We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Orion Queer a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Orion, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.
I’ve taken many risks in my career path to get to where I am now. Today, I’m a Healing Companion and Somatic Wizard, but I started off as a farmer.
Before I moved to Los Angeles in 2019, I was a farmer in the Northeast. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania and then lived in rural Maine for 7 years, growing organic vegetables & working at a creamery making cheese out of goat and sheep milk. I even spent time apprenticing at a traditional biodynamic butcher shop in Germany so I could learn traditional German charcuterie and sustainable animal husbandry practices and bring them back to the states. I thought I’d be farming for the rest of my life. I worked at a handful of farms over the years with the intention of learning & preparing to run my own farm someday. I had dreams of opening an organic local butcher shop and getting my community into nose-to-tail cuisine.
Suddenly and unexpectedly, tides changed and my intuition brought me to the city life. That was my first big risk, a leap of faith into an entirely different life. I was beginning to unravel my gender identity and knew that staying where I was would have been a tough, isolating road. I needed community and a wider acceptance of the fresh self discovery I was experiencing. I needed the spaciousness to step into who I was becoming. I felt called to a career path supporting queer and trans youth and was drawn to counseling. I found an LGBT Psychology program in Los Angeles and decided to move across the country to get my Masters in Clinical Psychology. I thought I wanted to become a therapist.
I went into the program very green about trauma and psychology. I just knew I wanted to support people, help them feel less alone and more resourced to live life true to themselves. The program was a huge awakening for me. I got exposed to a lot of different theories about why people struggle and experience pain. I learned that trauma gets stored in the body, and how it can repeat itself. I took a class in Jungian Psychology which opened me up to the world of symbology, colors, and art as a way of communicating with our unconscious. This led to many major openings in my own personal mental health journey that totally rocked my world and turned my belief system entirely upside down.
Then I did my traineeship at a clinic, where I started working with clients for the first time under supervision. This was also my first exposure to working in the traditional mental health field. Ultimately, this is where I had another major wake up call. I felt like I was actually being trained to surveil, document, and control my clients and their behaviors rather than actually offer healing support. Putting the theories I was learning into real practice made me see how manipulative many of the treatments I was being taught really were. I felt it was really odd that most of my training involved learning how to categorize someone’s symptoms into the correct label rather than how to actually be with the client and hold space for what they were experiencing. Once I was actually in the room with a client, I didn’t really know what to do other than investigate their symptoms and then slap a label on it. I often wondered… what next? There were no real answers, and I was mostly on my own to figure it out. While we talked a lot about supporting our client’s growth and healing, I never really learned how to do it.
I just want to say here that I think most people working in this field mean well, and are doing the best they can with the tools and trainings they’ve had. But I knew this couldn’t possibly be it. I started looking further for more answers.
I also discovered that the mental health field was not very supportive or welcoming of trans folks. Although I was working in an LGBT supervision group at the clinic, which openly advertised its services to the LGBT community on their website, I was not allowed to be out as trans. Incoming LGBT clients could request an LGBT therapist, but once they were assigned to us, we were not allowed to tell them that we were, in fact, a member of the LGBT community. Make it make sense, right? Let me explain exactly how nonsensical this really was. In the initial intake, clients would be asked about their gender identity and sexuality. This is standard gathering of demographic information. If they mentioned being a member of the LGBT community, they’d be asked if they’d like to request an LGBT therapist. If they said yes, their intake form would be marked to be sent to our LGBT supervision group. From there, our supervisor would assign us the clients who requested us. Once a client was assigned to us, we’d reach out to them to schedule our first appointment. At no point during any of this were we ever permitted to tell them we were actually a member of the LGBT community and they’d gotten what they’d requested.
