Meet Kayleigh Eden
Somatic Therapist in California
Virtual Services Available Throughout California
You’re longing to live with love, courage, and authenticity—to remember what it feels like to truly belong in your own body. Yet somewhere along the way, grief, fear, and old stories taught you to shrink, to perform, and to doubt your own magic.
You are not broken, and you are not alone. I help people move through deep grief and emotional transformation, alchemizing pain into a greater capacity for love, connection, and self-trust.
You might feel weighed down by grief or trauma — your own, your family’s, or even the ache of living on a hurting planet. Maybe you’ve tried to hold it all together by people-pleasing, staying “strong,” or disconnecting from your body just to get through the day.
The work we do together isn’t about fixing you; it’s about tending your nervous system so it can finally settle, grieve, and reconnect. Using somatic therapy, ancestral and ecological awareness, and a deep respect for your body’s wisdom, we gently rebuild your capacity to feel rooted in yourself, in community, and in relationship with the Earth.
My Values As A Therapist
Courage
Healing asks us to meet ourselves with honesty, even when it feels uncomfortable. I help clients build the capacity to stay present with their experience rather than abandon themselves.
Embodiment
Our bodies carry truths our minds often override. I guide clients into a relationship with their sensations, rhythms, and intuition so they can make choices rooted in what feels authentic rather than what feels expected.
Cyclical Wisdom
We aren’t meant to live in constant summer. I honor the natural cycles of expansion, contraction, rest, grief, and renewal — helping clients trust the seasons of their own becoming.
Inclusion & Liberation
My work is explicitly decolonial, anti-racist, pro-LGBTQIA+, pro-immigrant, and body-affirming. I believe that hate is a trauma response, and I strive to create spaces where all identities, lineages, and lived experiences are honored with dignity and care. This practice is committed to collective liberation, not just individual healing.
Trauma-Informed Across Generations & Systems
I honor trauma in all its forms—personal, ancestral, and the trauma inflicted by a world shaped by inequality, oppression, and chronic overwhelm. My approach recognizes how these forces shape the nervous system and our capacity to feel safe, connected, and alive. Together, we create the conditions for repair, resilience, and a more grounded sense of belonging.
Joy, Pleasure & Play
I believe joy is medicine. Pleasure, laughter, and creativity offer powerful counter-experiences to pain, allowing the nervous system to soften and reorganize in ways talk alone cannot. In this work, play isn’t a distraction — it’s a pathway to healing.
Lineage
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I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW #120525) in the state of California. I earned my Bachelor’s degree from California State University, Dominguez Hills, where I studied issues of race, class, and gender, and my Master of Social Work from California State University, Long Beach. I completed clinical training across hospice, addiction treatment, and homeless services.
My postgraduate education includes extensive Somatic Experiencing® training through Beginning I–III and Intermediate I–III, as well as additional training in DBT and Internal Family Systems. I bring a lifelong curiosity and a deep commitment to continual learning, ensuring my work remains ethical, embodied, and responsive to the people I serve.
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Somatic Experiencing® (SE), founded by Dr. Peter Levine, is a body-based, trauma-informed therapy that supports nervous system healing by helping the body complete the survival responses it never had the chance to finish. Instead of retelling traumatic events, SE uses sensation, rhythm, intuition, and slow pacing to resolve patterns of overwhelm, freeze, shutdown, and hypervigilance that come from trauma.
I have completed Beginning I through Intermediate III levels of SE training with my teachers Ariel Giarretto, MS, LMFT, SEP, CMT, CSB and Larry Iannotti, SEP™, LCSW, PhD — practitioners who model deep presence, humility, and reverence for the body’s wisdom. This training has been profoundly transformative for me. It expanded my understanding of trauma, and offered a healing framework that is both scientifically grounded and spiritually resonant. It is an honor to carry this lineage forward and support clients in finding greater regulation, resilience, and authentic connection.
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My work is shaped by teachers and storytellers who have expanded my understanding of intuition, earth-based wisdom, and the complex realities of trauma. I am deeply influenced by writers and clinicians who name the intersections of trauma, ecology, justice, and ancestry. This includes Jennifer Mullan’s work on Decolonizing Therapy, Robin Wall Kimmerer, bell hooks, Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands, Peter Levine, and the mythic wisdom of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés.
I am a longtime student of Lindsay Mack of Tarot for the Wild Soul, whose trauma-informed, soul-centered approach helped me rebuild my intuition with compassion and clarity. I have also apprenticed with Julie James of Green Wisdom, whose teachings in community herbalism deepened my relationship with plants as allies, kin, and guides.
These teachers remind me that healing is communal, embodied, ancestral, and intimately tied to land and liberation. Their work continues to guide the way I think, practice, and accompany others through profound transformation.
