Welcome to
‘Iao Mind & Body Health
Why Choose Us
- Telehealth services for your privacy and convenience
- Learn and experience new skills, strategies, and wisdom for enduring change
- Embodied Resilience. Informed by Science. Rooted in the Body.
- Where neuroscience meets embodied healing
Our Philosophy
Most of us were raised with messages like “don’t get angry,” “fix that attitude,” or “just get over it.” Many of us learned, explicitly or implicitly, that emotions are a nuisance and that it is easier or safer to ignore, suppress, or avoid them.
Yet neuroscience is clear and compelling: our emotions are always alive and active. The parts of the brain that process emotions operate with vast speed and capacity, far outpacing the areas responsible for logic and rational thought. At any given moment, your emotional brain influences roughly 90% of what you think, feel, and do, while your rational brain contributes only about 10%.
Our life history, personal experiences, and nervous system capacity shape the relationship we develop with our emotions. For many, distancing themselves from emotions was once useful or even necessary for survival. Certain emotions may have felt dangerous, while others may have felt familiar, necessary, or valuable.
What brings most people to therapy is the desire to stop repeating patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that no longer serve them. People often describe feeling stuck, overwhelmed by their emotions, or caught in reactive cycles without conscious choice. We long for freedom of choice. Without it, shame and guilt can become chronic, and relationships may feel strained or unstable.
The path to this freedom begins with cultivating a relationship with your emotions—the capacity to witness, tolerate, and allow emotional experience. When emotions are not acknowledged or allowed, there is no space between stimulus and response, and reactivity takes over. Emotional detachment is rarely a mindful choice; more often, it is deeply rooted, automatic, and unconscious.
Trauma and chronic stress live in the body. Our nervous systems are biologically programmed to protect us through instinctual survival responses: fight, flight, freeze, and collapse. When these responses become repetitive or overactive, it is not a flaw, it is the brain working too hard to protect you from danger that is no longer present. In this way, the past remains alive in the body as a persistent sense of discomfort, tension, or unease.
We can begin to develop awareness of emotions and survival responses by paying attention to our bodily sensations. Attuning to the body helps us connect to our present-moment experience. For example, after your partner dismisses your concerns about finances, you may notice a sensation of heat or tightness in your chest, accompanied by emotions such as anger or frustration. Instead of exploding outward or shutting down inward, you learn to witness the experience rather than be consumed by it. This act of witnessing changes the brain and creates a crucial half-second of space—space where choice becomes possible.
My own life history taught me that I had to fight to get my needs met—to be seen and heard. It felt like a biological imperative for survival. My nervous system became profoundly dysregulated, and in my 30s, I experienced severe panic attacks.
Somatic therapy gave me the conditions and tools to sense the trauma that was still alive in my body. Through conscious awareness, I learned to tolerate and safely experience emotions such as shame, anger, sadness, and fear. I learned how to sense and complete survival responses of fight or flight. Over time, my body became my ally—one I know how to comfort, soothe, and appreciate. I check in with this ally regularly, so it no longer needs to shout to get my attention.
When you foster a relationship with your body, you learn to move toward what is healing and vital, and away from what is not. Your body becomes a barometer—an internal compass that helps you read your experience as you engage with the world.
I invite you to walk this path of healing with me: to cultivate a relationship with your body, your emotions, and your lived experiences—so you can move through life with greater freedom, choice, and ease.
“The biggest mistake we make about who we are is believing that we are thinking beings. That we are cognitive driven people who on occasion stumble into emotion, move it out of our way, flick it aside and get back to our thinking selves. This is not true.”
-Brené Brown
Therapy Approaches
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-i)
Somatic Experiencing (SE)
Parts Work
About Us
Haunani Iao
M.A., Psy.D
Corporate Wellness
The Covid-19 global pandemic offered many teachable moments. Perhaps one of the most crucial lessons is the importance of RESILIENCE. We cannot know what lies around the corner for us. What is known is that each of us will experience adversity in our lifetime. While it can be nearly impossible to avoid all adversity, there are steps one can take to develop skills and strengths to rise to the challenges in life.