I know for a lot of folks reading this who’ve never worked in the mental health field, this probably doesn’t make any sense and it’s hard to understand why this would be the case. But if you’ve spent time in this field, you would know how intensely the field takes “non-disclosure.” The idea is that as a therapist, we should never disclose anything personal about ourselves or our lives. We should remain a “blank-slate.” They also said I wasn’t allowed to tell my clients my pronouns, either. Remember, I was working specifically with LGBT clients, many of whom used a wide variety of pronouns, but even so, I was told not to tell them mine. The idea was that clients should be able to project whatever they saw onto their therapists, and that this was somehow supposed to be healing. I can’t even begin to describe the impact this type of mindset can have in terms of boundaries. Clearly, this doesn’t teach our clients healthy boundaries, and it also encourages us to have very poor boundaries as therapists, putting both therapist and client at risk of great harm.
As a newly out transman early in my transition, not being allowed to be out as trans at work or tell people my pronouns was incredibly devastating and confusing. I was just starting testosterone for the first time, on the waitlist for top surgery, and trying on men’s clothing for the first time. As you can imagine, it’s hard to change your entire wardrobe all at once unless you have a ton of cash handy. This means that some days I was still wearing my old wardrobe of women’s clothes, while slowly trying to build up a stash of new men’s clothing. I knew that my appearance would be changing drastically in the coming year and my clients would certainly notice. But I wasn’t allowed to say anything about it? I was supposed to just let them continue calling me she/her? I had not expected this when I applied to work in a clinic that offered LGBT services on their website.
After I graduated my Master’s program, I knew I was no longer interested in pursuing a career as a therapist or getting my license. I had no interest in applying to more clinics that would ask me to be closeted. I also didn’t want to work for free for 2-3 more years to accrue enough hours to be eligible for licensure.
I left the program with a lot of questions. I was interested in deeper healing than what was being offered by the field. I wanted to learn how to really hold space for people. Not just label and categorize them, but how to really help them. I had fallen out of love with the diagnostic system and started to realize that it was just a myriad of ways to describe the same thing: people in pain, who were seeking healing. People who’d been let down in their lives and didn’t know how to get themselves out of the rubble pile they were in, who needed a hand to help them scramble out and back to shore. People who felt isolated and needed authentic connection and attunement.
Through this questioning and seeking deeper answers, I found somatics. I started working with my mentor Char Azad who described herself as a Somatic Companion (cominghomehealing.com) and had never been a therapist. In our work together, I experienced true healing & authentic connection for the first time in my own healing journey. This opened up a whole new world of healing for me that lay outside the realm of therapy. As my nervous system became more resilient and I stopped carrying around so much trauma in my body, I felt as though my life truly began. Life actually became mine to live. I knew I wanted to bring this same healing to my clients.
My somatic work with Char also taught me healthy boundaries, which like many of us, I did not grow up experiencing. I discovered that our boundaries and needs live in our bodies, and without a connection to our body’s sensations, we won’t know what they are. Reconnecting with this language of the body was deeply empowering and ushered in a ton of relief and ease into my life.
This is when I took the biggest risk of my career. I’d just gone into tens of thousands of dollars in debt for a career I was now leaving behind. Most folks who left the therapy profession went on to become coaches, but I didn’t like that title either because it still had an air of authority to it. I didn’t want that anymore. I knew people knew themselves and their needs better than anyone else ever could. I wanted to support them on their healing journeys as a friend might, not “treat” them or control their behavior, because we are not broken machines needing to be fixed. Inspired by Char, I, too, decided to come up with my own term to describe this flavor of space holding I was wanting to offer. I decided to become a Healing Companion. I also later enrolled in the Somatic Experiencing Professional Training Program so I could learn how to support client’s somatically in the way Char supported me.
Naming myself with a new term was scary. I wondered, would anyone know what I do? Would people be able to find me? Would I get enough clients to make a living?
These fears have proven to not be an issue at all. I have found that people are looking for exactly what I offer. There are a lot of folks who have been let down or harmed by the mental health system who are looking for alternative healing modalities and feel relief in finding my website. There are many folks out there who’ve been in therapy for years, some even decades, not seeing the changes they were seeking. I feel so deeply honored to get to do the work that I do. I love working with my clients every day. It is incredibly fulfilling and rewarding to get to be myself and live my life authentically and support my clients in doing the same.
