Being Smart Has Not Fixed This
You are very smart, and it has not helped. You have read about the vagus nerve. You probably understand your own cortisol better than your doctor does. You can explain, in complete sentences and with footnotes, exactly why you are exhausted. Your shoulders are still up around your ears. Here is the part no one with a graduate degree wants to hear. Your nervous system does not read. It does not care how much you understand about stress, and it will not stand down because you finally grasped the concept. It responds to one thing, which is safety, the deep physical kind it can feel in the body, and it only trusts that after enough time has passed to prove it is real. That is the whole reason somatic tantra runs for hours instead of the standard clinical fifty minutes.
I work with people who run companies, operate on patients, argue cases, and build the technology the rest of us complain about. They are not soft, and they do not arrive believing any of this. They show up skeptical, a little tired around the eyes, wondering if they have made a mistake. Most of them are not broken, and none of them need to be fixed. They are after the one thing their lives quietly stopped permitting, which is a few hours where the body is safe enough to set its weapons down. What happens once it does is the actual subject here, and it is stranger and more interesting than the wellness industry admits.
About forty minutes in, something shifts that most people never get to witness in themselves. The breath drops lower into the belly on its own. The jaw, which has been clenched for often years, softens by a millimeter. The shoulders come down from around the ears where they had set up permanent residence and started paying rent. Nothing looks dramatic from the outside. Inside, a nervous system is finally doing the one thing it has not been allowed to do in a very long time, which is stop bracing. That quiet letting go is the doorway this entire practice is built around.
Sometimes what surfaces is pure relief, a rest so deep the person cannot find a word for it. Sometimes old grief shows up uninvited and a few tears arrive with no story attached, and that is welcome too. Sometimes joy comes back after a long time away and the person laughs at how foreign it feels. Sometimes nothing emotional happens at all and the whole session is rest, and that is complete, and I mean that with everything in me. I hold every one of these outcomes as equal, because they are. My only real job is to build the conditions where your body can do what it already knows how to do the instant it believes it finally has permission.
Let Me Clear Up What Tantra Actually Is Before We Go Further
If the word tantra made you brace a little, I get it, and I want to take that off the table right now. The version of tantra that gets sold in the culture is a cartoon. Real tantra, the tradition it comes from, is a body-centered path, not a bedroom trick. Its whole premise is that the body is not an obstacle to a meaningful life but a doorway into one. It emphasizes presence, breath, attention, slowness, and a genuine reverence for physical experience. Pleasure is treated as information and as a natural language of a regulated body, not as a performance to grade yourself on.
I am not going to pretend that people in ancient India were secretly running fMRI brain scan studies. They were not. What I will tell you is that the practices they refined over centuries, the slowing down, the conscious breath, the attention to sensation, the insistence on presence, line up remarkably well with what modern neuroscience now says helps a human nervous system settle. That overlap is the reason I built my practice where I did, at the intersection of tantra, somatic healing, and skilled bodywork. You do not need to believe anything mystical to benefit from this work. You need a body and a willingness to slow down inside it. That is genuinely the entire spiritual prerequisite.
Your Nervous System Is Asking One Question All Day Long
Underneath your thoughts, underneath your to-do list, underneath the version of you that answers emails at eleven at night, your nervous system is running one continuous background question. Am I safe. It asks this every second, and it answers below the level of your awareness, reading tone of voice, facial expression, posture, and a hundred cues you never consciously register. Stephen Porges gave this automatic threat-and-safety scanning a name, neuroception, and it is a useful way to understand why you can walk into a room and feel your guard go up or come down for no reason you could explain out loud.
The larger theory this idea comes from, polyvagal theory, has genuinely useful clinical language, and it also has anatomical and evolutionary claims that a good number of researchers now actively dispute. I use the language because it describes real experience well, not because every detail of the model is settled fact. What is not in serious dispute is the practical part. Warm presence, a calm voice, unhurried attention, and non-threatening touch reliably shift a body toward its rest-and-restore state, and you can measure that shift in the data. Your body reads safety before your mind does. Everything I do in a session is built around giving your nervous system enough real evidence of safety that it finally believes it.
