Tending The Ground, LLC

jessica baker


 

What Is Tending The Ground Psychotherapy?

By tending the ground, you are learning how to sink into your own taproot: discovering your authentic, engaged, confident and wild self.

We are all imperfect, beautiful beings, and that’s okay. 

For most of us, there is an old wound of the individual heart to believe in unworthiness that may have been carried for a very long time; unquestioned, ungrounded and lacking in truth.

Our work together is one of curiosity and discovery. Cultivating awareness awakens an inner home, a “place” to return to and invoke patience and care toward yourself and others. This home becomes a platform to discover what doesn’t seem to be working, assess needs, make new choices, and rise to new heights. And we do this together…

 

By relating to yourself through your connection to an “other,” you have the opportunity to arrive deeply and authentically into the present moment experiencing of your body, however it shows up. However it shows up. 

I work with clients who struggle with trauma, anxiety, depression, life transitions, grief, relationship issues, chronic pain, and other mental health challenges. I utilize knowledge and guidance about connecting body and mind health in ways outside of the mainstream culture.   

Let me know if you have any questions.

If your ready…

let’s get started.

 

  

EMDR

Beliefs can drive self-sabotaging behavior due to old and unconscious assumptions. When these (“parts”) assumptions are learned at a young age the capacity to discern their irrational nature may have been thwarted. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization Re-processing) is a methodology that encourages these old assumptions or parts to organically update and be experientially replaced with empowered perspectives. These adjustments have the capacity to drive new behaviors (energy within new parts) from expanding and enhancing unforeseen possibilities and ways of being. Those updated perspectives (new programming) invite what now appear as possibilities to actually become a new reality. In this way, you are working with your subconscious mind to construct a new paradigm.   

Polyvagal Theory

We are regularly scanning the environment through the lens of proving our pre-existing beliefs to be true. This inherent bias lives in us all.

The majority of what comes to our cortex comes from our past experience. When we ask ourselves what the story is we are telling ourself, we can begin to tease apart what “parts” of us are trying to communicate to us, to get our attention. When we listen, honor, and provide resources to these earlier parts of ourselves we can begin to “map” and get to know our nervous system intimately. This “mapping”of the nervous system allows for more awareness, resulting in choice and opportunity for renegotiation of earlier implicit contracts and beliefs. 

Contemplative Psychotherapy

My training in contemplative psychotherapy has provided illumination into how our unique experiencing shows up in response to uncertainty. Every human finds ways to manage this perceived existential threat. There is both intelligence and neurosis in strategies to take the best care of ourselves.

With support we simply work within the current experience.

Though we may not meet our own expectations in the way we hope, we may benefit from recognizing a moral obligation to learn how to be kind to ourselves and others. When we work with the power of the present moment experience within this understanding, and implement greater kindness toward our experience, we increase our capacities to allow for an abiding sense of faith, resiliency, and patience on the inside, no matter what “appears to be” occurring on the outside.   

Nature-based Counseling

The grounding of the natural world invites deeper conversations within the psyche. The presence, openness and safety most clients feel when deeply guided in an earthy setting reminds their bodies of what their intrinsic and wild nature holds. I feel passionate about companioning clients into green spaces as a way to reap the benefits of the wisdom, reflection, and spaciousness found there, while providing a technological detox. Attuning to the support and gravity of “earth’s WiFi” can provide guidance, increase our sensual (senses) awareness and connection, and inform a sense of feeling “held” by something larger. Widening our perspective visually through wide open vistas invites the body’s nervous system response to down-regulate and relax. At our core, we are nature.

Providing the body with nature’s food medicine supports a health inner biome that leads to regular and proper waste elimination, essential for a healthy body and mind. Pervasive anxiety and depression is linked to inflammation inside the body. With renewed awareness of food as medicine an enormous health shift can occur simply from eliminating certain foods and emphasizing natural ones. Good mental health arises from a nourished brain and body. 

Movement Therapy

The body speaks with breath, movement and impulses. When we allow and follow primitive impulses to be welcomed and met with care and understanding, while welcoming the intention behind shame or blame, the body begins to speak more and release. The mind employs strategies to inhibit this, so we work both with the mind and the body to bring gentleness, space, safety and patience. Over time, we may come to know the joy of being back in the center of our body by feeling attuned to and contained. The opportunity to work with a safe “other” through gesture and movement allows an unfolding of the body’s experience/energy.

This applies to health and chronic states of pain experienced in the body. The body has a built in allegiance and protection away from pain, so it has strategies of fear and delusion to prevent future pain, especially when trauma and pain from the past are coupled. These conditions are challenging and also possible to journey through, but only with support, proper pacing, and skill.  

Cultivating Presence 

Cultivating the practice of bringing our attention back, again and again, to the present moment develops strength in presence. A practice of presence is a useful skill in anchoring throughout difficult experiences and transitions, and over time, it grows an internal core resiliency and intrinsic experience of Self. The repetition in cultivating an intention of being present allows all the “parts” of us to work together. With awareness, this lessens the chances of reactivity (survival level arousal) and the “displays” of automatic and unconscious responses when we become hijacked by parts who have the intention to protect us. Of course, we still get caught off guard, but our overarching intention and equanimity becomes strengthened.

Grief Counseling

Grief serves as a vehicle through which our prior overwhelming experiences have the potential to be transformed. As a grief counselor, with experience working with death loss in a hospice setting, I have guided clients in how to work within the landscape of the large emotions of sadness, despair, and yearning. It is possible to honor the intelligence of intense emotions, while also finding healthy ways to cope, receive support, and make nourishing choices.

The work of grief counseling can reclaim large portions of the adult self that have remained lost. Through the healthy process of releasing emotion in a sacredly held container there arises more space for spirit to begin to guide and direct you. The impacts are profound. 

Please note: I refer out clients who are working with substance use, eating disorders, abuse, court cases, and prior or current psychiatric issues.   

I look forward to meeting you,

Jessica Baker, LPC

Tending The Ground, LLC

 

 

 

What we encounter, recognize or discover depends to a
large degree upon the quality of our approach.
When we approach with reverence great
things decide to approach us.

– John O’Donohue

 

 

 

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