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?
I’m a Healing Companion and Somatic Wizard. My work is a unique blend of somatic coaching, energy healing, and peer support. I help folks connect with their bodies and intuition in nervous-system attuned ways. I support folks to connect with their magic and the magic all around us. The way I got here is an interesting story through my own healing portal of complex trauma and chronic illness.
While I was still in graduate school, I started experiencing a myriad of concerning health symptoms. It started out with sharp pain in my toes, then pins and needles in my feet, which grew into restless legs that would keep me awake all night in irritation and discomfort. Then my arms and hands also began falling asleep anytime I wasn’t moving them, for example if I was sitting in class with my hands by my sides they’d get pins and needles. I went to the doctor at one point but never heard back anything conclusive on the tests. (Later I found out my Rheumatoid factor was really high but they never called to tell me this so I didn’t know, I thought they’d found nothing). My right knee started aching and then I started experiencing shooting pain up my leg from my knee. Then it started swelling. I eventually ended up with a knee so swollen it was the size of a grapefruit and I couldn’t walk on it. This is when I returned to the doctor and they sent me to the ER, where they drained the fluid and ran a bunch of tests and found nothing except for, again, a high rheumatoid factor. I saw a rheumatologist who diagnosed me with rheumatoid arthritis, which did not make any intuitive sense to me. I was 28 years old, how could I have arthritis? Also, the whole immune-system-attacking-itself thing never made any intuitive sense to me either. But I didn’t have any other answers at the time so I took the meditations prescribed and they shot steroids into my knee for the inflammation. The knee swelled up again within days of getting it drained and getting the steroids. I went back to the ER and was finally sent home with crutches, which they honestly should have given me the first time around. I called my rheumatologist who told me there’s no way my knee would swell again that quickly, “joints don’t do that” he said, “steroids usually last 3 months, come back for another shot then” he said. He hung up the phone when I tried asking him more questions that he clearly didn’t have answers to. The pain of the swelling was so bad I remember literally screaming into my pillow and punching my mattress just to deal. The pain meds they’d given me did nothing.
The escalation of me finally getting sent home with crutches and no answers happened within weeks of me graduating from my Masters program. I’d just decided not to pursue a therapist license because I couldn’t find my answers in the mental health system, and now I was also awakening to the limitations of the medical system as well. I was bounced around from specialist to specialist, seeing rheumatologists, orthopedic surgeons, none of whom had any answers for me. I eventually deduced myself that it could be Lyme disease. I’d gone camping in rural Maine a year and a half prior and there had certainly been ticks all over me the entire time. I asked for a test and it was positive. I was prescribed a few weeks of antibiotics, but my symptoms only continued to escalate. My brain fog got so bad I started losing vision. The edges of my vision became dark, blurred, and fuzzy and I stopped being able to drive. I became so sensitive to the light that I was constantly being blinded while driving and couldn’t keep my eyes on the road. I couldn’t look at screens without getting super disoriented, the light was too bright and it was hard to focus on letters. My left knee began to swell as well and I had to get a wheelchair as I could no longer hold myself up on crutches. Then my wrists began to swell and I couldn’t even wheel myself around some days. When one side of my face started going numb and I couldn’t feel my fingers touching it, I was referred to an infectious disease specialist who sent me to the ER for Lyme Meningitis. I spent 8 days in the hospital hooked up to IV steroids and antibiotics. They took tests, including a spinal tap, and found nothing. They concluded I was “fine” and sent me home. Scared to bathe alone for fear of falling, I had someone sit outside the door just in case. Once I couldn’t even get to the bathtub myself because my bathroom wasn’t accessible so my sister had to carry me in. I couldn’t do my own laundry, couldn’t prepare my own meals, couldn’t change my bedsheets. I lived off of whatever food I could keep by my bedside: meal replacement drinks, beef jerky, bags of nuts, rice cakes. I was so dizzy, disoriented, and exhausted all the time. Life got real, real scary and no doctor or specialist could help me.