This is also why I am particular about the room itself. Long before any bodywork begins, your body is already reading the environment for cues, the quality of the light, the temperature, the sound, the pace of my voice, whether the person in front of you seems rushed or fully present. I design every one of those details on purpose, because they are not decoration. They are part of the safety signal your body reads the moment it walks in, and they keep speaking to it while you settle. A calm room is doing real regulatory work before I have laid a single hand on you.
You Cannot Talk Your Body Into Trusting Something
Here is the part that frustrates high achievers more than anything else. You cannot think your way into relaxation. You have probably already tried. You have read the books, downloaded the app, listened to the podcast about the vagus nerve, and understood every word of it, and your shoulders are still up around your ears. Understanding safety and experiencing safety are two entirely different events in the body, and only one of them actually changes anything.
The reason is structural. The parts of your brain that track danger do not speak English. They do not respond to a well-reasoned argument that the meeting went fine and you are not actually being chased by a predator. They respond to experience, to repetition, to evidence gathered slowly over time. A body that has spent years in low-grade fight-or-flight has learned to stay ready, and it will not stand down because you told it to. It stands down when it is shown, again and again, in real time, that it can. This is why a session cannot be rushed and why talking about the problem, as valuable as that is, often leaves the body exactly where it started. The body needs a felt experience, not a better explanation.
Why Fifty Minutes Was Never Going to Be Enough
Think about what you are carrying when you first walk in. You have got the drive over, the parking, the three things you forgot to send, the relationship thing you have not dealt with, the performance pressure you wear like a second skin. You are still cognitively active, still scanning, still half at work. That is not a personal failing. That is a nervous system doing its job well after the job has ended for the day.
A body in that state needs real time before it shifts gears. The first stretch of any real session is not the deep work. It is orientation. It is settling, breathing, getting used to the room, getting used to me, and letting the uncertainty of something new have somewhere to land. Your protective tension is not a defect to be overridden. It is intelligence. Muscular guarding, hypervigilance, the holding patterns you carry in your neck and hips, all of it developed for good reasons at some point in your life. The body is not broken. It adapted. Adaptation that smart deserves respect, and respect takes time.
A standard hour was built for a different purpose. By the time a stressed nervous system has actually begun to downshift, the clock in a short appointment is already telling everyone to wrap up. You get walked to the edge of something and then handed your keys. My sessions run three to four hours for exactly this reason. The length is not a luxury add-on or a marketing flourish. It is the amount of time a real human body tends to need to arrive, soften, do meaningful work, and come all the way back before stepping into traffic.
What Actually Happens When the Body Finally Lets Go
Once safety is established and the body believes it, a cascade begins, and it is beautiful to witness. The breath slows on its own without anyone coaching it. Muscle tone decreases. The small muscles of the face let go, which is one of the most reliable signs that someone has crossed over. Attention turns inward. Time gets strange, in the good way, where you lose track of it entirely. The body starts to feel heavier and more present at the same time. This is the beginning of what the tradition calls surrender, and I want to correct one thing about that word right away. Surrender here is not collapse or submission. It is an active, willing release of the effort it takes to stay armored. It is work, and it is a skill, and most people are out of practice.
Slow, attentive, respectful touch is doing something specific in this process. Your skin contains specialized nerve fibers, C-tactile afferents, that respond to gentle stroking at roughly the speed of a caress, and they route to the parts of the brain involved in emotional and bodily awareness rather than the parts that simply register pressure. This is the neurological reason a slow, kind hand feels so different from a brisk clinical rub. It is also why touch at this pace can quietly increase your awareness of your own internal state, an ability called interoception that tends to get muffled by chronic stress and that research shows can genuinely be retrained. Add slow breathing, which is one of the most reliable low-risk ways we have to nudge the body toward its calm state, and you have a set of simple ingredients with real evidence behind them. None of this is magic. It is physiology, given enough time to actually take effect.
