Nancy Leigh McPartland
MS, LCSW-C, C-IAYT, E-RYT 500, Reiki Master Teacher
You may understand your patterns, know your history, and still feel anxious, shut down, overwhelmed, or disconnected. Body-based therapy and nervous system practices help you work with the places words cannot always reach.
Feel it. Follow it. Find your rhythm.
"I've talked, analyzed, read, coped, and still feel stuck. I may not need more insight. I may need a way back into safety, sensation, breath, and belonging."
You look capable from the outside, but inside you feel braced, tired, flooded, numb, or alone. You may have done years of therapy, read the books, tried the apps, changed the medications, and still wonder why your body will not relax.
When emotions are too much to think your way through, the body often becomes the place they show up — in breath, tension, pain, shutdown, panic, numbness, and exhaustion.
You wake at 3 a.m. with dread in your chest.
You understand your trauma but still react before you can stop yourself.
Your body tightens, aches, freezes, or shuts down.
You are sensitive, intuitive, neurodivergent, high-functioning, exhausted — or all of the above.
You've tried conventional therapy and still feel disconnected from yourself.
You do not need to be fixed. You need a way to listen to your body without being swallowed by it.
A trauma-informed clinical social worker, yoga therapist, meditation teacher, and somatic practitioner.
For more than three decades, I've worked with people navigating anxiety, grief, trauma, chronic stress, chronic pain, caregiving, illness, life transitions, and the challenges of simply being human.
Over the years, I've noticed a common pattern: many people arrive with insight but little relief. They understand themselves. They know their history. Yet anxiety, overwhelm, exhaustion, or disconnection continue to live in the body.
My work helps bridge that gap by bringing together psychotherapy, yoga therapy, breath, movement, awareness, meditation, and nervous system education in ways that help people reconnect with themselves.
My work brings clinical training together with body-based practices: somatic therapy, nervous system education, breathwork, meditation, sound, parts work, and energy healing. Not as a replacement for medical or mental health care — but as a deeper way of helping the body participate in healing.
I believe people heal best when they feel understood, not pathologized. When the body feels safe enough to soften, the mind often stops fighting so hard.
I do not believe you are too much. I do not believe your body is betraying you. I do not believe insight is useless — I just don't believe it is always enough. I believe the body needs a seat at the table.
I am a Holistic Integrative Psychotherapist with over 26 years experience in the healing profession. I have worked with the University of Maryland Center for Integrative Medicine (CIM) educating medical staff about energy medicine and meeting with clients. My clinical background encompasses a wide variety of mental health issues, with a majority of practice focused on chronic pain, depression, and anxiety.
Yoga Psychotherapy integrates Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Solution-Oriented Approach, Rogerian Psychotherapy, Bowen Family Therapy, Meditation, Emotional Freedom Therapy (EFT Tapping), Guided Imagery, Yoga asanas, Pranayama, Reiki, and the philosophy of Patanjali's Eight Limbs of Yoga.
Four steps toward getting back in rhythm with your body, your needs, and your life. Everything begins with understanding — and ends with integration.
Learn why your nervous system reacts the way it does, so symptoms become information instead of shame. Understanding the biology removes fear.
Build the capacity to notice sensation, emotion, and activation without becoming overwhelmed. Your body is not betraying you — it needs guidance.
Use breath, sound, movement, touch, grounding, and attention to help the body return to steadiness. These are not soft add-ons — they are the actual mechanisms of nervous system reset.
Bring the work into sleep, relationships, boundaries, grief, focus, pain, and everyday life — where healing actually has to live. Identity follows when the body learns to feel safe.
with Nancy Leigh
Feel it. Follow it. Find your rhythm.
In music, being "in the pocket" means finding the rhythm so deeply that you stop forcing and start feeling. That is the heart of this work: helping you get back in rhythm with your body, your needs, and your life.
As a musician, I've always been fascinated by rhythm. When musicians find the pocket, effort gives way to flow. Life can feel much the same. Anxiety speeds us up. Depression slows us down. Trauma can pull us completely out of rhythm. Healing often begins when we learn to listen for our own rhythm again.
In the Pocket is my growing collection of Pocket Practices, books, guides, courses, and community offerings designed to help you come back into rhythm when life pulls you out of it.
Explore Pocket PracticesSmall body-based practices for the moments you need support now.
These guided audio tools and scripts are designed for real life: the bedtime spiral, the family gathering, the rejection sensitivity spike, the pain flare, the grief wave, the morning anxiety, the ADHD shutdown, the moment you cannot get yourself back.
Full access will be available soon through In the Pocket — a gathering space for practices, guidance, and community.
Individual results vary. These practices are educational and supportive and are not a substitute for medical or psychiatric care.
This work is not about fixing you. It is about returning you to what was always there underneath the survival — the part of you that knows how to belong to yourself.
That hesitation is not weakness. It is your nervous system doing exactly what it does when it has been hurt before. The resistance is the sign you have arrived at the right door. You do not have to be ready. You just have to be willing to begin.
Yoga classes are offered online via Zoom — open to all levels. These are not performance yoga. They are somatic, breath-centered, and therapeutic. You show up as you are.
Classes are informal, welcoming, and grounded in the same body-first principles as the clinical work. You do not need experience. You do not need a mat. You need a willingness to show up.
Join a Class