I started looking for answers outside the traditional medical model. Throughout this time, I’d already been dipping my toes into somatic work with a different practitioner who had definitely sent me further down my path but ultimately wasn’t the best fit for me. It was during this time, when I was at my lowest and sickest, that I began working with Char. That’s when things really started to change. I started realizing that the way my nervous system held onto my trauma was impacting the way my Lyme disease was affecting me. It was like my frozen nervous system was so used to hanging onto gunk and keeping it all stored and stashed away that it was doing the same thing with Lyme as well. My nervous system wasn’t in flow, and neither was my body. It was stagnant. And because I spent so much time sick in bed, my movements being so limited, I’d become even more stagnant. But it was also terrifying to move my body, because if I overextended myself, I’d get seriously hurt and my joints would swell. I learned how to attune to my body enough that I could start introducing gentle somatic movements, but also recognize when it was time to pause. This gentle, safe movement reduced a lot of my inflammation. And the specific somatic movements I was learning were supporting me in coming out of a chronically frozen nervous system, which brought so much relief to both my mental and physical health. This brought clarity to my intuition and decision making. I started being able to distinguish between something that would support my body’s healing and something that would not support it, because I was learning how to attune to my body’s language via its sensations.
This ability to discern helped me explore and discover other healing modalities that ultimately also paired well with somatics in supporting me on my journey of healing from both my complex trauma and Lyme disease. I started working with a psychedelic somatic practitioner, who used somatics with a small amount of microdosing to attune to my nervous system and release stored reactions of flight or flight from my body. My chronic tension and painfully stiff neck disappeared. I started feeling less afraid of the world and other people and could walk around holding my head up high instead of cowering in shame.
I started going to yoga every week, which helped me get into a routine of gently moving my body regularly. Somatics helped me know which movements I could do and which ones I couldn’t, as well as how far to push myself and when to stop. It made movement safe for me. It also made being in public and talking to people about my body’s needs feel more comfortable and less threatening, because I had healthier boundaries. It’s scary for many people to show up to a gym in a wheelchair and be the only one in a yoga class who has to do all the exercises on the floor. Somatics helped me feel confident and comfortable enough to navigate this social side of it all.
Then I started going to the Korean spas and used cold plunges alternating with the hot tub and sauna. Because of what I’d learned about somatics, I knew how long I needed to stay in each tub and when it was time to move. I also knew how to experiment with different movements inside the water to support releasing stuck energy, increasing my circulation, and moving into a regulated nervous system state. Because I was still in a wheelchair, the water was a perfect place for me to get to move around my body without the pull of gravity. I’d also been going to aquatic physical therapy which taught me lots of movements I could do in the water to slowly start to strengthen my legs and joints again. The rotations of hot and cold water paired with the somatic exercises I’d been learning completely got rid of my brain fog, dissociation, and the pins and needles in my legs and feet. I started being able to feel and move my toes and fingers again, and they regained their full range of motion.
Eventually I knew it was time to get increased support with regaining muscle strength. I’d been in a wheelchair for a year and a half and had lost so much muscle. I wanted to learn how to walk again and knew I couldn’t do it alone. This is when I started working with a personal trainer at Everybody Gym. When we began, I could only do floor exercises sitting or laying down. I couldn’t even do cat/cow, my knees and wrists were too weak and inflamed. Again, somatics helped me navigate all of this. It made me capable of communicating with my trainer what I was feeling and experiencing which allowed us to do this work safely and effectively.
After almost a year of personal training, I started walking again, first with a walker, then a cane. Now, I can freewalk again! That’s what I call walking without any mobility aids.
Since then, I’ve learned about how certain fruits and vegetables can heal our bodies and nervous systems. Again, guided by my intuitive discernment, which somatics gave me the gift of, I’ve navigated nourishing my body with healing foods. My healing has sped up exponentially and I feel healthier than I have in my entire life. I have more energy than I did in high school and I’m 31 years old. Looking back, I realize I was probably sick then too. Now I only need about 8 hours of sleep and I can get so much done in a day without a problem. I’m almost never tired anymore. Last weekend, I just went camping with my friends and we hiked 4 miles in one day!