Something shifts in the mind during this process too, not only in the body. The busy inner narrator, the one running commentary and rehearsing conversations and keeping score, tends to quiet down. Contemplative and body-focused practices have been shown to reduce activity in the brain network responsible for that self-referential chatter, the same circuitry involved in rumination. In plain terms, the part of you that never stops narrating finally takes a break. People often describe this as the first real silence they have had inside their own head in months. That silence is not empty. It is spacious, and a great deal can happen inside it.
Why the Feelings Show Up Right When You Relax
People are often surprised, sometimes alarmed, when emotion arrives during deep relaxation rather than during stress. It seems backward. It is not. A nervous system in survival mode is busy, and it will suppress a great deal in order to keep you functional. That is a feature, not a bug, and it is why you can white-knuckle through a hard season and only fall apart once the danger has passed. As genuine safety increases, the system gains the bandwidth to let material surface that it had been holding down, sometimes for years.
There is a lot of loose talk in the wellness world about trauma being stored in the body, and the real version is more interesting than the slogan. It is not that memories live literally inside your muscles like files in a cabinet. What is well supported is that difficult experience leaves real imprints on the body’s systems, in autonomic patterns, in posture and guarding, in how accurately you can even sense your own insides. Chronic suppression of emotion carries a genuine physiological cost over time, and allowing safe expression tends to reduce that strain, even though the moment of release can feel intense. There is also a real mechanism, memory reconsolidation, by which an old emotional pattern can actually be updated rather than merely managed, when it is reactivated inside a new and contradictory experience of safety. I am not promising you a breakthrough. I am telling you the conditions under which the body sometimes does its own deep housekeeping, and why those conditions are hard to find in ordinary life.
The Part Everyone Skips: Finishing What You Started
This is the section I care about most, and it is the one the wellness industry gets most wrong. A lot of people spend years opening painful material and almost no time completing it. They activate something difficult, they touch the edge of it, and then the appointment ends, or the day intrudes, and they walk back into their life carrying an open wound with nowhere to close it. Doing that repeatedly does not heal a nervous system. It teaches it that going near the hard stuff means getting left there.
There is a useful idea from trauma work, the window of tolerance, describing the zone of arousal where a person can stay present and actually integrate an experience rather than getting flooded or shutting down. Good work keeps you near the edges of that window without shoving you out of it, and then, crucially, brings you back to center before you leave. This is where extended time stops being a nicety and becomes the whole point. A long session has room to move toward activation and then all the way back to regulation, to let the intensity rise and genuinely settle, to make sure you walk out grounded rather than raw. Ending a session in a regulated state is not an afterthought in my work. It is the difference between an experience that lands and an experience that leaves you dysregulated in your car.
Presence Is the Actual Technology
People sometimes assume the tools are what make this work potent, the sound bed, the warmth, the aromatics. Those things help, and I will describe them. The actual active ingredient is something simpler and much harder to fake. It is a regulated human being paying complete, unhurried, non-judgmental attention to you. Across decades of psychotherapy research, the single most consistent predictor of whether an approach helps is not the specific technique. It is the quality of the relationship, the sense of being genuinely met. That finding holds across method after method, which tells you something profound about what human beings actually need in order to change.
The mechanism has a name I like, co-regulation. Your nervous system does not settle in isolation. It settles in the presence of another nervous system that is already calm. A steady, grounded presence gives your body something to synchronize with, a reference point for what safety feels like. You will hear people credit oxytocin for this, the so-called bonding chemical, and the real story is more nuanced than that headline. Oxytocin is involved in trust and connection, and it is not a simple love potion that heals on contact. What I can tell you plainly is that safe, attuned, relational presence measurably buffers the body’s stress response, and that repeated experiences of exactly that kind of presence can, over time, shift a person toward a more secure baseline. Healing tends to happen inside relationship, not because someone hands you advice, but because a steadier system helps stabilize your own.
