ABOUT 

Rachel Halder ❍ Somatic Soul Work

✴︎ Who This Work Is For ✴︎

My people are the deep-feelers.

The edge-walkers.
The sensitive, the brilliant, the exhausted.
The neurodivergent and “other-ed” ones, those who feel “broken” or “unfixable.”
Perhaps you’re an advanced guide or practitioner yourself.
A coach with so much training.
A therapist who has the schooling.
Or a spiritual seeker who has all the lingo.
You’ve healed so much—and still, something feels unreachable.
Perhaps you’re at a crossroads.
An underworld journey, or a dark night of the soul.
Maybe you feel depressed or confused or unsure of what your next steps are.
Or you’re feeling disenchanted, frustrated or done with particular doctrines, dogmas or relationships.
Maybe you’ve experienced multiple ruptures,
painful endings with teachers or guides of your own,
Maybe it’s desire.
Maybe it’s trust.
Maybe it’s that part of you that went quiet long ago, waiting for the right conditions to speak again.
That’s what we listen for.
That’s what we midwife back into being—through depression, anxiety, transitions, low-points and underworld journeys.

✴︎ My Story ✴︎

I’m Rachel. Somatic teacher, ritualist, erotic reclamation guide, and space-holder of humans. A lover of wild spaces and deep questions and nuance.

I help people come home to themselves—through the body, through desire, through deep nervous system listening and integration.

My work lives at the intersection of trauma healing, relational repair, erotic embodiment, animism and mysticism. It’s rooted in reverence for the body’s pace, for the intelligence of sensation, and for the truth that healing is both deeply personal and inherently political.

I’ve walked through chronic illness, chronic freeze dynamics, childhood sexual abuse, abusive relationships, cult-like dynamics and spiritual rupture, and the long road back into self-trust and embodied reclamation.

I carry lineages of nervous system healing, devotional slowness, and erotic reclamation, as well as a deep connection to Isis, the Magdalene path and Christ-consciousness (but don’t worry, not the alt-right pipeline type).

I don’t believe in fixing people. I believe in making space for what’s already inside to emerge. And I believe—deep in my belly, body and soul—that this work can be pleasurable and joyful, too.

Whether I’m teaching inside a five-month sexuality immersion like Slow Burn, guiding yearlong mentorship in Rooted, or holding space inside my upcoming somatic school, my approach centres around one core commitment: to create spaces where you can become more fully yourself.

Not the performative version of “healed” or “empowered.” The version that breathes deeper. Feels more. Trusts more. The one that knows when to pull away and when to lean in. The one that can reclaim pleasure without abandoning safety.

My practice goes far beyond the standard somatic experiencing principles. I bring in nature-based wisdom, mysticism, energy work, ancestral healing, and spiritual reclamation.

I hold a Master’s degree where I extensively researched sexual and spiritual healing through the lenses of neuroscience, trauma recovery, and embodied interspirituality—specifically focused on the spiritual trauma incurred by those marginalized in the Christian Church through sexual suppression, abuse, and LGBTQ+ identification.

My work is informed by:

☼ Certified VITA Coach (600+ hours of training in Sex, Love, and Relationship Coaching with Layla Martin)

☼ Graduate of Alchemical Alignment: Bodywork for Trauma Resolution and Embodiment of Spirit (completed modules 1–14 with Brigit Viksnins, and repeated modules 1–7 with Tele Darden)

☼ Support Coach and student of Rachael Maddox’s ReBloom method and Sex After Trauma program

☼ Two years of study in Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy through my graduate degree

☼ Levels 1–3 of David Elliott’s Pranayama Breathwork Training

☼ Certified in Energetic Justice, an anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and spiritual awareness modality

☼ Intro levels of Somatic Experiencing

☼ Spinal Attunement Method study with Sigourney Belle (SomaMystica)

☼ Craniosacral Therapy Levels 1 & 2 (Upledger Institute)

☼ One-year certification in Emotional Leadership

☼ Currently enrolled in a 10-month Process-Oriented Facilitation Unshaming Training with David Bedrick

