About Nate Tobey

 My Story: Becoming A Thresholder

“You’re here to use the wisdom of your body.” 

The phrase came to me — and while I had no idea what it meant —
it felt true. And I was starving for truth. 

It was the fall of 2017 and my life had fallen apart. I was 36 years old and 
near the end of my rope. 

I lived in Minnesota, where I was freezing and had no community, doing an
office ‘dream job’ that stressed me to the bone, and my body and soul
were giving out. My marriage was barely surviving. I had no energy, my stomach was in constant pain, I felt hopeless, suffered panic attacks, endured crippling brain fog, and saw an endless string of doctors and healers in a desperate attempt to get back to health. (I only recently learned, in 2023, that all of this was due to a severe mold exposure in 2016). 

For so long, I had thought financial and professional success would create contentment and stability. I was wrong. And now, I felt completely lost. 

So, one day I sat alone and prayed. I wasn’t much of a believer in any higher power back then, but what did I have to lose? I prayed to anyone or anything that could hear me for help. I prayed, and I meant it. 

I was in a state altered by cortisol and fear — and amidst crying and swaying by the Mississippi River, I heard that one phrase, "you're here to use the wisdom of your body," for a split moment, and it became something I could hold onto.  

Around that time, a massage therapist suggested a somatic therapy practitioner and I decided to try it out. That visit changed my life. 

She continued to bring my attention back to the present moment, to my body, asking me to describe what I was feeling right now, look around the room and find a place I could rest my eyes, even lie down on the floor and shake, and I started feeling new sensations — like my body was coming back online, waking up, taking in air and beginning to feel the swirl of emotions and expressions I was keeping at bay. No one had ever done this with me before. It wasn’t meditation, it was relational mindfulness — being present with the help of another. 

For the first time in years, I felt some relief. I cried. I was a bit less hopeless. There was finally something that seemed to help. I began to realize that the path to healing wasn’t so much about understanding or ideas as about experiences and sensations. The key was to follow my body’s lead; surrender to the flow; take my hands off the wheel rather than gripping it even more tightly. 

I’d known what it felt like to move my body in joy, but tuning into its full expression beyond any label, and especially into territories of pain or fear or grief — this was a revelation. 

From there, I became more and more focused on learning about this type of work and finding better and better practitioners to work with. I had my first experiences receiving psychedelic assisted therapy — which opened new doors of healing potential and power. In my first experience, I recalled a memory of my 6-year-old self walking peacefully with my mother by a creek, the final moments before our time together was shattered by fire engines racing to put out a fire that nearly destroyed the nursery school my parents had founded. I realized this had been perhaps the last moment I believed the world was safe. And for a few hours, I felt that feeling again for the first time in 30 years. 

Shortly after, I decided to quit my job and move to Northern California to study Hakomi, which had caught my attention for its poetic, gentle method and graceful loving presence. 

I attended my first Hakomi training in the fall of 2018 in San Anselmo, California — and I immediately fell in love with it. Our teacher described the method as: “learning how to look at any human, at any time, the way you might look at a sunrise, seeing the beauty and sacredness within each heart”. That skill has changed my life - and helped me remember how to stand inside my soul. 

Moving across the country was harrowing — I could barely walk a few blocks by the time I arrived in the Bay Area — but once I got settled in and began a steady regimen of therapy I began to stabilize. As I began my Hakomi training, I met a community of people devoted to this work, and that helped enormously. I felt less alone. I saw a path forward. 

I vividly remember lying on the floor at a Hakomi training as a gifted fellow student sat with me, holding my hand, without trying to fix me. As I looked into her kind, patient eyes, she began crying, softly. Tears rolling down her cheeks. I could feel that she was letting herself feel my own sorrow and honor it — without merging with me or needing me to say or hear anything. And a crack began to ripple across the wall I’d built as a man taught to keep my feelings inside. I cried and felt safe, a sweet feeling I had long ago forgotten. 

We sat there crying together as she gently held my head, and I knew I would be ok. That no matter how bleak things might be or become, that if we can do this together then I could heal and even thrive again. I felt faith in love for maybe the first time; if, together, we can go towards and through whatever needs to emerge from within us — rather than fear or fight it — humans might just be ok after all. 

Over time, I just kept feeling more nourished by Hakomi and a range of related trainings. The two that have been most impactful are Relational Somatic Healing — which has been the key piece for learning to trust my body as a path to healing trauma — and a series of psychedelic assisted therapy trainings and retreats, which further opened the door to deeper levels of release and support in community than I’d ever imagined possible. 

I have found my calling as a somatic practitioner: I deeply trust my body's wisdom and the use of slow, gentle, consensual touch, informed by developmental psychology and trauma, to help people find a way back home to the safety inside themselves. 

Today, I still struggle with the residue of my collapse — and I still need help — but I know what heals me, and I love my work. 

I understand what that voice meant now — that my own purpose and passion would come not from focusing on my mind but from learning to let my body lead me, in my life and my work. 

I have discovered that my work in this life is to be a ‘thresholder’ — developing my own approach to helping each other home, through the many thresholds of life, which are often accompanied by a “healing crisis” much like my own. 

This work is my joy, my offering, and my teacher. I believe it saved my life. My gratitude for it is limitless. May it be of some service to you or someone you love.