Rest Is Not the Opposite of Healing, Especially for You
I work with a lot of people who are very good at their lives. Founders, executives, scientists, doctors, artists, the kind of people who solve hard problems for a living and rarely stop moving. If that is you, I want to say something you may need to hear from someone who is not going to flatter you. For many high performers, rest itself has become unfamiliar, even a little threatening. Receiving feels harder than giving. Stillness feels like something is wrong. You have optimized yourself into a person who is superb at output and out of practice at simply being cared for.
For a person like that, rest is not a break from the healing. Rest is the healing. Learning what it feels like to receive without earning it, to be present without producing anything, to let another person tend to you while you do absolutely nothing useful, is genuinely corrective for a nervous system that has forgotten how. There is good evidence that unhurried, attentive bodywork reliably reduces anxiety and lifts mood, though the popular claim about massage dramatically lowering your stress hormones is weaker than the marketing suggests. I would rather tell you the true and modest version than sell you the shiny one. The true version is still remarkable. A few hours of genuine, skilled, undemanding care can teach a driven person something their body forgot it was allowed to know.
Receiving is a skill, and like any skill it weakens without practice. The people I work with are often masters of giving, to their teams, their families, their patients, their companies, and near strangers to the experience of being genuinely given to. I have watched a brilliant, composed person lie down and have no idea what to do with the simple fact of being cared for, because there is no task in it, nothing to manage, nothing to win. Relearning how to let care actually land is one of the quietest and most important things this work offers, and it does not stay in the room. People tell me they receive differently everywhere afterward.
Weekly Therapy and an Immersion Are Not the Same Tool
I want to be clear that I am not here to talk you out of therapy. I have my own therapist, I study several therapeutic frameworks continuously, and I send people to good ones all the time. I think weekly sessions are valuable for a great many things. A weekly hour is excellent for insight, for narrative, for steady maintenance, for having a consistent person who knows your story. It runs primarily through language and cognition, and it is often bounded by the clock in a way that keeps the work in the thinking mind. That is a real strength for certain kinds of work and a real limitation for others.
An extended immersion is a different instrument entirely. It engages cognitive clarity and emotional access and the body all at once, inside a single unbroken container, with enough time for something to actually arrive, unfold, and complete. One is not better than the other. They do different jobs. If your challenge is one your body already understands and your mind has been circling for years, there is a decent chance the missing ingredient was never another conversation. It was time, safety, and touch, arranged so your body could finally join the discussion. The research on extended formats is still developing, and I will not overstate it, but the consistent pattern across contemplative and therapeutic work is that depth tends to emerge after enough time in safety, not in the first few minutes.
What I Actually Built and Why It Takes Three to Four Hours
Everything I have described is why my signature work, the Somatic Tantra Immersion, is structured the way it is. This is my original methodology, developed over more than two decades of hands-on practice and thousands of sessions, and it did not come from a marketing meeting. It came from noticing, over and over, that people simply went deeper when they had enough time, and building a container worthy of that observation.
A session follows a consistent arc while staying completely responsive to you in real time. We begin with a short arrival and grounding, because settling in is not a formality, it is where safety starts. We move into grounding and breath to help the body downshift. Then comes extended, slow, attentive full-body bodywork, guided by pacing and attunement rather than a checklist. As the nervous system settles, there is room for whatever wants to soften, whether that is deep relaxation, emotional release, or simply a profound sense of connection and openness. Toward the end, you can rest on a FDA approved class one medical device using the vibroacoustic sound bed, which lets you feel sound and vibration through the whole body, to support integration. We close with time to ground, shower, and transition slowly, so you leave settled rather than cracked open. Depending on what serves you, the work can include heated dual percussion therapy for guarded muscles, immersive sound healing, and a guided virtual reality meditation to close. After every session I provide personalized follow-up by phone and email, because I do not believe in opening something in a person and then vanishing. You do not leave this work without a clear bridge back to yourself.
