Hello, I’m Eric
I deeply believe that everyone has a fully intact and innate capacity for healing and wellness and that the job of a therapist is to help clients learn to access their own healing resources within. A good therapist can ask the right questions, create an environment of safety and empathy, and teach the right tools for a person’s innate capacity for healing and wellness to emerge.
The heart knows it’s path. Trauma, relationships, and rupture can make intuition and clarity seem so very far away. Our attachment in relationships can become disordered and confusing. The healing begins with being heard with empathy and feeling seen in the heart. All of the pain and disconnection can be alchemized and transformed into wellness.
Through the gift of somatic therapy, music and sound, creativity and trust, my way has restoration, repair, and connection to self as the core principles.
Why Sound + Nature
I founded Sound + Nature to bring somatic psychotherapy, 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, and attachment-based, and oriented in creative arts therapy (music therapy, mindfulness, songwriting, therapeutic recording arts).
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 experience of wellness and change.
I am passionate about therapy that helps clients to express and find a resolution to anxiety and depression that is connected to trauma and/or life 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.
While based in Brooklyn, 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.
In 2021, I became certified in a trauma resolution method called DARe (Dynamic Attachment Re-patterning Experience), which brings together Somatic Experiencing with Attachment work. This is a talk therapy modality.
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.