And this is where my journey really became magical because, well, I found magic. Through all of this, I started to realize that magic was real. You know, I was one of those kids who grew up waiting to get their Hogwarts letter on their 11th birthday but it never came. And now, in my thirties, I’m starting to realize that magic is, in fact, all around us. I take a walk around my neighborhood and I see the portals all around me, in the space between the tree branches and leaves, their rustling ushering me into a world more expansive and alive than I ever imagined existed.
Somatics didn’t just help me heal my complex trauma and Lyme disease. It also opened me up to a world of sensation, feeling, and wisdom that I never knew was possible. With my increased senses, increased nervous system capacity, increased inner felt sense of safety, and a deeper connection to inner confidence and knowing, my intuitive capabilities started opening up. This is when I decided to start calling myself a Somatic Wizard as well as a Healing Companion, to really honor my natural magic. It’s been such a fun journey!
All of this is what I help my clients do. I’ve been through my own portal and came out the other side. I help you navigate your own healing journeys with the help of somatics and magic. Healing Companionship is what I call my unique blend of coaching, energy healing, and peer support. You can think of me like a friend with a giant toolbox to share who accompanies you on this journey. I have somatic tools, communication tools, relational tools, and energy tools to offer you the attunement you need to navigate moving out of fear & stagnancy into a state of flow and ease. I offer 1:1 companionship, relational conflict support (where we use somatics and energy healing to support you in holding space for your tough conversations), and groups.
I’m a gentle riverbed for the river that is you. I provide a soft, sandy, flexible container that moves with and is moved by you, while you become free to flow in the direction you were always meant to flow in.
You are Magic, and Magic is everywhere.
Let’s do some Magic together.
I hold space both online and in-person at my office in Everybody Gym’s Wellness Center in Cypress Park, Los Angeles.
Other than training/knowledge, what do you think is most helpful for succeeding in your field?
It’s a cliché, but it’s a cliché for a reason: you have to take really good care of yourself. People misunderstand this statement a lot, which is why it often gets dismissed as shallow advice. I think sometimes people hear that and think this means they have to take a lot of bubble baths or something. And so they do take a lot of bubble baths, or drink a lot of tea, but they’re still feeling super drained by their work with clients and struggling to hold space for others in a way that supports themselves as well. So they think, well I’m taking bubble baths and drinking tea and having spa days and going to therapy! I’m doing all the things! What is wrong? What is missing? And after that folks start to think either there’s something wrong with them, or this is just the way things are, things are just supposed to be hard and the pain of carrying it all is simply inevitable. And this just isn’t true. It doesn’t have to be that way. Holding space for people can be joyful, easeful, and nourishing.
Heck, if you love bubble baths, go ahead and take as many as you want. Drink all the tea. Go to all the spas. These will be supportive, if our nervous systems know how to access them. If our nervous systems know how to relax, how to settle, all of these activities can be restorative.
But what often happens is, our nervous systems don’t know how to relax, so even if we give them lots of opportunities to relax and release, they don’t. They hold onto stuff from our clients because they don’t know how to release it.
That’s where somatic work comes in. It helps our bodies learn the rhythm of tension and release. We can be with our clients tough stuff, and we can also release it so we don’t carry it around with us. This all happens in the body. It’s not something our mind does. It’s not something we can just read about and follow a guideline for and then boom, our bodies start releasing things. We have to learn it by doing. Our bodies need to be guided through learning how to release, learning that it’s safe enough to not have to hold it all.
If we can learn how to sit with our own discomfort, pain, and tension, we start to build bigger capacity to be with our clients’ discomfort, pain, and tension. A big part of building our capacity for this means learning how to help our nervous system return to flow. The freedom to flow from pain to pleasure, discomfort to comfort, tension to release, and back again.
This makes our work more sustainable, enjoyable, pleasurable, and best of all, nourishing.
Your body will thank you, and your clients will too, because they’ll feel your ease and it will be contagious!