The work actually begins before you ever arrive, on the phone. I treat the pre-session conversation as a real design conversation, not a booking formality. It is where I learn what you are carrying, what you are hoping for, what you would rather I steer clear of, and where your particular edges are. That conversation lets me shape the session around the real you instead of a generic template, and it is also the first place your nervous system gets to start trusting that this is safe and considered. New clients complete an application and a brief screening for the same reason. Care and discretion are not features I bolt on at the end. They are the container itself.
I match the container to the depth of the work. Most people begin with a three to four hour immersion, which is the strongest starting point for a complete experience that does not feel rushed. Returning clients sometimes choose five hours for even more spaciousness. There is also a version of this work designed for couples who want to slow down and reconnect, and dedicated sessions for women seeking a more attuned and supportive entry point. You can see the full shape of the work on my Somatic Tantra Immersion page, explore the Couples Somatic Tantra Immersion if you are coming with a partner, look through my full offerings, or read the FAQ if you are the kind of person who likes to understand something completely before you step toward it. I respect that person. I am that person.
Who This Is For and Who It Is Not For
This work is for you if something in you is genuinely ready, not just for relief, though relief is welcome, but for the possibility of something actually moving. It is for you if you are willing to be present, to receive without an agenda, and to trust a process that moves at the pace of your body rather than the pace of your calendar. Many of the people who find their way to me are thoughtful, accomplished, and quietly exhausted, and they arrive curious rather than certain. That curiosity is exactly the right starting point.
This work is not for someone looking for a scripted performance or a service menu with guaranteed outcomes, because no honest practitioner can promise a breakthrough and I will not insult your intelligence by trying. It is not a substitute for medical or psychological treatment, and I am clear about that boundary. Every session is held within firm professional structure, real consent, and genuine discretion, because those are the exact conditions that make depth possible in the first place. My clients include people whose lives require absolute privacy, and I treat confidentiality as a lived practice, not a paragraph on a website. If any of this is landing in your chest as you read it, that feeling is worth listening to.
A Personal Note Before You Decide Anything
One of the great privileges of my life has been getting to watch what happens when a person finally stops trying so hard. Some people arrive carrying years of burnout they had stopped even noticing. Some arrive carrying a grief they never had room to feel. Some just want to rest, and they do, and it is enough. Some laugh through the whole thing. Some fall asleep and wake up embarrassed and I tell them that falling asleep is a wild compliment to the safety of the room. Some cry. Some leave lighter than they have felt in years. Not one of those experiences is worth more than another, and I mean that with my whole heart.
I did not build this work to fix people, because I do not think you are broken. I built it to give a body the rare and simple thing it almost never gets, which is enough time, enough safety, and enough skilled attention to remember what it feels like to be at home in itself. My authority in this comes from repetition, not opinion. I have watched it thousands of times, and it still moves me every single time.
If you are simply looking for several hours of deep, cared-for rest, you are welcome exactly as you are. If your body has been quietly asking for something deeper, and you are ready to meet that with care and without force, you are welcome too. Every Somatic Tantra Immersion begins precisely where you are, and there is no wrong place to start.
If you have been curious about what this kind of work might open for you, I would be honored to hold that space.
I am currently welcoming new clients for Somatic Tantra Immersion™ sessions in the Marina del Rey and Los Angeles area.
If you would like to read more about what to expect in a session with me, I wrote about that here: https://sensaurasanctuary.com/what-to-expect-in-a-session-with-me-crystal-clear/
You can learn more about my background and training, explore the full Somatic Tantra Immersion offering in detail, or read about the Couples Somatic Tantra Immersion experience through the links below.
https://sensaurasanctuary.com/project/crystal/
https://sensaurasanctuary.com/somatic-tantra-immersion/
If you’re curious about session options, visit our offerings page here: https://sensaurasanctuary.com/offerings/
If you’re new and want clarity on how sessions work, our FAQ is here: https://sensaurasanctuary.com/faq/
With gratitude and grace,
Creator of Somatic Tantra Immersion
Extended, guided experiences for discerning clients
Footnotes
1. Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W. W. Norton; Geller, S. M., and Porges, S. W. (2014). Therapeutic presence: Neurophysiological mechanisms mediating feeling safe in therapeutic relationships. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 24(3), 178 to 192.
