I am a multi-cultural white person with Ashkenazi, Mexican and western-European ancestry. I am a cis*-gendered queer woman. I am married. I am a fellow messy human doing my best to navigate the pains and the pleasures, the injustices and the generosities, of our shared planet and co-created realities.

    Mindful awareness, radical self-compassion* and co-liberation* are at the core of both my personal growth journey and professional therapy practice. I have pursued further specialization in couple therapy, polyvagal-informed* -therapy, embodiment*, and earth-intimacy*. You can view a more complete list of my experience below. 

  • California Institute of Integral Studies - Master of Counseling Psychology with focus in somatic studies

    Lewis & Clark College - BA in Foreign Language and Literature (Spanish & French), BA in Psychology

    Center for Somatic Psychotherapy

    Seeds of Awareness Holistic Counseling Center, Oakland

    Oakland International High School

    DOT Center Oakland

    PACT Couple Therapy, Level 1 certification

    School for Body-Mind Centering, Engaging self and other through embodiment

    School for Body-Mind Centering, Embodied touch as transformative practice

    Process-Oriented Psychology, Deep democracy and relativity for inner & world conflict

    Petaluma Academy of Martial Arts, black belt recipient (2006)

    Restorative Practices Alliance, cohort participant and curator

    Weaving Earth, ATTUNE cohort participant (currently enrolled)

  • * A portal into connection (video) - filmed on the ancestral lands of the Kashia Pomo among what we know as the Sonoma coastal range. Written and narrated by Hannah Rosales, music by Evan Tenenbaum.

    *Cis- a shortening for ‘cisgender’, which is someone whose gender identity corresponds with the sex they were assigned at birth.

    * Co-liberation - a practice captured in Fannie Lou Hamer’s declaration, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free,” inviting us into the recognition that we can not fully heal ourselves without striving to heal all beings on earth.

    * Earth-intimacy - “a felt sense of interrelationship with the living planet all around us” - a core area of study and practice through Weaving Earth relational education (www.weavingearth.org)

    * Embodiment - Experiential study through movement, touch, voice and mind that enhances one’s awareness, perception and consciousness in relationship to the world around us (www.bodymindcentering.com)

    * First-generation - refers to a person born and/or raised in the U.S. to immigrant parents.

    * Latine - often used interchangeably with ‘Latinx’ to refer to either a group of people of multiple genders and of Latin descent or one person who identifies as gender non-binary and is of Latin descent. Some say that ‘Latine” is more easily pronounced among Spanish speakers, though always best to refer to individual discretion.

    * Mestiza - referring to the work of Gloria E. Anzaldúa (Book: Borderlands/La Frontera: the New Mestiza) , a term to describe the experience of the growing population who must learn to navigate and abide by two or more sets of cultural expectations. Mestiza/o is used more broadly to describe someone of mixed indigenous and foreign descent.

    * Polyvagal-informed - referring to Polyvagal Theory (PVT), developed by Stephen Porges, describes how the brain’s unconscious sense of safety or danger impacts emotions and behavior. PVT offers a map for improving one’s ability to notice and regulate emotions in order to to optimize one’s capacity for connection.

    * Queer - a reclaimed umbrella term for people whose sexual orientation and/or gender identity are not heterosexual and/or cisgender.

    * Radical self-compassion - blending the teachings of activist/author Sonya Renee Taylor (Book: The body is not an apology) and meditation teacher Tara Brach (www.tarabrach.com) which guide us toward loosening the grip of negative emotions and limiting beliefs and returning to the root of our relationship to ourselves, which is Love. This practice allows us to love our bodies in a way that transforms how we understand and love the bodies of others,