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My work is also shaped by the people and beings who came before me. I carry a deep connection to my grandmother, Hilary Eden — bold, rebellious, a social worker in Oakland in the 1960s, whose life was rooted in service. She taught me unconditional love, the power of color coordination, and to “Don’t let the bastards get you down!” Her legacy continues to guide the way I practice and move through the world.
My ancestry is 97% Northwestern European, and I am aware of harms within my direct lineage connected to the colonization of the people and land I currently occupy. I hold this history with honesty and responsibility, tending the grief alongside both the ruptures and the resilience it carries. For me, this awareness is a living commitment—to practice in ways that move away from harm and toward repair, accountability, and our shared humanity.
I also honor my beloved black cat, Cat — a companion through many thresholds whose spirit remains woven into my life. This work is a tribute to them and an offering to the future grandchildren, shaped by my commitment to leave a world more connected, more just, and more alive than the one I inherited.
Less Formally
I’m a burlesque performer, herbalist, gardener, and stargazer — often swimming in the ocean or laughing and sharing food with loved ones. I’ve always been someone who listens deeply and notices the subtle things. I’m someone who lives heart forward — who falls in love with the leaves on trees and smiles from strangers. I’ve been a listener, observer, and secret-keeper for as long as I can remember.
Why “The Grief Fairy”
In my lineage, the fairy is a pre-colonial earth spirit—a reminder of a time when people lived in relationship with the land, the seasons, and the unseen. It roots my work in ancestral archetypes and reverence for the earth, while also offering something gentler: innocence, playfulness, and lightness to balance the depth of grief work. Grief asks us to move through darkness and the places we were taught to fear, and the fairy brings just enough magic, tenderness, and curiosity to enter those spaces with courage and care. To me, the Grief Fairy is a guide—reminding us that even in profound loss, beauty, wonder, and the possibility of rebirth remain.
I deeply ascribe to the belief that there are no bad emotions—only energy in motion.
When that motion or impulse is blocked, it can become stuck in the body, looping as it seeks resolution. In my work with clients, the goal is not to eliminate challenging emotions such as grief, rage, fear, or jealousy, but to expand our capacity to hold them as sacred communication from the body—guidance toward our desires, what we love, and what matters enough to protect or align with.
Rather than taking a purely cognitive, top-down approach to therapy, I work somatically, engaging not only the individual body but also our collective nervous systems and our relationship with the earth through the cycles of life, death, and rebirth.
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Grief Therapy
Grief isn’t something to fix—it is a sacred form of communication from the body, a teacher that reflects how deeply we have loved. I hold grief not only as acute loss, but as part of the water many of us are swimming in, shaped by personal heartbreak and a world that has not made space for mourning or tenderness. In therapy, we slow down and listen to how grief is being held somatically, expanding your capacity to stay present with love and loss at the same time. Together, we tend what has been lost with honesty and care, so grief can become a heart-expander rather than a weight—supporting a more connected, loving, and fully alive way of living.
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Therapy for Trauma and PTSD
Trauma is the body remembering what it had to do to stay alive. It is the imprint of moments that were too much, too fast, or too soon, held in the nervous system long after the threat has passed. I believe trauma responses are not signs of pathology, but expressions of devotion — evidence of a body that organized itself around protection when safety and support were not available. In therapy, we slow down and listen to the language of the nervous system, making space for unfinished protection to complete itself with care. Together, we tend what has been held with tenderness and courage, learning how to carry what has shaped you in a way that restores agency, deepens connection, and devotion to what matters most.
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Somatic Experiencing Therapy
Somatic Experiencing® is a gentle, body-based way of healing trauma, grief, and chronic stress by working directly with the nervous system. Rather than reliving the past or forcing emotional breakthroughs, we listen to the subtle language of the body and allow healing to unfold at a pace your system can trust.
Your body is not broken — it is wise and devoted to your survival. In our work together, I help you learn its language again so your nervous system can release what it no longer needs to carry and remember how to move toward safety, connection, and rest.
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Ancestral Trauma Therapy
Ancestral trauma refers to the ways grief, fear, and survival responses are passed down through families and cultures and live on in the nervous system. Even when we do not have stories or memories of what our lineage endured, the body still remembers. We slow down and listen to sensation, breath, and impulse, allowing inherited patterns of protection to gently unwind at a pace your body can trust.
I believe your body is your first home and the keeper of your lineage’s history. In our work together, I offer deep attunement and help your nervous system release what no longer needs to be carried forward so you can move toward safety, connection, and a life shaped more by choice than by inherited survival.
Ready to Begin?
Healing begins the moment you decide you don’t have to do this alone. If you’re ready to listen to your body, tend the grief you’ve been carrying, and build a more rooted, connected way of living, I’m here to walk with you. Reach out today, and let’s see what brilliance is lurking just beneath the surface.