2. Grossman, P., et al. (2023). Fundamental challenges to the anatomical and evolutionary claims of the polyvagal theory: An expert evaluation. [VERIFY BEFORE PUBLISHING: confirm final citation, authors, journal, and year before print.]
3. Moyer, C. A., Rounds, J., and Hannum, J. W. (2004). A meta-analysis of massage therapy research. Psychological Bulletin, 130(1), 3 to 18; Moraska, A., and Pollini, R. A. (2009). Physiological adjustments to stress measures following massage therapy: A review of the literature. Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 7(4), 409 to 418.
4. Moyer, C. A., Seifert, C., and Redfern, R. (2011). Does massage therapy reduce cortisol? A comprehensive quantitative review. Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, 15(1), 3 to 14.
5. Zaccaro, A., et al. (2018). How breath control can change your life: A systematic review on psycho-physiological correlates of slow breathing. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12, 353; Lehrer, P. M., and Gevirtz, R. (2014). Heart rate variability biofeedback: How and why does it work? Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 756.
6. McGlone, F., Wessberg, J., and Olausson, H. (2014). Discriminative and affective touch: Sensing and feeling. Neuron, 82(4), 737 to 755; Bjornsdotter, M., Morrison, I., and Olausson, H. (2010). Feeling good: On the role of C fiber mediated touch in interoception. Experimental Brain Research, 207(3 to 4), 149 to 155.
7. Wang, X., et al. (2019). Anterior insular cortex plays a critical role in interoceptive attention. eLife, 8, e42265; Zhou, L., et al. (2024). Interoceptive training impacts the neural circuit of the anterior insula cortex in healthy adults. NeuroImage, 283, 120401. [VERIFY BEFORE PUBLISHING: confirm 2024 citation details before print.]
8. Garrison, K. A., et al. (2015). Meditation leads to reduced default mode network activity beyond an active task. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 15(3), 712 to 720; Marusak, H. A., et al. (2022). Meta-analytic evidence that mindfulness training alters resting state functional connectivity. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 137, 104657.
9. Gross, J. J., and John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348 to 362; Gross, J. J. (2015). Emotion regulation: Current status and future prospects. Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 1 to 26.
10. Kearney, B. E., and Simpson, J. A. (2022). The brain body disconnect: A somatic sensory basis for trauma related disorders. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 16, 989765.
11. Nader, K., and Hardt, O. (2009). A single standard for memory: The case for reconsolidation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(3), 224 to 234; Schiller, D., et al. (2010). Preventing the return of fear in humans using reconsolidation update mechanisms. Nature, 463(7277), 49 to 53; Ecker, B., Ticic, R., and Hulley, L. (2012). Unlocking the Emotional Brain. Routledge.
12. Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
13. Fluckiger, C., Del Re, A. C., Wampold, B. E., and Horvath, A. O. (2018). The alliance in adult psychotherapy: A meta-analytic synthesis. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 316 to 340; Wampold, B. E., and Imel, Z. E. (2015). The Great Psychotherapy Debate (2nd ed.). Routledge.
14. Shamay-Tsoory, S. G., and Abu-Akel, A. (2016). The social salience hypothesis of oxytocin. Biological Psychiatry, 79(3), 194 to 202; Quintana, D. S., and Woolley, J. D. (2016). Intranasal oxytocin treatment for psychiatric disorders: Too early to call it a panacea. CNS Spectrums, 21(4), 289 to 292.