☼ Ongoing mentorship with numerous coaches, practitioners, and guides in the realms of energetics, somatics, and trauma

☼ Formative years spent in a transformational community steeped in permaculture, spiritual practice, and collective healing

My specialties include:

• Attachment Trauma
• Boundary Ruptures: Sexual Assault and Abusive Relationships
• Karmic Trauma, Soul Evolution, and Soul-Purpose Development
• Emotional/Developmental Trauma
• Complex PTSD
• Spiritual Trauma
• Anxiety/Depression
• Perinatal Trauma
• Grief and Death Trauma
• Chronic Freeze and Chronic Health Dynamics
• Ancestral and Lineage Based Trauma
• Neurodivergence Trauma (Autistic/ADHD experiences in a neurotypical world)

I am half-English, half-American, of English and Swiss-German descent. I was raised white and middle-class on a farm on the land of the Meskwaki, Sioux, and Ioway peoples (currently known as Iowa).

I grew up in the Mennonite Church. Now, I consider myself an animist witch with deep Mennonite roots—roots that still inform the ethics and humility with which I walk.

At age 22, I re-remembered my childhood sexual abuse, which sent me on a deeply introspective journey of trauma healing and spiritual reclamation. I began examining my painful sexual experiences, disconnection in intimacy, autoimmune symptoms, and the sense of unsafety I felt in relationship.

Over time, I also began to recognize the chronic, developmental trauma I carried from childhood. The ancestral lineages I come from began speaking to me—through dreams, through illness, through the land. I began to see the imprints of spiritual suppression, codependency, and covert abuse that lived in my system.

I began to see that so many of my challenges were rooted in a chronic lack of safety and self-trust in my own body. The trauma of overdoing and overachieving led to chronic health conditions, digestive issues, and chronic fatigue that eventually collapsed my system into freeze.

Around the same time, I was also extricating myself from an abusive relationship. One that mirrored the energetic and emotional patterns I was just beginning to uncover in my lineage and psyche. That relationship forced me to confront how enmeshed I had become in other people’s needs and projections. It asked me to reckon with how unclear my energetic boundaries were. It was devastating—but it cracked me open.

It was through that breakdown that I began to recover a felt sense of sovereignty.

I began to truly understand what it meant to feel safe inside myself. To recognize when my nervous system was signaling a no—even when my mind wanted to say yes. To disentangle from cult-like communities, damaging spiritual ideologies, chronic merging, and the fantasy of being saved.

For the past fifteen years, I’ve been unwinding these dynamics in my life—and holding space for others as they do the same.

My work is here to support those in deep unraveling. Those reclaiming their erotic aliveness, their truth, their voice, their felt sense of self.

Those ready to “heal” – or in other words reclaim or discover who they are – at the root.

The dark feminine path is not about darkness as danger or evil—rather, it is the fertile, quiet, unseen, often uncomfortable spaces of deep transformation and reclamation. It is the underworld journey. The cave. The compost. The mystery. The moonlit path that calls us to slow down, feel more, and root deeper.

It is a path of embodiment over performance. Of being over doing.
Of feeling over fixing.
Of surrender over striving.
Of listening to the body’s whispers rather than overriding them in pursuit of someone else’s version of healing or success.

This path doesn’t always look pretty. It asks you to descend into the muck, meet the parts of you that have been exiled—your rage, grief, shame, erotic innocence, wildness, and intuitive knowing—and learn to be in relationship with them. It invites you to dismantle the internalized systems that taught you to silence, shrink, or sever from your truth.

For me, the dark feminine is not just a concept—it’s a lived practice.
It’s been my guide through chronic illness, nervous system collapse, betrayal, trauma, grief, and initiations I never would have chosen.
And it’s what I now walk with others through.
Not to fix or force them into some ideal of “healed,” but to accompany them in reclaiming what was once lost, buried, or shamed.

The dark feminine path is a reclamation of wholeness.
Of cyclical wisdom.
Of erotic innocence and sacred anger.
Of choosing what is true over what is palatable.