About Colleen
Colleen Chen has been practicing holistic health therapies since 1999. She trained in spiritual counseling, hands-off healing, and in teaching meditation at the Berkeley Psychic Institute, and was a transmedium healer at the Aesclepion Healing Center in San Rafael. She was certified by the Integral Yoga Institute of San Francisco to teach basic hatha yoga and also has a strong practice in kundalini yoga.
Along with Rolfing, her favorite bodywork modality to both give and receive, Colleen integrates triggerpoint, deep tissue, craniosacral therapy, and acupressure into her work. In addition to her somatic training and experience, Colleen holds a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) from Pomona College and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Colleen was introduced to Rolfing Structural Integration at age 25, as a treatment for scoliosis that had gone untreated until that time. Rolfing was the first modality Colleen encountered whose practitioners not only told her that her scoliosis could be improved, but they seemed quite matter of fact about it. Encouraged by this attitude, she embarked on a journey of years of receiving structural integration and then training in it, all the while learning other more subtle modalities that supported her process and helped unwind emotional patterning that had held her physical structure in place as well. The results were dramatic and have lasted, and through this process her learning about her own structure has given her a deep understanding about how trauma and injury, and the body’s various corresponding compensations, get mapped throughout a person's physical, physiological, and emotional structures.
When Colleen touches a body she listens with her hands and her intuition, allowing the touch to be a space of communication between the client and practitioner, mirroring patterns to the client and creating awareness for change and a clearer knowledge of who one is. The idea is that confusion about who one is, which creates dehumanization of self or others, cannot exist when one sees the internal pattern that creates the external reality. This concept lies behind Colleen's drive toward building the reflections between dichotomies: body and being, microcosm and macrocosm, “you” and “me.”