Abby Alderete is a bodyworker who offers Embodiment and Integration Guidance at Sol Solace Studio in Austin, Texas. She specializes in Tarot and Divination, Primal Consciousness, Soul Integration, Mediumship, Energy Work, and more. Just what does all of that mean? We had a short conversation with Abby to learn about her multidimensional work and journey as a healer.
Here is that conversation:
What is it that you do? What is an “Embodiment and Integration Guide”?
Embodiment Integration Guide is kind of a way of disclosing that I am a metaphysician. I work in the different bodies — not just the physical body, but also the mental body, the emotional body, the spiritual body — and I layer them however the client really needs, whether that’s through dimensions or through emotion and spirit and heart and all of that. Then I kind of acquiesce my language to help them see what I’m seeing.
How do the different modalities intertwine? Do clients go to you specifically for tarot for example, or should they expect a blend of bodywork, tarot, and other modalities?
It depends, they can specify. You can come in specifically thinking ‘I need a tarot session’. A lot of times that feels a lot like confusion in your life looking for answers that aren’t there, or needing to understand why you feel the way you do. Or if someone has shoulder pain and neck pain maybe it’s really about security and voicing boundaries, or ‘wearing the world on my shoulders.’ I can take that into physical work, I can take that into processing where I’m actually writing down maps of all the different things in my head, or I can take that to an emotional space. So there are different ways to get to it, and basically what I do is I attune to the client, and when I attune to the client with this multidimensional perspective I just follow the alarm systems and triggers that are going off.
The basis of an empath in my opinion is someone who walks into a room and can just sense where all the issues are, because they’ve programmed themselves to focus where the risk is, to go in and soothe it so that the risk minimizes. So I have that on steroids, much like Chalchicoatl and Monica – they walk in and it’s just on steroids. And it comes from lifelong experiences of having to survive, but now it’s used as an offering through our work.
How did you get into all of this in the first place? What came first and how did it lead to this blend of modalities you now offer?
I was having intense dreams and blending pretend potions by the age of 2 or 3 years old. And I had my first real astral dream where I was experiencing a transition from one life to another around two, and then I came in and hovered over my body and saw me and my mom and just sank in. So I remember it vividly. I started reading Tarot when I was like eight or nine. I started learning about them, and I think I’ve learned about them and their meanings several different times because I’d put it down and forget it and then decide to do it again. And then I was even massaging people around that same time, so it started young.
Then by the time I was 11, my mom was doing pilates and eventually turned into a fascial stretch therapist, and I got to witness and go to all of her workshops and trainings. I was just a kid and bystander learning the whole time. Then when I got into pilates at age 18 everybody was telling me I should be a massage therapist. And by 19 I had gotten into massage school.
Backing up — when I was around 16 I had a mentor come in who was a pendulum dowsing supplement coach. So she would cure all kinds of different ailments in the body with intense supplement regimes, and she was also into cards and all the spiritual work. So she really popped my top on how spirituality and health were so intertwined, and she broke the medical construct around me that I was really stuck in, and it gave me the power to start thinking outside the box.
Around 2015 I met my astrology card creating mentor, and so she works with anything that she can get her hands on, and she’ll break up this information into cards and begin to divine these mechanisms and see how she tracks herself in them. She’s also really into neurological health, polyvagal theory, biochemistry of the brain, the microbiome and gut health … So a lot my training has been in herbs and gut health, just holistic health in general.
So the physical, emotional, and spiritual all became intertwined for you.
Because they’re so similar .. they’re all the same for me. They’re not all the same for everybody. But I’ve started to organize them in the same place for myself because they’re so intertwined.
What’s the overall picture? That’s what I’ve been after for a long time. Ultimately with most healing modalities and especially my bodywork and craniosacral like Monica, the idea is we’re reconnecting you to the healing aspect of your homeostasis and your brain. Your body actually can really heal a lot on its own, and heighten your immune system enough to fight off viruses and bacteria and pathogens that we don’t even think about, that we get all the time. If your immune system is high enough, your vibration is high enough, these things can’t survive in that type of electric environment, right? It’s not the right charge. So the idea with bodywork, especially conscious bodywork, is that we need to get you out of the way, so that your system can come in and reset and recover.
What’s the most important thing you want someone to understand before they come see you and what’s the biggest takeaway you want them to have from each section.
It’s hard for me to explain, but I’m going to start here. I was trained on the premise from my mother who described it like this: There’s a victim and there’s a criminal. And in the body especially, the victim screams and the criminal gets away with it. So it’s this kind of idea that our symptoms are messages and they’re alarm systems, but they are not necessarily where the wound or the injury is happening. And even in a 3D bodywork system where we go into your body and your ankle, I could end up in your head shifting your skull bones, or your gut trying to get you to release your stress … so that you’ll release your feet and allow them to move. So that’s the idea and that’s good to know before coming. I’m hunting for the source of the pain from the get-go.
Also, I don’t tolerate a lot of time dancing around the symptoms … I wanna get to it.
If you are interested in booking a session with Abby at Sol Solace Studio, check out her available times here. Please note that challenging content may arise throughout the work, and we recommend supplementing it with professional talk therapy.