Somatic Therapy | Yoga and Sound Baths in Santa Monica | CA
Composure has a price. The women who come to Power Through Process are often the ones who have mastered it, who move through high-pressure environments with extraordinary grace and arrive home to a body that has been holding the bill for that grace all day. Somatic therapy, yoga, and sound healing exist at the edge of what composure can contain. This practice works underneath the surface, where the actual account of the day's experience is kept.
Ocean Avenue traces the edge of Palisades Park, where the bluffs look out over the Pacific Coast Highway and the beach below. Montana Ave runs east from the water through one of the most quietly affluent neighborhoods in the region. The Third Street Promenade pulls foot traffic through the heart of the city, while Santa Monica College anchors a corridor of younger residents alongside the established community. The Bergamot Station arts complex near Olympic Blvd draws a creative professional population, and Wilshire Blvd, running east toward the Miracle Mile, connects Santa Monica to the broader city. Brentwood begins just north. The beaches of Venice and Ocean Park reach south. This is a city of surfaces that look easy, and a private life that is often anything but.
Santa Monica holds a significant population of women who have access to every form of conventional wellness and still cannot find their way to actual rest. They have the gym, the therapist, the acupuncturist, the nutritionist. And yet the body remains tense, the sleep shallow, the sense of being genuinely okay just out of reach. What somatic therapy in Santa Monica offers is a different kind of approach, one that does not add to the wellness checklist but goes underneath all of it, to the nervous system itself.
How it works
01
Start where you are—not where you think you “should” be
Somatic therapy does not begin with what happened. It begins with what is happening now, in the body, in this moment. The tightness along the ribs. The breath that does not quite reach the belly. The sensation in the chest that appears before the mind has caught up with the feeling. These are the entry points, and they lead somewhere that talking about events rarely reaches.
02
No scripts. Just what your body needs
The first step toward this work is simply a conversation. There is no gatekeeping here, no criteria to meet before being allowed to begin. Someone reaching out is already doing the most important thing. The rest unfolds from there, at a pace determined by what feels honest and workable for the person, not by any external schedule or protocol.
03
Where science meets soul
What changes through somatic therapy is not a collection of insights. It is the body's relationship with experience itself. Clients describe a growing capacity to be inside their own lives without needing to manage every dimension of the experience. Rest becomes more accessible. Relationships become less exhausting. The sense of being genuinely present, which had felt like a luxury, starts to feel like a right.
Explore my therapy services and specializations
Women who live well and still feel hollow are the clients somatic therapy was designed to serve. Not the visible falling apart, but the invisible one, the quiet internal erosion that happens when someone spends years prioritizing everyone else's experience over her own. Somatic therapy names what is happening and works with it at the level where it actually lives. The focus in sessions is not on reconstructing events or correcting thought patterns. It is on building a direct relationship with sensation, with the body's own knowledge of what it needs and what it is holding. Over time, this relationship becomes a reliable source of guidance rather than a site of confusion or override. All sessions are virtual. The depth of presence in the work does not depend on a physical location.
A city adjacent to the ocean carries an invitation to stillness that many of its residents cannot quite receive. Yoga and sound baths are practices that make that receiving possible, that create in the body the conditions for genuine settling rather than the performance of it. Sound bath sessions use vibrational resonance to bypass the thinking mind and speak directly to the nervous system. Yoga sessions are slow and sensation-oriented, designed to build a quality of inner listening rather than external achievement. Together, they restore what chronic composure depletes: the capacity to actually land somewhere. These practices are offered virtually and are accessible without prior experience of either. The body knows how to receive what is offered here.
Many women who appear most capable in public feel most unknown in private. The armor that works so well in professional contexts leaves very little room for genuine intimacy, genuine need, genuine being-seen. Relational Gestalt therapy creates a space to explore what it feels like to be met, and to begin practicing that experience. This approach attends to the relationship between practitioner and client as a live field of information. What happens in the body when attention is offered fully? What arises when a need is expressed without preemptive minimizing? These are not hypothetical questions. They are explored in the actual moment of the session. What clients find is that the relational capacity built here extends outward. The quality of presence they develop in sessions begins to reshape how they experience their closest relationships.
There is a particular kind of activation that looks like capability. The person who is always two steps ahead, always prepared, always anticipating what might go wrong. From the outside it reads as competence. From the inside it is exhausting, and the nervous system knows the difference even when the mind does not. Nervous system regulation work creates the conditions for the body to experience safety as a felt state rather than a conclusion. Sessions build the capacity to inhabit the present moment without the constant background assessment of threat. Over time, the body learns that it does not have to stay ready every moment, and that learning begins to reshape the entire experience of daily life. This work is available virtually and is appropriate for women across a wide range of experience with bodywork or somatic practice.
The body does not experience trauma the way a story is experienced. It is not held in narrative. It is held in activation patterns, in the way the system responds to certain sensory experiences, in the reflexes that appear before the mind has time to intervene. Somatic trauma therapy works with those patterns where they actually live. Sessions are oriented by the body's readiness rather than by any external timeline. Nothing is pushed toward resolution. The approach is one of attentive accompaniment, creating enough safety that the nervous system can begin to move through what it has been holding in suspension. For women in Santa Monica and the broader Westside carrying the layered complexity of personal trauma alongside cultural and professional pressures, this work offers a container that is genuinely equal to what they bring.
