Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Nicteha Cohen & Jessica Forman. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Nicteha Cohen & Jessica Forman thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

At Salt + Gold: The Somatic Home, our mission is to help people feel deeply connected to themselves, their spaces, and the natural world through a unique blend of somatic awareness, interior design, and ritual. But our mission didn’t begin in a boardroom or come from a clever marketing idea—it was born from lived experience, forged in illness, longing, and the slow work of returning home to the body.

Nicteha Cohen and Jessica Forman, the co-founders of Salt + Gold, each walked winding, nontraditional paths to arrive at this work. For Nicteha, an unstable and nomadic childhood left her without a consistent sense of safety or home. What seemed like romantic freedom was, in reality, deeply disorienting. Later in life, a long battle with Lyme disease forced her to stay in one place for the first time—and in that stillness, something profound happened. She began to understand the deep relationship between her inner world and her physical space. Her home became not just a container, but a catalyst for healing. What emerged was a completely new modality: The Somatic Home—a practice that integrates design, nervous system awareness, and soulful presence.

For Jessica, a similar thread wove through her life. Her mind processed the world differently—subtly, poetically, deeply attuned to nuance. She learned, through struggle and sensitivity, that her environment either fragmented her or brought her back into coherence. Through years of ritual, nature connection, and embodied learning, she came to see home as sacred ground—an altar for daily life, and a place where the soul can safely unfurl.

Our mission is meaningful to us because it is the very medicine we needed—and in many ways, still need. This work did not come from textbooks or trends. It was shaped by ceremony, illness, grief, devotion, and the body’s own wisdom. It was grown from the ground up—not as a product, but as a practice.

At its core, our work is about helping people remember how to stay: in their bodies, in their lives, in their homes. In a culture that often pushes for more, faster, louder—we invite slowness, depth, and beauty. We don’t offer prescriptive solutions. We offer deep listening, creative co-creation, and a return to what has always been true: that home is not just where you live—it’s how you live.

This mission is not separate from who we are. It is who we are. And every client we work with is not a transaction, but an invitation to walk this path of remembering, together.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

We’re Salt + Gold: The Somatic Home—a practice rooted in the belief that your home isn’t just where you live; it’s how you live. We help people create environments that support their nervous systems, reflect their true selves, and invite a deeper sense of coherence between body, space, and spirit.

Our work lives at the intersection of somatics, intuitive design, nervous system education, and holistic coaching. It was born not from theory, but through lived experience. We—Nicteha Cohen and Jessica Forman—each walked long, nonlinear paths shaped by instability, chronic illness, neurodivergence, and a deep desire to feel at home in our bodies and environments. Our personal journeys led us to discover something vital: that our spaces were not separate from our healing—they were central to it.

What We Offer
Salt + Gold offers a deeply personalized process we call The Somatic Home—a body-based approach to space design that blends nervous system regulation, spatial awareness, and intuitive ritual. Through guided sessions, we help clients uncover how their environments are influencing their internal state—and how they can intentionally shape their spaces to support ease, creativity, clarity, and well-being.

This isn’t interior design in the traditional sense. And it’s not therapy. It’s something in between—a new discipline that understands the home as both a physical and energetic ecosystem. Through somatic inquiry, values-based reflection, and hands-on support, we help people create homes that feel like home.

Who We Work With + What We Solve
We support people who are highly sensitive, in transition, healing from burnout or trauma, or simply craving a more intentional life. Many of our clients have done years of personal work but feel their environments are holding them in outdated patterns. Others feel overwhelmed by their homes—scattered, disconnected, or overstimulated. We help them create spaces that soothe their nervous systems, reflect their evolving identity, and become a foundation for sustainable change.

We don’t offer one-size-fits-all solutions. What sets us apart is our ability to listen deeply—to your body, your rhythms, your story—and co-create from that place. We move slowly. With care. One corner, one breath, one pattern at a time.

