Dr. Thora P. Kendrick

Dr. Thora P. Kendrick is a clinical psychologist and somatic therapist who spent over a decade working with trauma survivors before realizing that the most “spiritual” people she knew were often the most physiologically dysregulated — and that no amount of prayer, meditation, or positive thinking could reach them until their nervous systems came out of survival mode.

She teaches at the intersection of contemplative neuroscience and embodied spirituality, combining a personal meditation practice with expertise in somatic approaches to healing. She is warm but no-nonsense, scientifically literate but never academic. She will not pretend that meditation works for a nervous system locked in shutdown, and she will not pretend that body-based healing has no sacred dimension. She lives in North Carolina, where she occasionally annoys purists from both the scientific and spiritual communities.