Wellness culture can be its own kind of pressure. When every recommended practice becomes an obligation, the anxiety that was supposed to be addressed gets reorganized around the practice schedule. Sound meditation operates differently. It requires nothing. It offers a direct encounter with vibration and silence that the body simply receives. The resonance of singing bowls and other instruments during sound meditation sessions interacts with the nervous system at a physiological level, supporting a shift from activation toward rest. Clients often describe this as the only practice in which they have felt genuinely capable of letting go rather than just trying to. Sessions are offered virtually, accessible from any quiet space. No prior meditation experience is required.
For Black women in predominantly white environments, whether on Montana Ave, in Brentwood, or in the professional corridors of West Los Angeles, the tax of code-switching, performing safety, and managing others' comfort around race is a real and chronic drain. Therapy for Black women in my practice names this explicitly rather than treating it as background noise. My framework is anti-oppressive and decolonizing, which means the work does not ask Black women to adapt to models of healing that were not designed for them. It begins from the acknowledgment that their experience is specific, layered, and deserving of care that is equally specific. This is a space where everything a Black woman carries arrives welcome, including the parts of her experience that broader cultural narratives prefer not to name.
In a city with no shortage of yoga studios, somatic yoga offers something that most studios do not: a practice oriented entirely around interior experience rather than visible form. There are no mirrors, no benchmarks, no comparison. There is only the body and what it communicates when given enough space and silence to speak. Sessions move through gentle sequences with extended pauses at the edges of sensation. Breath is the guide rather than the timer. What emerges over time is a quality of self-knowledge that is deeply specific to each person's body and its particular history. For women who have found conventional yoga classes activating or disconnecting rather than grounding, somatic yoga offers a genuinely different experience of what it means to practice.
For Black couples on the Westside and in Santa Monica, the gap between an outwardly successful relationship and an inwardly nourishing one can be wide and quietly costly. Black couples therapy in this practice closes that gap, creating a space for both partners to arrive in full and to work together toward something genuinely sustaining. Sessions are offered virtually.
Santa Monica's wellness economy produces an abundance of surface-level tools for employee care. My corporate wellness offerings go deeper, bringing somatic regulation, sound healing, and nervous system education to organizations that are ready for something that actually changes the baseline. Available virtually.
Serving clients in Santa Monica and nearby areas
My practice serves women throughout Santa Monica and the surrounding Westside communities, including Brentwood, Ocean Park, Mar Vista, Venice, Pacific Palisades, and neighboring areas along the coast. All sessions are held virtually, removing any barrier related to traffic, parking, or commute. An embedded map of the Santa Monica service area appears below.
Chelsey has been a mentor to me in many ways. She has a warm, patient, thoughtful presence that is consistent and unmoving, and the ability to closely contact whatever arises in a calm and non judgemental way that allows for connection. Highly recommend!
Haley Winer
Chelsey and I recently led a group and I was in awe of her ability to hold space, give others feedback, and stay regulated throughout the course. Chelsey was a supportive, caring, and wonderful co-facilitator. I learned so much from her!
Julia Willinger
She's phenomenal. I've had a few different therapists during my mental health journey, but Chelsea is the first one to actually make me feel comfortable enough to be vulnerable. She reminds me that it's okay to acknowledge my feelings, instead of bottling them up in order to process the situation that brought that particular feeling up. I spent a long time feeling invisible; my sessions with Chelsea remind me that I'm here, and I matter. It feels good to feel seen and understood.
Anonymous
What inspires me about Chelsey's clinical skills is that she has a talent and passion for integrating her work with holistic health and wellness. She offers healing on a deep level and her very presence has a calming effect. I highly recommend Chelsey.
Fox Eros Life Stress Intimacy Polyamory
Chelsey's approach to therapy is rich, fulfilling, and empowering. Her groundedness propels her in the ability to be attuned to her clients' needs which is valuable to community healing.
Keri Anderson
I have had the privilege of being Chelsey's supervisor for the past 18 months. She is a caring and compassionate clinician who brings thoughtfulness, warmth and curiosity to her work with clients. I highly recommend Chelsey.
Penny H.
Chelsey has been a mentor to me in many ways. She has a warm, patient, thoughtful presence that is consistent and unmoving, and the ability to closely contact whatever arises in a calm and non judgemental way that allows for connection. Highly recommend!
Haley Winer
Chelsey and I recently led a group and I was in awe of her ability to hold space, give others feedback, and stay regulated throughout the course. Chelsey was a supportive, caring, and wonderful co-facilitator. I learned so much from her!
Julia Willinger
Testimonials
Hello, I'm Chelsey Reese, somatic therapist and sound healer serving Santa Monica
I'm a somatic therapist, yoga practitioner, and sound healing facilitator, and the founder of Power Through Process Wellness Co., serving women of color in Santa Monica and across the greater Los Angeles area. My practice integrates somatic experiencing, polyvagal-informed care, relational Gestalt, and trauma-informed mindfulness within an anti-oppressive, decolonizing framework. I work with women who have built lives that look exactly right from the outside and who are ready to build an inner life that matches. My work is grounded in a single belief: empowering women of color to listen to the wisdom inside their bodies, release stored trauma, and step into an abundant life of peace and connection.
Frequently asked questions
How does virtual therapy work?
Virtual therapy sessions are held over a secure, HIPAA-compliant video platform. All you need is a private space, a stable internet connection, and a device with a camera and microphone.
Can I use my insurance for virtual therapy?
I currently do not accept insurance. I can provide a superbill for reimbursement and I do accept Loveland Vouchers.
What if I need to cancel or reschedule a session?
I ask for at least 24 hours notice to reschedule or cancel your session. Cancellations made less than 24 hours notice may incur a fee.