Why This Work Matters
Most approaches to design overlook the inner world. Most coaching or healing work overlooks the power of the physical environment. We bridge that gap. We understand that your home is constantly sending messages to your body—about safety, possibility, and presence. When your home and nervous system are in sync, lasting transformation becomes not only possible, but embodied.

This is not about trends or perfection. It’s about coherence. About coming home to yourself—through your space.

What We Want You to Know
You don’t have to keep living in survival mode. You don’t have to wait for your life to slow down before you feel grounded. Your home can help you get there now. Not through radical renovations or expensive makeovers—but through simple, intentional shifts that support the way you actually live.

We’re most proud of the depth and integrity of this work. It’s real. It’s relational. And it’s built to last.

If your body is craving spaciousness…
If your spirit longs for beauty and ritual…
If your home feels like a reflection of who you’ve been, not who you’re becoming…

We invite you to begin. To slow down. To come home.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

A big lesson we had to unlearn—especially me, Jessica—was the belief that we had to do it all alone.

Before Salt + Gold, both of us had tried (and tried again) to build businesses on our own. We each had powerful, soulful work inside us, and a deep desire to share it with the world—but translating that into something tangible, clear, and sustainable was incredibly difficult.

For me, the vision was there. The sensitivity, the depth, the care. But trying to hold the entire process alone—conceptualizing, naming, structuring, designing, promoting—was overwhelming. My mind, which moves in nonlinear, poetic ways, struggled to organize all the moving pieces. I would get stuck in cycles of refinement, unable to get the clarity I needed to fully bring the work forward.

There was also a deeper narrative running underneath: that real success meant doing it all myself. That partnership might dilute the vision or slow it down. But in truth, going it alone kept the work smaller than it wanted to be—and left me burned out and doubting my capacity.

Everything changed when Nicteha and I entered into partnership. There was a kind of exhale, a yes. Suddenly, I didn’t have to figure it all out alone. We could bring our strengths, minds, and hearts together—and what emerged was more coherent, more grounded, and more alive than anything we could’ve built on our own. We became more than the sum of our parts.

The Somatic Home itself is rooted in the idea that your environment reflects your inner world, and vice versa. What we learned through this process is that co-creation is part of a healthy ecosystem—whether it’s in a home, a nervous system, or a business. We don’t heal or thrive in isolation. We’re meant to do it together.

Unlearning the myth of the lone genius was humbling—and liberating. It made space for something much more beautiful to grow.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

One story that illustrates our resilience is Nicteha’s experience of living with chronic Lyme disease—and how that season of limitation became the unexpected seed of this work.

In 2007, Nicteha’s life took a sharp turn when she contracted Lyme disease. It was debilitating—she was forced to quit her work as a tour guide and spent nearly a decade mostly homebound, often in a state of physical and emotional exhaustion. For someone who had lived much of her life on the move—traveling, exploring, staying in motion—this stillness was jarring. She found herself in a 400-square-foot apartment, with little access to the outer world. The space became both a sanctuary and a kind of prison.

But something powerful began to happen in that tiny apartment. Without the distractions of a busy life, she turned inward—and inward still. Her background in design, somatic therapy, Feng Shui, and meditation slowly wove themselves together through daily, intimate engagement with her environment. Rearranging a shelf, shifting the light, adding texture—these weren’t just aesthetic decisions, but acts of survival. Of meaning-making. Of staying present in a body that often felt unbearable.

This space—so limited in square footage—became a crucible of transformation. It didn’t “fix” her illness, but it changed her. It slowed her down. It asked her to live in a completely new way. And it taught her to see with new eyes.

That time became the quiet birthplace of The Somatic Home—the modality that would eventually become Salt + Gold. It was not born from ambition, but from necessity. From the kind of patience and presence that only emerge when everything else is stripped away.

Resilience, in our world, isn’t about pushing through or “bouncing back.” It’s about deepening into. Into discomfort, into relationship, into a quieter kind of strength. That season of constraint became a womb of potential—and its lessons continue to shape how we show up, for ourselves and for the people we serve.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thesomatichome.com
• Instagram: @thesomatichome
• Facebook: Salt + Gold: The Somatic Home