Wendy Elisheva Somerson (WES)
My clients learn to trust themselves and lead liberated lives by accessing the wisdom of their bodies.
As an activist and organizer, I have been working for the past twenty years to help shift our larger culture by organizing campaigns, workshops, and rituals.
Since 2010, I have been training in trauma theory, bodywork, and somatic healing to help folks transform from the inside out.
I work at the intersection of healing and activism because I believe that individual and societal transformation are interdependent.
Before training in somatics, I didn’t know how to shift my own behavior to bring it in line with my values. Talk therapy helped me gain insight into my past, but I was unable to think my way into new behavior.
Activism gave me a framework for political work, but activist culture often replicated unhealthy dynamics of domination in the larger world.
When I first heard how generative somatics integrates body-based healing, political analysis, and movement work, I immediately knew this was the next step on my path.
Through somatics I was able to align my behavior and my values, and find a model and vision for promoting healing from trauma and oppression, including racism, antisemitism, ableism, and classism within our communities.
I am committed to bringing effective and politically relevant embodied healing of personal and collective trauma to social justice communities.
My clients say that I create a strong container to hold them fully in their complexity and depth.
I came to Seattle for graduate school, but after earning a PhD in English with a focus on queer, feminist, and anti-racist studies, I decided that I didn’t want to continue living primarily in the world of ideas. As a survivor of violence, it was much easier to be in my brain than my body, but I felt frustrated with the limits in my life.
After leaving academia, I became more involved in activism, political writing, and visual art–modalities that led the way to somatics.
I live in Seattle where I practice somatic healing with individuals and groups, train leaders in embodiment, hang out with my kitties, organize with Jewish Voice for Peace, make visual art, and write. I identify as a queer non-binary disabled anti-Zionist Ahskenazi Jewish healer.
Testimonials
Individual clients
“Working with Wendy (Wes) has changed my life. They’re on my team to facilitate my journey without judgement or pressure.
I am now able to slow down in stressful situations, feel my body, find my agency, and make decisions from there.”
– ORGANIZER
“Wes helped me stay present. In the past, I would have frozen or had to retreat from being so overwhelmed. I’ve been able to stay with difficult conversations with my partner–something I set as a goal over a year ago as a way to tell that I had made progress in my therapy.”
– FILMMAKER
“Wendy always met me where I was at, and also pushed me to think bigger, including defining a new and more powerful commitment for myself. Wes helped me connect with my own source of power.”
– ACTIVIST
healing groups
“I was needing this next step in my work as a white anti-racist healer. I made a commitment to deepening my sense of EMBODIED justice, and that is exactly what I got. I gained a deeply somatic sense of my engagement in anti-racist work as a white person.”
– THERAPIST & ACTIVIST
“I am coming out of this feeling more–more present and connected with my body, my feelings, my spirit, and my community. I got to grow a lot by sharing and reciprocating vulnerability and witnessing us fighting for ourselves and one another.”
– ACTIVIST
Art
I create original encaustic paintings and prints inspired by my relationship to real and imagined creatures, including animals, birds, and humans.
Working with an eye toward healing, I acknowledge our struggles as part of the journey to become our full, magical selves. By finding resilience through connection to each other, animals, nature, and spirit, we can start imagining and creating the world to come.