15. Brosschot, J. F., Verkuil, B., and Thayer, J. F. (2016). The default response to uncertainty and the importance of perceived safety in anxiety and stress. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 41, 22 to 34; Roisman, G. I., et al. (2007). Earned secure attachment status in retrospect and prospect. Child Development, 78(1), 218 to 233.
17. Payne, P., Levine, P. A., and Crane-Godreau, M. A. (2015). Somatic experiencing: Using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 93. [VERIFY BEFORE PUBLISHING: evidence on extended and marathon formats remains limited and should be framed as emerging.]
20. Geller, S. M., and Porges, S. W. (2014). Therapeutic presence: Neurophysiological mechanisms mediating feeling safe in therapeutic relationships. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 24(3), 178 to 192.
APA Bibliography
Bjornsdotter, M., Morrison, I., and Olausson, H. (2010). Feeling good: On the role of C fiber mediated touch in interoception. Experimental Brain Research, 207(3 to 4), 149 to 155.
Brosschot, J. F., Verkuil, B., and Thayer, J. F. (2016). The default response to uncertainty and the importance of perceived safety in anxiety and stress: An evolution theoretical perspective. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 41, 22 to 34.
Ecker, B., Ticic, R., and Hulley, L. (2012). Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at Their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation. Routledge.
Fluckiger, C., Del Re, A. C., Wampold, B. E., and Horvath, A. O. (2018). The alliance in adult psychotherapy: A meta-analytic synthesis. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 316 to 340.
Garrison, K. A., Zeffiro, T. A., Scheinost, D., Constable, R. T., and Brewer, J. A. (2015). Meditation leads to reduced default mode network activity beyond an active task. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 15(3), 712 to 720.
Geller, S. M., and Porges, S. W. (2014). Therapeutic presence: Neurophysiological mechanisms mediating feeling safe in therapeutic relationships. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 24(3), 178 to 192.
Grossman, P., et al. (2023). Fundamental challenges to the anatomical and evolutionary claims of the polyvagal theory: An expert evaluation. [VERIFY BEFORE PUBLISHING.]
Gross, J. J. (2015). Emotion regulation: Current status and future prospects. Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 1 to 26.
Gross, J. J., and John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348 to 362.
Kearney, B. E., and Simpson, J. A. (2022). The brain body disconnect: A somatic sensory basis for trauma related disorders. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 16, 989765.
Lehrer, P. M., and Gevirtz, R. (2014). Heart rate variability biofeedback: How and why does it work? Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 756.
Marusak, H. A., Elrahal, F., Peters, C., Kundu, P., Lombardo, M. V., and Etkin, A. (2022). Meta-analytic evidence that mindfulness training alters resting state functional connectivity. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 137, 104657.
McGlone, F., Wessberg, J., and Olausson, H. (2014). Discriminative and affective touch: Sensing and feeling. Neuron, 82(4), 737 to 755.
Moraska, A., and Pollini, R. A. (2009). Physiological adjustments to stress measures following massage therapy: A review of the literature. Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 7(4), 409 to 418.
Moyer, C. A., Rounds, J., and Hannum, J. W. (2004). A meta-analysis of massage therapy research. Psychological Bulletin, 130(1), 3 to 18.
Moyer, C. A., Seifert, C., and Redfern, R. (2011). Does massage therapy reduce cortisol? A comprehensive quantitative review. Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, 15(1), 3 to 14.
Nader, K., and Hardt, O. (2009). A single standard for memory: The case for reconsolidation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(3), 224 to 234.
Payne, P., Levine, P. A., and Crane-Godreau, M. A. (2015). Somatic experiencing: Using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 93.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W. W. Norton.
Quintana, D. S., and Woolley, J. D. (2016). Intranasal oxytocin treatment for psychiatric disorders: Too early to call it a panacea. CNS Spectrums, 21(4), 289 to 292.
Roisman, G. I., Holland, A., Fortuna, K., Fraley, R. C., Clausell, E., and Clarke, A. (2007). Earned secure attachment status in retrospect and prospect. Child Development, 78(1), 218 to 233.
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