Marla Leigh Caplan Psychotherapy for the Soul
Marla Leigh Caplan, Marin County psychotherapist offering mindful somatic therapy, in a contemplative moment on Mt. Tamalpais.

Hakomi Mindful Somatic Therapy

Embodied wisdom to heal your heart and restore balance to your central nervous system.

Discover Transformative Healing with Somatic Therapy

Offering in-person therapy in San Francisco and online therapy throughout California.

Hakomi mindful somatic therapy is a body-centered therapy that honors your innate capacity for self-healing.

Integrating mindful awareness of your felt sense with emotional processing, Hakomi is a gentle and effective approach to trauma therapy, couples therapy, and individual therapy using effective tools to transform from within.

mindful-somatic-therapy-3
Artwork by Kahn & Selesnick from Tarot of the Drowned World

A Journey to Inner Wisdom and Healing

Somatic therapy invites you to access the innate intelligence within you, exploring the deep connection between your mind and body through physical sensations and emotions to facilitate organic healing and transformation.

Guided by your natural capacity for healing, this therapeutic process helps you:

With “organicity”—the natural inclination towards healing—as a guiding principle, the process gently supports you to discover your inner wisdom and allows healing to unfold organically in a relational field of loving presence and attunement.

Principles of Hakomi Mindful Somatic Therapy

Artwork by Kahn & Selesnick

Innate Wisdom & Organicity

At the core of Hakomi mindful somatic therapy lies the belief in your innate capacity for healing. The process helps you connect to your inner intelligence, which naturally moves toward

With gentle curiosity, somatic therapy uses reflections and invitations to explore your present-moment experience. These inquiries bring awareness to what is ready to unfold while somatic resourcing helps rebuild a regulated nervous system.

Hakomi invites awareness across the body, heart, soul, and spirit, helping you deepen your understanding of all aspects of your experience.

A mindful somatic approach honors the fluid interplay between:

By weaving together these dimensions, mindful somatic therapy encourages you to embrace your wholeness for deeper integration.

Ethics of Respect: Honoring Defenses and Boundaries

The unique power of somatic therapy lies in its ability to hold all facets of your being while providing specific tools to access the depth of your inner world.

Respecting your body’s wisdom includes honoring your natural defenses. Rather than adversaries, your defenses are protectors and allies that intuitively guide therapy at a pace aligned with your needs to ensure a gentle, non-invasive process.

Honoring your defenses enables you to follow the body’s wisdom in a safe and natural progression. This approach ensures that each part of your being is met with care and understanding.

Polarity Work: Holding Dualities

Hakomi therapy teaches you how to hold opposing experiences — ecstasy and terror, light and shadow, life and death — with grace. We grow by learning to move between polarities, using the dance between opposites to create meaningful change. By embodying both sides of a polarity you will learn to uncover the wisdom embedded in the dialectic.

Shadow Exploration

Shadow work involves taking a brave look at the parts of ourselves that we would rather not acknowledge — repressed desires, emotions and experiences that have been exiled to the unconscious.

Confronting hidden or avoided parts of yourself holds the medicine for deep healing. When intense emotions arise, Hakomi therapy helps you stay present and grounded with mindful awareness and somatic resources to:

Benefits of Mindful Somatic Therapy

Being with the full range of emotional experience.

Mindful somatic therapy is an invitation to come home to yourself with curiosity, presence & love.

trauma-therapy-1

Somatic Therapy for Embodied Healing in San Francisco, CA

Trust the process.
The body remembers.

Artwork by Rachel Hulin
Artwork by Kahn & Selesnick

Discover healing from the inside out as you learn to soften protective patterns and reconnect with your body’s innate intelligence. Hakomi mindful somatic psychotherapy invites you to:

If something in you is ready to shift, reach out to learn more or schedule a session.