somatic offerings

This is how I got here; I hope to portray how my lived experiences in healthcare impact my role as a practitioner. I would also like to portray that I’ve had many different roles because I was working hard to stay in leftist LGBTQAI communities and hustled to do so (vs. return to places I didn’t feel safe in). If you want to skip the narrative and jump to a bullet of my healthcare experiences, look at the resume titled: healthcare in a below tab.

I’d like to begin by talking about some of my teachers. I am grateful to have done workshops with rev angel Kyodo Williams, Lama Rod Owens, Aurora Levins Morales, Tony Eason, teachers from The Somatic School and different Vipassana centers in the United States.

Like others in the early 90s, I thought I would serve coffee as a job throughout my 20s. A friend of mine, introduced the idea of instead, becoming a CNA and working in nursing homes. I did just that.

My work in nursing homes stretched for several years until I longed to do more personal, sustainable and honestly less violent care work and found that working as a PA for folks with disabilities offered me that. In Milwaukee, I worked with Patty Hayes throughout the 90s, and she taught me about ADAPT and disability justice.. This work changed my labor and disability politics; I began learning how to weave my budding mediation or mindfulness practices into my work days assisting Patty. Equally powerful, I was able to do direct action with Patty and ADAPT–protesting unaccessible stadiums (for example) by lodging wheelchairs in sport stadium turnstyles.

After I moved to the SF Bay area in the late 90s, I continued to do PA work for Easy Does It, an emergency PA organization. In parallel, I began to work as a volunteer street medic for protests; in 2001, the SF Bay Area Radical Health Collective trained me as a street medic. Around this time, I also received training in holistic massage work and did massage at the St. James Infirmary health clinic.

You can see that my decade + long healthcare work was in very physical roles. This all changed circa 2003, when I became physically disabled by tendonitis. I feel grateful for being a part of disability culture, because it deeply helped me accept that I couldn’t work in physical roles any longer. I had to exit PA and massage work and find non-physically stressful work. The harm reduction community offered me that window.

I became an HIV/STI counselor/tester, and licensed Phlebotomist (through the AIDS Health Project and  Berkeley InnerCity Schools), which was my entrance point into community and peer-based harm reduction health work at drop-in clinics such as the San Francisco Aids Health Project, and St. James Infirmary peer-based Clinic for sex workers. This experience turned into Coordinating the transgender and training departments at St. James Infirmary, which I did through 2008. While most of my health work has been providing direct care, I have also managed community clinic labs and acted as a liaison with the San Francisco DPH.

In 2008, I had gotten burnt out by healthcare in nonprofits, so to get fat back into my heart, I went to grad school for Creative Writing in El Paso, Texas.

After completing my MFA, I moved to Chicago and returned to healthcare as a volunteer. I have since volunteered as a harm reduction counselor/tester for the After Hours transgender drop-in clinic and Broadway Youth Clinic at Howard Brown. I have been volunteering as a Phlebotomist and Medical Interpreter the Chicago Community Health Clinic since 2019.

In 2022, I became certified as a Somatics Coach through the Somatic School, based out of the UK. And that leads me to my present moment! My own non-linear life path in healthcare allows me to pull from a wide-range of experiences when sitting with others in a somatic coaching session. 

Somatic Coaching: I work on a sliding-scale basis. My sessions are $45 – $100 for 50-minute sessions. Please contact me, below, for further information. Worksheets are resources (writing exercises, stretches, meditations, etc) to support client’s Somatic Practices outside of synchronous, sessions.

Bundles (the below time durations are only recommended examples, the amount of sessions can be used as you like).

I am available to facilitate somatics-based writing workshops or one on one consultations. Price is negotiable. Trade is always an option for Transformative Justice grassroots groups.

Writing workshop series is something I have been designing and facilitating since 2007. In this time period, I’ve facilitated one day intensives as well as six week long workshops. Over the last several years, my focus has honed on somatic or body-based writing exercises as a generative tool. We then draw from such material to further existing writing or drawing projects.

Description of most recent workshop at Woodland Pattern Bookstore:

This two-part, somatics-based, online course will use body sensory language as a portal into veiled imagery or worlds. Participants need only come prepared with food that is in your home, items you already use as creative tools, and an object from your room. Whether you enjoy drawing, writing, or comics, this workshop will support you in working among various creative registers. Participants will learn simple techniques of note-taking, playful translation of sensory language into narrative images or storyboards, as well as how to let go of cognitive logic as a pathway toward compelling literary structures.

“Somatics as Prism For World Building” taught me to think carefully about how I want to navigate and interpret the spaces between my body, my writing process, and the ‘ground,’ and about what might happen in the slowness between sensation and perception. This kind of attention feels so rare and necessary, and I am grateful for blake’s ability to lead others towards it.”

“I have attended two of Blake’s somatic writing workshops so far and they were both conscientious, comprehensive and yielded discoveries for me about the connection between my body and my writing. Blake’s approach is to prioritize listening to the body in order to start a conversation between the languages of body and text, and then to create a supportive atmosphere to write and share. I have found each of his workshops to produce shifts in my writing and my practice that were extremely valuable.” L Goldstein

“Blake Nemec led a group of 7 of us in a somatic writing exercise that allowed me to notice physical pain that was connected to a psychological fear. The precise use of language and clear instructions gave me a sense of safety and inclusion within the group as we had time to share our different experiences at the end.” Sarah Zalek

Somatic Writing Workshops: I can facilitate groups up to 24 students

• $100 per hour for grassroots organizations
• $250 – $500 per hour for for-profit businesses or organizations