What is it that you dream of?

What do you long for?

What life have you felt possible but just out of reach?

Through this work, together, we’ll support you to develop:

  • Greater ability to feel all of your emotions, without overwhelm

  • Expanding capacity for navigating all aspects of life

  • Steadfast inner resources to help support you through caverns and cliffs of the unknown

  • More vibrant connection to creativity

  • Deeper connection to spirit

  • Clear, kind, healthy boundaries

  • Safer, more fulfilling relationships

My sessions are . . .

Warm Intuitive Open Grounded Playful Gentle

About my approach

I facilitate deeply connected care by prioritizing safety and self-expression in all my sessions. I create and support an environment wherein you are allowed to safely express whatever you need to, in real time.

Often this looks like following the curiosities and desires of the mind and body into movement, expression, or even play that feels supportive. In this safe energetic space, I’ll support you to allow emotions and sensations to arise and to gently explore them and their wisdom.

We work from exactly where you are at, trusting that where you are is the perfect place to begin. Then, we move intentionally in the direction you want to go.

FAQs

  • Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a therapeutic approach and set of tools that resolves symptoms of stress, shock, and trauma that accumulate in our bodies. When we are stuck in patterns of fight, flight, or freeze, SE helps us release, recover, and become more resilient.

  • We usually begin by talking about your goals. What you would like to be different, whatever that may be. Then as we talk, I will invite you to notice the sensations in your body and your felt experience. I might support you to move between different sensations, and explore your impulses. And if that’s not something you feel comfortable with yet, we start with creating more awareness and attention to your environment. This modality is mindfulness-based, so if you already have a mindfulness, meditation, or yoga practice, this “tracking” of thought and sensation will be very familiar.

  • Coaching is more collaborative than traditional talk therapy, and SE is much more sensation-based than talk therapy. I will support you in tapping into different sensations in the body, at your level of comfort, creating spatial awareness over time. I also draw on nonverbal intuitive energy shepherding, focusing on somatic “bottom up” processing rather than “top down” processing, meaning we’re focusing more on the body’s messages and needs rather than using language or the thinking mind to try and force the body to have a different experience.

    The goal of this work is to support you to tap into the natural rhythm and wisdom of your own nervous system. Through tools, collaboration, creativity, and play, we’ll learn the shape of your nervous system and how it can best thrive in its full vitality and aliveness. 

Why I’m passionate about this:

After a childhood and adolescence rife with painful experiences and dysfunctional relationships, I became a struggling twenty-something feeling extremely lonely and isolated. I was in incapacitating pain and struggled with frequent suicidal ideation. I had this feeling that there was a good life out there somewhere for me, but that I couldn’t live it because I was too incapacitated. I thought that there must be something about me that I needed to “fix” or change to get there.

I would self-soothe (as we all do at times) with things like overeating, overworking, overspending, excessive pleasure, unfulfilling and stress-inducing relationships, alcohol, cigarettes, and even an obsessive approach to “inner work.” I read tons of self-help books, and pursued quick fix promises of “healing.” I played this pattern out over and over again in different formats.

This cycle is all too familiar for most of us. If I could go back in time and speak to my younger self, I’d tell her:

There is nothing wrong with you. There is nothing that needs to be fixed.  

I’d tell her, in the words of Mary Oliver, “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

I’d reassure her that she made it through, and that she eventually found the right relationships and therapy modalities to free her from that cycle. 

That’s why I’m so passionate about sharing this work with others – because it’s been so deeply freeing for me and so many of my loved ones, and restored us to our full vitality and aliveness.

And when I say vitality and aliveness, what I mean is….

  • Cartwheels by the ocean

  • The deep knowingness that I can steer my own f*cking ship

  • Giving my grief, anger, and despair the same open welcome as my joy, peace, and celebration

  • Knowing all my emotions will come in waves, and knowing that I won’t feel overwhelmed and won’t have to go into shutdown and collapse

  • Being able to be with my pain without reaching for the go-to coping mechanisms of the past

  • Confidence that I can meet and am equal to all of life’s challenges AND joys

  • Trusting that the universe has got me – but like, REAL trust

  • Sensing the rug can never be pulled out from under me again

  • Taking full leadership in my own life

I’m thrilled to share what this work has helped me to experience. But most of all, I’m interested in what this work will support you to experience.   

My wish for all my clients is for them to discover new ways of experiencing themselves and the world, including opening up to feeling fully alive and deepening relationships, whether they be internal (with work, spirituality, purpose, self-parenting) or external (with friends, family, partners, co-workers, etc).

If you’re curious about this work, I offer a free 15 minute call for us to connect and see if working together would be a good fit before scheduling out first session.

Please email me at tanna@tannakey.com to get started.

About Tanna Key 

I am a Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner (SEP) in-training through the Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute (SETI), currently having completed 3 of the 8 modules total required for the 3-year certification tract (2024). Additionally, I am a certified Life Coach through the Martha Beck Institute (2018), as well as a well-versed practitioner of Byron Katie’s inquiry-based practice “The Work,” which I utilize as a stress reduction model (9-day School for The Work graduate, 2019). I have personally explored and been professionally educated in several modalities of life coaching, stress reduction, and methods to support renewed aliveness since 2016, including attending The Hoffman Process and learning from teachers such as Gabor Maté, Koelle Simpson, Diane Poole Heller, David Whyte, Mary Oliver, and the natural environments of Southern California and South Africa that are near and dear to my heart.