Meet Sonya

Sonya Brewer HeadshotAs a somatic psychotherapist and mentor to conscious, purpose-driven women, I believe that each of us is already whole, and that we come equipped with everything we need to express our soul’s brilliance.

My job is to help you remember what is already inside of you. Our bodies are one way to access this inner wisdom, and my work encourages us to explore and celebrate what your body has to teach you about your innate capacities for growth, transformation, and visionary action.

I believe that our bodies hold the keys to our awakening, and that when we learn to listen to our bodies with deep awareness, we can no longer continue to live and act in ways that are out of integrity with our deepest knowing.

I am a compassionate mentor and guide on this journey towards remembering who you are. I am a fierce stand for your being all of who you are meant to be and more.

My Story…

When I graduated from college, I asked one of my mentors how I should go about figuring out what to do with my life, and he said, simply, “Ask the universe.” At the time, that made no sense to me, but I trusted him, so I followed the instruction anyway.

It would be years later before the answer to that question began to take shape in my life, but one morning, I woke up, and I just knew: I am a healer. I realized that, on some level, the knowledge had always been there inside of me, but it had been covered up by clouds of doubt and ideas about what I thought I should be doing.

I spent the next decade on a quest to understand what it could mean for me to be a healer, and how it would look in the world. The journey started where every healer’s journey should start: with my own healing.

Over the years I explored a range of healing, spiritual and personal growth modalities—naturopathic medicine, Chinese medicine, Vipassana meditation, Authentic Movement, various forms of bodywork, yoga, chiropractic medicine, a variety of conscious dance forms, Reichian breathwork, and psychotherapy to name just a few. I studied massage; I became a doula. I studied Tantric breathwork. I took workshops. You get the idea. I was on a mission.

At the same time that all that was happening, I continued pursuing a career in marketing and business development in the finance and technology areas. My path, in the corporate world, was always the same. I would start a job all gung ho to bring myself fully to the task at hand. I would enjoy learning new things and meeting new people. And then, slowly but surely, the lights would go out inside of my heart, and I would begin to feel like I was dying inside.

Always, in the back of my mind there was that voice whispering, “You are a healer.” I experienced it as an urging…a persistent inner push towards this path. Every time I took another corporate job, it felt like a subtle betrayal of my Self, and yet, I still didn’t know what it meant to be a healer, and I wasn’t willing to be poor while I waited to figure it out. Like so many of us, I was sure that following my calling had nothing to do with making a good living. I felt divided inside, hiding the best of who I was.

Sometimes we get “help from the Universe.” When the dot com boom went bust, I found myself out of work. In retrospect, I can say that it was a good thing… but at the time, I was terrified; I had a mortgage for goodness sake!

Eventually, as unemployment wore on, I began wondering what it would be like to share some of what I had been learning about healing with others. So I began to see clients, offering bodywork, breathwork and sex coaching, and taking on the occasional doula client.
For the first time in my life, I was doing work that felt right to me. I became virtually obsessed with the intersection between body, mind and spirit. How does one shift the experience of trauma in the body? How do I support people to move towards more joy, more pleasure, more meaning in their lives?

I finally understood what it meant for me to be a healer, and yet, even though I knew this, I didn’t have the courage to step all the way in. In order to make a career change, I would have to completely transform my life, and somewhere in there I had a hidden belief that it wasn’t possible to make a good living doing what I loved.

So once more I entered the corporate arena. This time it was even harder. I had a taste of what it was like to be really inspired by my work and be doing what I’m supposed to do in the world, and there was no going back from this deeper knowing. It was no longer working to ignore my calling, and yet I felt paralyzed by fear.

This happens for so many of us. You know that place? We know that we need to do something different, and yet we keep doing the same old thing, hoping against hope that something will change… without requiring us to change. This is how so many of us stay stuck. Sometimes, in the midst of all that stuckness, it takes a major catalyst to push us past all that fear. For me, it was the death of my mother.

When my mother died, I hadn’t spoken to her in about five years, and hadn’t we seen each other in at least ten. When I first heard about her death, I couldn’t think of a single good memory about her. I had done a ton of work healing anger and grief around my childhood, and was just beginning to feel I was ready to try to connect with her when I received the phone call that she was gone.

As I prepared for my mother’s service, I really struggled with how to create a ritual that would honor her and her life, given the nature of our relationship. As I searched for inspiration, I came across this Buddhist Earth Touching ritual that Thich Naht Hahn describes in Teachings on Love:

In gratitude I bow to all generations of ancestors in my blood family. I see my mother and father, whose blood, flesh, and vitality are circulating in my own veins and nourishing ever cell in me….I carry in me the life, blood, experience, wisdom, happiness, and sorrow of all generations. The suffering and all the elements that need to be transformed, I am practicing to transform…

In the moment that I read those words, I recalled a song I had heard, “We are the answers to our ancestors’ prayers.” For the first time in my life, I felt in my bones that I had been my mother’s hope, that the lifetime that I had spent “practicing to transform” my own suffering had been a way to transform her suffering as well. Now, I could come home. I could honor my mother.

In the days that followed, I would wake up with feeling that she had been whispering in my ear, telling me all those things she had never been able to say while she was alive. I found myself knowing more and more about how much she loved me, and how afraid she had been in her life to really live.

What I got when I went home for my mother’s funeral was that I could begin to let the fear go. I could finally see that in doing the work that I was destined to do, there was no way for me to fail, no way for me to not have my needs met. The work was bigger than me, bigger than my fear. Perhaps it was my mother’s spirit speaking to me, urging me back onto the path. When I returned to California, for the first time since I was very small, I could feel my mother. I could feel her love, her support, and I could feel my love for her, and I knew that the time had come to step into my true work in the world.

Many people I’ve worked with have also felt disconnected, from their dreams, their deep longings… from who they really know themselves to be at their core. Sometimes it takes something radical to open us to the possibility of reclaiming our Selves: the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, the end of a marriage.

Other times, we simply find ourselves ready, ready to do something different just because… it’s time. Whatever your path, the transformative process requires a kind of commitment. It can feel like stepping off a cliff into the unknown. And yet, what is the risk, if you choose not to commit, not to take the leap?

My commitment is to support as many people as I can in taking that leap! I am delighted to help you step into the possibility of living life more fully and more passionately, of speaking your truth, and being more of who you are, of living more in alignment with your highest vision for yourself and for our planet.

If you feel that call, I invite you to get in touch for a complimentary discovery session today. I look forward to meeting you!

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Credentials

  • Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist #89901
  • M.A. in Counseling Psychology with a Concentration in Somatic Psychology from the California Institute for Integral Studies
  • B.A. in Political Science with a Concentration in Comparative Politics from Yale University

Affiliations

To learn more or schedule a consultation, please call me at (510) 496-6010.

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