About Me

I am Molly Mitchell-Hardt Field, I am a depth and somatic psychotherapist, sacred motherhood torch bearer, yoga teacher, group/workshop facilitator and ritualist. 

I started my journey as many people in the healing profession do, in my own suffering. Much of who I am was forged in the dark cave of my inner sanctum. The place I have habitually gone to hide, to gestate, to collapse, and ultimately to heal. 

I was an elite gymnast throughout my young life. I practiced before and after school and on the weekends. I lived somewhat of a double life, one, trying to be a “normal” teenager, and another, trying to achieve perfection as an athlete. I did not know at the time, but I was blessed with an exquisitely sensitive nervous system which at a young age was a source of confusion, shame, and isolation.

As I navigated the complexities and turmoil of life within school, peer groups, family, and competitive athletics I became interested in human behavior. I was introduced to a book that planted a seed that is continuing to grow to fruition, it was called The Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman. It was the story of a college gymnast who encounters an unlikely spiritual teacher. Through this book I learned about concepts of non-attachment, presence, mindfulness, intention and transcendence. This book was a vital seed planted at the perfect time. It was my first initiation into the unseen that changed the way I saw the experience of being human and what is possible.

After physical injury and disillusionment around the safety of authority figures within the gymnastics world, I left the sport that I had dedicated so many years to and had sacrificed so heavily for. I spent a long time searching for who I was without this significant aspect of identity.

I spent my first two years of college with a sense of displacement, grasping for belonging in the wrong places, I struggled with tumultuous relationships, body image, disordered eating, and suicidal thoughts. 

I chose to take a gap year and moved to Los Angeles to work for a non profit organization called City Year. During that year I worked as a tutor and mentor in the South LA school system. Another seed was planted, I knew that I was meant to lead a life of service to others. 

I finished my college education at USC, more purposeful at first and increasingly more lost. Again, I struggled to find a sense of belonging, feeling more and more isolated from my peers. I spent my senior year learning swahili and preparing to travel to Tanzania to live and serve in a small village with no electricity or running water. I often hesitate to speak of the time I spent in the nonprofit world, because I am aware of the immense privilege and white saviorism perpetuated by a lot of this work. Despite this, these experiences on the ground were deep and personal, face to face, sharing food, stories, laughter and time.

The times in my life that I have experienced the greatest shifts perspective have been when I have stepped away from the rushing river of American life, unplugged, and planted my feet amidst people and places that are still connected to the Earth. It was hard to come back to my life as a college student and not see the problematic aspects of our cultural values and behaviors.

I felt even more isolated when I came back to finish school. I felt like I had lived many lives and had a harder time connecting with my peers. Living a double life had become a management strategy, one where I tried to conform and fit in, and another where I would seek for deeper meaning. When I was not busy trying to be a “normal” college student I was driving to yoga classes across town. It was in those classes that I finally fit, but not with any group, for the first time within myself. That shift was another seed planted at the right time. I knew that I wanted to become a yoga teacher as a means to align my life’s work with spiritual seeking. However, I did not dare speak it out loud until many years later. 

There were a few lost years after graduation I spent paralyzed by a search for meaning and purpose, I finally decided to pursue becoming a yoga teacher. In a complete leap of faith, I traveled to India for training. I sold my things and gave up my apartment and when I returned I felt as though I was beginning my life again from scratch, determined to live in alignment with my purpose no matter what. I lived on the living room floor of the apartment I left behind and built my career as a yoga teacher from nothing, scraping money together to pay for gas and food.

I spent ten years learning, teaching yoga and determined to live a yogic way of life. This meant inner study and outer congruence. What I have come to realize is that my yoga practice, while a helpful ally, became another, more sophisticated management strategy, that did not get me closer to the wellspring at my center. I spent a long time within the spiritual community and was tiring of what I could later identify as spiritual bypass and spiritual materialism. 

During this time that my body started to show the signs of so many years of overriding and managing rather than attunement, coherence, and resourcing. I went through a year-long period of adrenal burnout, I could barely get out of bed, my digestion was not functioning, along with myriad other symptoms that stopped me in my tracks.

It was around then that I felt called to pivot and move my career in another direction. When I arrived at Pacifica Graduate Institute, I felt I had finally come home. I spent the next few years discovering and learning about the Depth Psychological and Jungian tradition with a voracious curiosity that I thought was all but lost. 

While at school I got married and became pregnant with my son and my seeking turned toward pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum. I wrote my graduate thesis about the experience of pregnancy within the patriarchy. I garnered more and more information through extensive evidence-based research, a deep dive into my own inner experience, and guidance from the wise women who came before me, the ones who carried the torch of soulful motherhood. What I found was a deeper layer of truth far more ancient and intuitive to hold my unfolding. It is on this ground that I stand with a more expansive and rich understanding of the numinous process of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood.

After graduate school and my own initiation into motherhood, I began working with a somatic experience practitioner and later was inspired to train in the somatic experiencing healing modality. All that I have done informs my practice. Both the Depth/Jungian and Somatic lenses strongly influence my work with clients. The somatic in the resolution of trauma and nervous system healing and depth lens as a framework and cosmology to hold the meaning and complexities of life. I have found the end of the road in many modalities and cosmologies, where they are rendered obsolete or too limiting. I have sought a container large enough to hold all of me and myself in all of my rich complexities and hope that this serves my clients even when it is so seductive to ascribe to a healing path that appeals to our desire to fix and problem solve.

The path forward into greater wholeness involves a rite of passage where we follow our fear down and in and allow ourselves to be held in the darkness and consciously move through a process of alchemy over and over again as we arrive at our more essential nature and from this place we hold more wisdom, joy, sorrow, complexity, compassion, and meaning than we thought possible.

I work as a psychotherapist (LMFT #143845) in private practice in California and as a somatic coach worldwide. Beyond all the practices and modalities, I believe that wellness comes from living a soul-centered, and soul-led life—one full of meaning, depth, courage, and connection.