About Linda Baird
Cracking My Dark Skies
What you are about to read is my story. It is because I have had these experiences that I can relate to the challenges you’re dealing with and confidently lead you out of the darkness. If you choose to read it, you will get a sense of why I have chosen this path as my work in the world. This journey has been profoundly difficult, yet most amazing and beautiful.
My Struggle and the Search for Answers
In my early 20’s, I fell into a sudden, deep depression. I also began having panic attacks, I couldn’t sleep, and I became suicidal. I was living away from my home state of Colorado at the time. Not knowing what to do, I went to a family practice M.D., who put me on tricyclic antidepressants and sent me out the door without any follow-up support (there were no antidepressants such as Prozac or Zoloft at the time). These drugs only made me feel different, like I was in a fish bowl, and not better. Although I felt emotionally unstable and could not find another human being who understood what was happening to me (I knew nothing of therapy, at the time), I took myself off the drugs and vowed to find answers.
I began reading everything I could get my hands on about depression. I went back to school to study biochemistry, pharmacology and neurochemistry—a path that led to my first career as a biochemist in the biotechnology industry for fifteen years. To get healthier, I changed my lifestyle and eating habits. Although the panic attacks subsided and I was no longer suicidal, I was still deeply depressed.
Finding Healing and a New Path
It was in my late 20’s that I found my first Hakomi therapist. Over 30 years later, she is still a deeply trusted colleague and mentor. This approach to therapy completely changed my life and has become the foundation of my own practice, although I also incorporate several additional modalities into my work.
What I discovered as my therapist and I worked together were deeply rooted belief patterns that were unconsciously running my life. Had someone simply asked me what was wrong, I would never have known the answer. In working experientially and developing mindful awareness, however, I discovered and healed the unconscious root of my depression and panic, which has led to freedom.
Years later, in the early 1990’s, I faced another profoundly life-challenging situation. At the time, the current awareness and research on trauma and PTSD was in its early stages, although the symptoms had been recognized in Freud’s work with hysteria and also in soldiers during WWI. Not by conscious choice, as I was searching for a somatic therapist in the Boston area where I was living at the time, I serendipitously ended up in a therapy training program at the Institute for Emotional-Kinesthetic Psychotherapy, where there was emphasis was on trauma resolution toward the end of the third year. This work was exceptional and, as a result, I made the decision to change careers.
Since completing my initial three-year therapy program in Boston in 1998 and the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute (SPI) Professional Training in Boulder in 2000 (previously known as Hakomi Integrated Somatics), I have assisted trainings with both SPI and the Hakomi Institute. I have also been a teaching assistant in the Somatic Psychology graduate program at Naropa University in Boulder. I have studied a number of different modalities, most notably EMDR and Internal Family Systems, the work of Richard Schwartz, Ph.D. I continued to study trauma, went to graduate school, and completely left my career as a research scientist to go into private therapy practice in 2001. I am a Certified Hakomi Therapist, Certified IFS-informed EMDR therapist, Certified Yoga Instructor, and Licensed Professional Counselor in the state of Colorado.
I am also proudly a member of the Hakomi International Ethics Committee, which consists of four members. We are responsible for facilitating the repair and resolution of ethical grievances between clients, students, Hakomi therapists and Hakomi trainers worldwide.
Integrating Yoga and Spiritual Practices
In addition to my path with experiential therapies, I began to study yoga at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in 1995, where I also received my Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy certification in 1998. I have been a committed student ever since. I practiced Anusara yoga for 10 years. The universal principles of alignment, as well as the Tantric philosophical foundation of the Anusara practice, has informed my physical, spiritual and emotional life on many levels. A devoted philosophy geek, I studied Tantric philosophy with Dr. Douglas Brooks, amazing scholar and Professor of Religion at the University of Rochester.
I was introduced to the practices of ParaYoga and Yogarupa Rod Stryker in 2011 through a process called The Four Desires. I became a committed student of Rod Stryker and Parayoga for over a decade.
Through ParaYoga and The Four Desires, I found my spiritual home and practices that have taken psychotherapy beyond resolving emotional disturbances and dis-eases to a deeper connection with my authentic Self.