Hello, I'm Brittany
My work weaves psychology, nervous system awareness, the subconscious mind and intuitive healing together for women who have spent years functioning, overthinking and understanding themselves, while still feel disconnected from the body they're living inside.
EmBodhi Shakti is the container that holds this work. I am the practitioner who meets you inside of it, bringing years of study, lived experience and intuition into the room while allowing what is actually present in you to determine where we go. Through private sessions, day retreats and longer retreat experiences, the work can take many forms, but the intention underneath it remains the same: to bring you back into relationship with yourself and your body.
I have a lot of tools and I'm really good at using them, but I am not the answer.
You are.
We just have to get underneath everything that taught you not to trust that.
My Story
The Catalyst
2020 wasn't the beginning of my story, but it was the catalyst that cracked something open in me that I could no longer put back together the same way.
When the world closed in, my one-bedroom apartment became my office, my gym and essentially my entire existence. What had once been a refuge slowly began to feel like a pressure chamber because there was nowhere to go and very little external movement to quiet what was happening internally.
And the noise became UNBEARABLY loud.
Depression I had known before returned, anxiety tightened its grip and patterns I had become incredibly skilled at functioning around were suddenly impossible to ignore. I had lived with anxiety and depression for years, shaped in part by experiences that taught me vigilance long before I understood what that meant. I knew how to function, how to stay strong and how to keep moving quickly enough that I didn't have to sit too long with what lived underneath it all, but I didn't know how to remain with myself when there was nowhere left to go.
I remember sitting on the edge of my bed one evening staring at the same four walls and feeling, somewhere underneath everything else, that something had to change. I didn't know what that meant yet and I certainly didn't know it would eventually lead here, but I knew I couldn't keep living almost entirely inside my head.
There had to be something beyond white-knuckling my way through life, numbing what hurt and endlessly understanding myself while simultaneously feeling completely disconnected from myself.
I didn't want to spend the rest of my life surviving myself. I wanted to actually feel what it was like to live inside my life.
And that realization cracked the door open.
The Unraveling
I started seeking something deeper because I had done the meds, the therapy and the inpatient stays, and while pieces of those experiences had their place, nothing ever fully clicked for me. I could talk about what had happened and understand myself incredibly well on paper, but there was still an enormous distance between everything I knew about myself and what I actually felt inside my body.
So I began studying.
I started with trauma and the nervous system because I wanted to understand what was happening inside of me beyond a diagnosis or a list of symptoms, and that curiosity eventually led me into Clinical Hypnotherapy, the subconscious mind, breathwork, somatics, energy work, womb healing and the intuitive practices that had already existed within my life in ways I hadn't always known how to name.
The deeper I went, the more I began to feel the difference between understanding myself and actually being in relationship with myself. So much of what I had considered personality had been shaped by the ways I learned to move through life, and I had become incredibly capable of functioning while overriding what my body was communicating. My independence, productivity and ability to keep going weren't inherently bad things that needed to be stripped away, but I began to recognize where they had stopped being choices and become ways of protecting myself from having to feel what happened when I slowed down.
That distinction changed the trajectory of my life and eventually became foundational to the way I work.
My body wasn't an obstacle standing between me and the life I wanted. She had been communicating with me the entire time.
I simply had to learn her language.
The Becoming
EmBodhi Shakti grew from that learning.
She isn't a brand I created because I needed something pretty to put on Instagram. She is the container that has grown around years of lived experience, education, trial and error, intuition and my devotion to understanding what it means to actually return to ourselves.
And I say return intentionally because I don't feel healing is about manufacturing some shinier, more evolved version of yourself. Much of my own work has been the opposite. It has been stripping away what I learned to perform, questioning what I had accepted as truth and slowly becoming intimate enough with myself that I could feel what was actually mine underneath it all.
I've had to look at the places where I outsourced my knowing and where hyper-independence had become something I wore as sovereignty. I've had to learn that being deeply intuitive doesn't exempt me from being incredibly human, and that spirituality isn't meant to remove me from grief, anger, heartbreak, uncertainty or any of the other experiences that come with being alive. If anything, embodiment has asked me to become more willing to experience my humanity instead of constantly trying to transcend it.
I'm still learning how to do that, and I hope I always remain willing to meet the places within myself that ask for more honesty because I cannot ethically ask another woman to become intimate with parts of herself that I continually refuse to meet within my own.
The beauty is that I no longer feel like I live exclusively from the neck up.
I know how to come home to my body now.
And that changed everything.
My Philosophy
I don't feel women need another person telling them who they are.
Most of us have had enough of that already.
We've learned to outsource ourselves in ways so subtle that we barely recognize we're doing it, looking outside ourselves to determine whether our feelings are reasonable, whether we're allowed to want what we want or whether the knowing we feel inside can actually be trusted. Then we can enter healing spaces and unintentionally recreate the exact same dynamic with the person sitting across from us.
I don't want that relationship with you.
I don't want to become another voice inside your head that is louder than your own, and I don't measure the success of our work by how often you need me to tell you what something means. My role isn't to walk your path for you. I'm there beside you, paying very close attention while you walk it, holding the lantern when things become difficult to see and occasionally turning that light toward the place you've been trying very hard not to look.
That last part matters because I am incredibly soft in the way I hold people, but that doesn't mean the work will always feel soft. There may be moments when something I ask activates you or something I reflect back feels uncomfortable, and I don't fear those moments the way I once might have. I will never intentionally take you somewhere I feel you aren't ready to go, but I'll also be damned if I'm going to sit across from you, take your money and help you continue avoiding the very thing you came to me because you were ready to change.
Sometimes comfort is part of what keeps us stuck, although that doesn't mean discomfort is automatically evidence that we're healing either. There is nuance here, and a huge part of embodiment is developing enough relationship with yourself that you can begin to feel the difference between something that genuinely exceeds your capacity and something that feels uncomfortable because it asks you to respond differently than you always have.
That is also why I don't decide what you need before you arrive.
When we sit together, I listen to what you're telling me while paying attention to what is happening underneath the words, and together we follow the thread rather than forcing your experience into a predetermined process. Depending on what comes forward, that may lead us into Clinical Hypnotherapy, somatic work, energy work, breath work, womb healing or another modality within my training. I don't feel the modality itself is the magic; it is simply the tool I reach for based on the woman sitting in front of me and what she is showing me she needs.
My intuition is woven through that work too, but intuition doesn't give me authority over your life. I may feel something before you have language for it, notice a shift you haven't consciously recognized yet or bring something into the room because it keeps asking for my attention, but you still get to feel into whether it belongs to you.
You may disagree with me sometimes, and I actually want there to be enough sovereignty in the room for you to do that.
I'm not interested in teaching you how to agree with me. I'm interested in helping you become intimate enough with yourself that you can feel what is yours without immediately needing someone outside of you to validate it.
Because I don't want your healing to become another place where you abandon yourself.
I want the work we do together to deepen your relationship with yourself enough that when life inevitably becomes uncomfortable, you have more capacity to remain inside your own experience without immediately escaping into your head, someone else's approval or an old pattern that once kept you safe.
Not because the goal is to never need support again. We are human beings and we need one another.
But because needing another person and leaving yourself for another person are not the same thing.
That is sovereignty to me.
And EmBodhi Shakti is the container where I have the beautiful honor of doing that work beside you.
