Francine Kelley

Francine Kelley

SEP™, RYT500, LCPC

Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor and Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT500)

So how does a Jamaican country girl end up teaching SE? It’s been an interesting journey!

As a little girl growing up in Jamaica, I wanted to be a dancer. Watching dancers move, and moving my own body, seemed like the most natural and delightful of experiences. My father had a daily yoga practice learned from a fellow graduate student at Boston College. It wasn’t usual to know someone who did yoga in Jamaica at that time. So it was natural that as a bookish and ever-curious tween, I picked up a book my dad had bought for my mom on learning yoga and started to do the practices myself. I was bendy and it was fascinating, and though I didn’t know it at the time, the seed of whole new way of being with my body had been planted.

That seed was nourished through immigrating to the US and being introduced to West African dance in college. Then through years of studying and performing modern, West African, Afro-Modern and Caribbean dance. Yoga teacher training and meditation teacher training continued to feed my soul throughout a 10-year career in Corporate Information Technology.

When I went back to grad school to study counseling, I discovered Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Amy Weintraub’s Yoga for Anxiety and Depression and  Trauma-Sensitive Yoga training at the Trauma Center in Boston. I also learned a valuable lesson while teaching yoga to women at the DV shelter where I did my internship and to young women on exchange from rural villages in Niger: less is more. Sometimes very small shifts can lead to big changes.

Serendipity led me to Ariel Giarretto’s Intro to SE very shortly after I competed Level 1 of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy training. In response to a student’s question she replied: “premies (premature babies) have one foot in this world and one foot still in the last.” That was a summary of my life, and I knew I had to learn more from her. More than that, I knew I needed SE to truly heal from wounds I hadn’t even had the knowledge to name.

I didn’t really understand embodiment until I studied SE. SE helped that seed, planted so early, to truly take root, and it’s been a joy to share SE with the clients who entrust me to walk the journey of healing with them.

My integrative private practice in Chicago combines SE, SP, yoga, DBT, somatic touch and a healthy dose of humor. I support SE students with personal sessions and individual and group consultations. I also volunteer as a supervisor for counseling interns at Chicago Women’s Health Center, a women’s health collective.

Sharing the magic of SE with BIPOC practitioners during my mentorship in the BIPOC cohorts has also been a very fulfilling experience for me. It is my intention to continue to share SE with communities that so desperately need ways to heal from the very human, and so often debilitating, effects of trauma.

I also have one grown son who is a college student and YouTube influencer, and my “baby girl” is almost out of high school.