Nisenan land | Sacramento, California
Honoring the healing function of the imagination
Offerings
Imaginal Care
Cristina Benitez Allen LMFT, (she/her) is a queer Latinx Chicana mother, writer and somatic psychotherapist with over thirteen years of clinical experience in the field of Depth Psychology. She is a ritualist, trained as a priestess in sacred arts. She is rooted in animist earth-honoring values, actively reclaiming her ancestral healing traditions from Mexico. Her private practice is virtual and based in the unceded lands of the Nisenan known as Sacramento, California.
She works with clients in a holistic approach to connect the collective wisdom of the body and soul through imagination, intuition, mindfulness and dreamwork. Her treatment focus is on relationship, cultural wounds, trauma resolution, ancestral lineage repair, animist parenting and reconnecting to the sacred. Read more about her journey.
Psychotherapy
Speaking Engagements
Workshops
Community Healing / Ritual
Meditation Offerings
“When an individual has been swept up into the world of symbolic mysteries, nothing comes of it; nothing can come of it, unless it has been associated with the earth, unless it has occurred when that individual was in the body.... Only if you first return to your body, to your earth, can individuation take place; only then does the thing become true.”
Methodologies
Therapeutic Approach
We have come along way since the beginnings of traditional psychoanalysis, "the talking cure." Developments in humanistic, child development, family systems, attachment and trauma theory informed the work further and brings us to our current evolution of knowledge in neuropsychology. While this serves a great function to define symptoms and dynamics of the human condition, ultimately, to attain and embody an experience of wholeness, we embark on a practice of coming back to our true nature, again and again. Find out more.
Relational Animacy
Above all, being relational is essential to the well being of the individual. It is a core need to be seen, heard, and valued for our unique self. Healing emotional wounds cannot take place out of relationship to self or others as nature, and holding respect for greater forces. Tending to this unifying principle of interconnectedness in the great web of life, gives us an opportunity to deepen into compassion, participate more fully with humility, and take radical responsibility for how we are relating to all the phenomena.
Imaginal + Dream Weaving
Imaginal Psychology as coined by James Hillman recognizes the archetypal dimension forged by the Jungian tradition. It considers the deepest patterns of the psyche, as aspects of the soul that engage through mythopoetic images. These images and symbols emerge spontaneously from the individual, as we find in dreams, and offer a sense of meaning in the process of soul-making. Often psychological symptoms, from this perspective, offer great clues to the suffering and the requests implored by the soul.
Hakomi Mindful Somatics
Hakomi is a method of applied mindfulness to support discovery of habitual patterns that organize in the mind and body to sustain the individual. Hakomi is based on Daoist and Buddhist principles, rooted in non-violence, mind-body holism, mindfulness, unity, and organicity. It is a gentle, deep, and effective method to support clients in resourcing new options for a more embodied, resilient, and true expression of self.
Mindful body awareness offers an invaluable way of engaging with the totality of experience. Deepening in this way can provide release of tension and a gateway for the imagination to offer insight, guidance, and resources in the development of consciousness.
Medicine Journey
With embodied ceremonial wisdom and reverence for the sacred, working with medicines to support expanded states of consciousness bridges us to the awareness of our symbiotic relationship with nature, ancestors, and the cosmos as central to wellness, purpose and interbeing.
Weaving relational, archetypal, somatic practices, animist and Indigenous wisdom traditions, ritual safety is key in providing a well held medicine circle to support the healing that wants to unfold.
