What to Expect in Your First Session with Anne

Key Takeaways

● A first session begins with our first contact — your nervous system is already being attended to the moment you walk in the door

● We can never go too deep — only too fast. This work moves at the pace your body can truly integrate

● The goal of every session is practical: you leave with your nervous system more settled, your body and mind more coherent, and a clearer felt sense of yourself

Before You Walk In

Most people who find their way to my practice have already done their research. They've read, compared, sometimes searched for years. Often they arrive through someone they trust — a friend, a physician, a therapist who knows my work.

People find me for different reasons, through different doors. Some come for somatic work, some for craniosacral, some because they sense their earliest history is shaping their present. What matters is that you arrived.

Before your first session, a conversation has begun. What brings you here. What you've already tried. What you're hoping for. Your nervous system begins to organize around this work before you ever walk through my door.

The Practical Details

Sessions are 60 or 90 minutes. Bodywork is done fully clothed — no oils, no undressing. Anne works with clients in her Santa Monica office, and also offers online sessions for those who are not local or prefer to work from home. For those ready to go deeper, Anne offers intensive private workshops with a small number of clients.

The Moment You Arrive

Walking into a new place, meeting a new person — even when you decided to be here — is new information for your nervous system to register. I often tell clients: it's impossible to be somewhere new with someone new and have a completely relaxed nervous system. That's not a problem. It's the doorway into how your nervous system works.

From the moment you arrive, I'm paying attention to where your whole system actually is. I have zero expectations of where you should be. This is your space to unfold. If we already know what's going to happen, it's coming from your current patterns — not the change you came here for.

What I hold for you is a paradox: complete freedom to express, inside a strong and steady structure. The freedom is yours. The structure is mine. Together, they create safety.

The work begins here, in the now, with more than words.

A Space to Unfold

Most people who come to see a therapist or practitioner expect to sit in a chair and talk. I often surprise them.

Your nervous system is deeply connected to your motor system — so we might use movement: standing, shifting posture, or creating physical, visual boundaries. The activities may seem deceptively simple. But when movement is a response connected to an activation in the nervous system — not an obedient execution of instructions, but an authentic impulse from within — it can repair wounds that ten years of talking could never reach.

This is also where I ask for your intention for our session.

By the time we move toward the table — if your journey with me evolves to benefit from craniosacral work — all your systems are already more synchronized. Your own wisdom knows why you are here, and where you are going.

The Table

Craniosacral therapy is done fully clothed, lying on a comfortable treatment table. My touch is light — sometimes barely perceptible. To someone watching from outside the room, very little appears to be happening.

Inside your system, it can be a different story. Touch allows a deeper listening.

I work with the craniosacral rhythm — a subtle pulse that runs through your entire system, from your skull to your sacrum. Through light contact, often at your head, feet, or sacrum, I listen. I feel it, I witness it. I won't usually add pressure to force a release — instead, by holding a stuck place gently and with precise awareness, something shifts. Most clients find this deeply relieving.

Many find themselves moving into a deeply meditative state — not sleep, but an expanded awareness. A quieting of the mental chatter. Some simply feel that their body is safe, and that a relationship can exist at the simplest level of being met respectfully, with kindness.

Closing and Integration

Before you walk back out into the world — to your car, your afternoon, your life — we take time to reorient together. This is not small.

Most of us underestimate integration. We move on before something has truly landed. But the nervous system cannot settle into the state of relaxed alertness that is its natural home if it is still carrying unprocessed material. We keep piling on. The body keeps count, quietly, until it can't.

How the Work Unfolds Over Time

This work is rarely a quick fix. It is also not endless.

The body is slower than the mind. Your mind can see the change it wants in a flash — but as you already know, it takes more than a single moment or single want for that change to become embodied, encoded into your cells.

I often tell clients: it's better to go one inch forward and truly integrate something new than to go the full nine yards and snap back. If we move too fast, your system won't be able to hold what shifted — not only will it return to what it knows, it will bury itself deeper into the wound. That's how nervous systems protect themselves.

A new neural pathway is created instantly when we create an embodied reparative experience together — forever forward, you will know this new healthy response as a valid option. But it gets consolidated with repetition.

Together we find the frequency that fits your life and your system. Most clients benefit from weekly sessions during an intensive period of work. Some sessions feel dramatic. Others feel quiet — and are doing just as much. What I witness, over and over: after a period of deep work, clients find they are ready to meet their lives differently. They come back — after a pause, after a milestone, after something new asks to be met. The work doesn't end. It evolves.

Reflection Question

Right now, are you feeling open or skeptical? How do you know you are feeling this way?

Anne sees clients in her Santa Monica practice and online. Book a free 10-minute call or request a session.