I am a thirty-five-year-old somatic anxiety practitioner who did not believe my body could be the answer until it was. I live in Asheville, North Carolina, with my husband, our five-year-old son, and a slow-moving golden retriever named Birch.
I trained as a hospital social worker in my twenties, intending to spend my career inside the medical system. That plan ended one Tuesday in a Trader Joe's checkout line, when my first full panic attack collapsed me in front of a stranger holding a flat of strawberries. The diagnosis came two weeks later. Generalized anxiety disorder with panic features, identical, my psychiatrist noted, to the pattern I had been carrying since high school but had been calling responsible instead.
I tried what most women try. Cognitive behavioral therapy. Two SSRIs. Three sleep hygiene plans. A meditation app. An elimination diet. The quiet, exhausting performance of being fine. Nothing held until somatic work. A friend introduced me to Peter Levine's writing on Somatic Experiencing, then to Stephen Porges's polyvagal theory, then to Deb Dana's clinical translations. I trained for the next three years, not as a therapist, but as a practitioner who could meet women in their bodies before I met them in their thoughts.
I left the hospital. I founded The Calm Body Lab, a small private practice in Asheville. Over the last five years I have worked with more than two hundred and fifty women in chronic anxiety patterns, learning what the polyvagal podcasts and Instagram reels rarely admit: that the work is slow, deeply unglamorous, and the most reliable thing I have ever offered a client.
I write because most anxiety books still treat the body like an appendix to the mind. Five chapters on thoughts. Half a chapter on breathing. A closing paragraph on yoga. I write for the woman whose anxiety lives in her chest, her jaw, her ribs, and her shoulders before it ever reaches her thinking, and who has been told, gently or not, that she should be able to think her way out of it.
My books are not protocols. They are not 21-day resets. They are field guides to a nervous system that has been doing its job too well for too long, and to the small, embodied moves that teach it a different one.
I am currently writing The Calm Body Lab, a five-book arc on nervous-system literacy for women with chronic anxiety. Vagus Nerve Reset for Women With Chronic Anxiety is book one, the foundational book in the series and the free Kindle entry point.
When I am not seeing clients or writing, I walk slow loops through the Pisgah forest, make a sourdough that is two-thirds gluten denial, and re-read Mary Oliver every November.
Maeve