Hello, I’m Eric
I deeply believe that everyone has a fully intact and innate capacity for healing and wellness. My work aims to help people reconnect to their own capacity to heal, grow, and change.
I serve Individuals and Couples who are ready to dive deep into updating their own attachment style and patterns through a skillful blend of somatic mindfulness, talk and sound/music therapy. This can include psychedelic integration therapy and KAP (ketamine assisted psychotherapy). My practice is called Sound and Nature, a name that captures two healing principles. Discovering and recovering our own NATURE by learning to speak and live from our authentic selves, and utilizing the therapeutic potential of SOUND to tune and tone the nervous system. Options can include sessions in outdoor nature settings.
I am certified in DARe (Dynamic Attachment Re-Patterning). I am also a Licensed Creative Arts Therapist and Board Certified Music Therapist. My approach is creative and progressive. I am skilled at holding space to help people resolve intense emotions and personal/inter-personal conflicts. I am also trained in Voice Dialogue, a similar approach to IFS.
Some may like to know I am a parent, raising my children together with my wife Ruthie Fraser, the founder of Body Re-wilding https://www.bodyrewilding.com/
Feel free to schedule a FREE 15 minute consultation with me. My website also has more info about my offerings. I am committed to holding a non-judgmental, confidential and inclusive space. All genders, sexual orientations, religions and political orientations are welcome. You will feel at home here!
Why Sound + Nature
I founded Sound + Nature to bring somatic psychotherapy, couples therapy, psychedelic assisted and integration therapy, music therapy and attachment therapy into a licensed psychotherapy practice where clients can receive individual and group mental health care. Clients, together with the therapist, can decide which offerings are most appropriate for them and develop an individualized treatment plan.
Sound and Nature is also available to develop customized retreats and workshops for groups of people to have somatic and sound meditation experiences for restoration of the nervous system, recovery from excessive exposure to digital media and connection with natural settings. Retreats and workshops can include participation from specialists in restorative yoga and other healing art forms.
My Approach
My approach to psychotherapy is trauma-informed, somatic, attachment-based, and mindfulness based. Combining talk therapy and experiential modalities with sound and somatic mindfulness/awareness, I offer a dynamic, personalized, creative and flexible therapy process. I see a therapeutic relationship as a collaboration, guided by the principle that all people have an intact intuition, self-hood, and capacity to heal.
Somatic therapies involve connecting clients with how emotions and trauma are being felt in their bodies, and re-patterning and integrating those autonomic (habitual) reactions/responses into a newly felt embodied sense of wellness and change.
Attachment therapy is an approach to help people understand how they have developed attachment strategies over their lifespan. In our journey’s to cope, succeed and develop identity, we come to a point where we may need to update our attachment style to support secure, mature and healthy adult relationships. In attachment therapy, clients can learn to course correct features of avoidant, anxious, or disorganized attachment in order to develop and nurture secure attachment in relationships (family relations, marriage, dating, friendship, colleagues, work environments etc..)
What excites me and is a cornerstone of my work, is combining attachment therapy with somatic therapy. I was formally trained and certified in Dynamic Attachment Re-Patterning experience with Dr. Diane Poole Heller, a progressive approach that combines somatic therapy with attachment therapy.
Traditional psychotherapy or solely talk therapy are not enough by themselves in my view. Introducing practices like mindfulness, meditation, sound work and therapeutic psychedelic experiences have clearly demonstrated a strong potential to help people truly shift their own mental health and recover their innate capacity for growth, healing and change.
I also offer Psychedelic Integration sessions. Psychedelic assisted therapy is back in the good graces of the medical and mental health professions. While Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) is the only currently legal form of psychedelic assisted therapy in New York State, many people have embraced the healing and therapeutic power of psychedelic experiences in general. Psychedelic Integration sessions are to help people to process and integrate prior psychedelic experiences, and develop intentions for preparation and integration for future experiences.
A Musical Beginning
I received my Master’s (MA) in music therapy from NYU in 2009. I then became Board Certified in Music Therapy (MT-BC). After having studied music in India independently for years prior to my graduation from NYU, I received a Fulbright Senior Research Scholarship for a project to create a music therapy program at a school for special needs children in Kolkata.
I spent over 10 years working as a music therapist in Foster Care and receiving supervision to work towards my License in Creative Arts Therapy (LCAT). During this period I also had extensive experience doing music therapy with children on the autistic spectrum. My work with children in foster care and with children with autism was, for me, a very profound learning about trauma informed care and the healing power of the creative arts in therapy . I have a strong connection with recording arts, songwriting, electronic composition, and more. Music therapy allows me to utilize all the instruments I love to play and to facilitate music-making for people of all abilities.
Indian Music Influence
My music background is eclectic and it all plays a role in how I do music therapy and/or bring music into somatic work. Like everyone, I am a complex person with different orientations and influences, yet my deepest training in music happened over the course of nearly 20 years in India with my esteemed (late) master teacher Pandit Gopal Roy.
My study of Indian classical music on the bansuri flute occurred in the Guru-Sishya Parampara tradition, meaning that I received training in Indian classical music in the traditional way (living with the teacher and dedicating years of my life to practice and development). The beautiful art of North Indian classical music has deeply impacted my own healing journey and taught me about the power of tone, tuning, and rhythm, three of the most potent tools humans have to calm the nervous system, naturally promote altered states, and to generally promote self-realization.