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
I had to unlearn a lot of beliefs about money and helping people. I grew up in a community where there were a lot of different toxic beliefs around money. There was this idea that if you loved someone, you’d do it for free. Free labor was considered a show of care. Except, it was expected, which is kind of ironic. You can’t really show someone authentic care when it’s demanded of you, right? Then it’s not even coming from an authentic place but from a place of fear and obligation. Asking for payment for work you did would have been very offensive and equated with being selfish or “only in it for the money” or even that you were taking advantage of the person. How backwards, right? Like, if I’m the one doing free labor… Maybe I’m the one being taken advantage of? But anyway, toxic beliefs don’t often make any intuitive sense when they’re looked at with a wider lens.
There’s also a lot of cultural beliefs out there around money and care work I had to disentangle both for myself and with my clients. There’s this idea that paying for care work signifies a lack of authentic relationship. Some folks come to me saying they don’t want to have to pay for friendship, they just want real friends. I think this mindset is sad and also clearly there’s some shame in there around needing care. Also, I am a real friend! I’m a real human who is choosing to spend time with my clients from a place of authentic joy in connecting. My responses, shares, and words are all real, and my work is quite vulnerable for both myself and my clients. If I didn’t feel a genuine desire to connect with someone, I wouldn’t accept them as a client. They wouldn’t be a good fit. Authentic connection is the basis of my work and I think the felt sense of the attunement this offers is what allows the healing to truly take place.
There’s no shame in needing care, and there’s no shame in paying for it. In fact, I’d say quite the opposite–it’s extremely cool and empowering to notice you need something and go out there and get it!
We live in a world that is currently very isolated. Many of us are carrying around a bunch of relational trauma that makes authentic connection with others challenging, or even scary. So many of us are lonely and don’t feel accepted for who we really are. Or maybe we don’t even know how to show who we really are to the people we love, which leaves us feeling lonely. The cool thing is, there’s a real big need for authentic connection out there in your communities. You’re not the only one. Doing somatic work helps us unlearn and shed our trauma around connection, so that we can learn how to connect in ways that are safer for our nervous systems. When our nervous systems feel safer engaging in this way, we are more free to open up to others, explore social connections, and get to know people. The cool thing is, in our work we also learn communication tools that help us communicate in ways that are safer for our nervous system. This makes connecting a breeze and most clients find their communities grow the longer they do our work. They start building new friendships and relationships and finally begin to feel a sense of true belonging.
So much of connecting with people requires us to be comfortable with some discomfort. Think about it. Striking up a conversation with a stranger at your local venue brings up a lot of discomfort for most folks. But what if you had the tools to be with a little discomfort and it didn’t feel overwhelming? Think of the possibilities this would open up. Somatics is so helpful for this.
When I first started out doing this work 3.5 years ago, talking about payment was the absolute hardest part of my job. I felt so uncomfortable and guilty accepting payment for my care. Now, that’s all gone. I’ve realized that I cannot truly show up to help someone if I’m not taken care of myself. I can’t help my clients heal if I’m stressed about making rent or unsure if I’ll have enough money for groceries and my medical needs. I have way more healing energy to share with my clients when my life is full and abundant, and this speeds up their healing, too.
Today, I feel so much joy that my clients pay me. To me, it’s a beautiful, powerful mutual exchange of care. I show up for you and meet your needs in this way that is deeply transformative, and you show up for me by making sure I can afford to keep a roof over my head, food on my table, and in my beautiful cat Mallow’s food dish. You take care of me and Mallow and I take care of you. How f*cking beautiful is that? I feel grateful for my client’s care every day. I’ve gotten to do the work of my dreams for the last 3.5 years as my sole source of income and I’m beyond grateful. My clients paying me allows me to dedicate my entire life to healing. And they get to reap the benefits by receiving my care, which would not be possible if I didn’t get to spend so much time with it. What a deeply powerful and joyful exchange.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://orionqueer.com
- Instagram: @orionqueer
- Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/ orion-queer-44a71631a
Image Credits
All photos belong to me.