A 50+ Year Legacy of Integrated Healing

The Lomi School founders in 1970s
Lomi Psychotherapy Clinic founders in 1980s

For more than five decades, the Lomi School and Lomi Psychotherapy Clinic have stood at the intersection of innovation, depth, and service. Founded in 1970, Lomi is among the earliest organizations in the United States to integrate psychotherapy, somatic practice, and mindfulness into a unified approach to healing. Across generations, continents, and communities, Lomi’s work has shaped therapists, influenced the field, and provided essential care to those most in need.

The history that follows reflects both the length of Lomi’s presence and the breadth of its impact— spanning education, clinical care, research-informed practice, community service, and global training.

Our Mission

To provide high quality, affordable, and accessible mental health care and education to our community and professionals, specializing in a mindfulness-based, integrated model of care.

Our Vision

We envision a safe and vibrant community through the support of accessible mental health care.

Lomi Inception - A Radical Vision

Founded in 1970, the Lomi School emerged from a bold and integrative vision of health and healing. At a time when mind and body were often treated as separate, Lomi’s founders understood well-being as a whole-person process — body, mind, and spirit working together. They recognized an innate human wisdom that can be obscured by trauma, habit, and conceptual thinking, and believed that healing unfolds naturally when mindful attention is cultivated, particularly through direct bodily experience.

What was once considered radical is now widely supported by research. Mindfulness-based and somatic approaches that Lomi pioneered decades ago have since become intrinsic to contemporary psychotherapy and healthcare. While science has caught up, the original vision remains unchanged.

In 1987, this vision expanded into the community with the founding of Lomi Psychotherapy Clinic, created to provide affordable, high-quality mental health care while serving as a training site for therapists grounded in this integrative approach.

Our Timeline

  • Early History

    The Lomi School Foundation was founded in 1970 to integrate psychotherapy, somatic practices, and meditation into a coherent and practical model of healing. In 1978, the Lomi School Foundation was established as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit to support the school and its growing network of training programs worldwide.

    During the 1980s, the Foundation opened the Tomales School of Psychotherapy, in partnership with Sierra University, offering a master’s degree program and comprehensive professional training in mindfulness-based, somatic psychotherapy to Sonoma County residents and to serve as a clinical training site for intern therapists.

  • The 1970s: Integration and Innovation

    The 1970s were a period of experimentation, creativity, and integration. Founders Robert K. Hall, MD; Richard Strozzi-Heckler, PhD; Alyssa Hall, LMFT; and Catherine Flaxman, LMFT envisioned a school that addressed the full complexity of human experience. Drawing from meditation, bodywork, breathwork, Gestalt Therapy, yoga, martial arts, movement therapy, and expressive arts, they developed what became known as Lomi Work — a mindfulness-based, body-oriented psychotherapy.

    Early offerings included three-week intensive workshops open to the public. These experiences proved deeply transformational, leading many participants to pursue formal training in the model. Workshops and trainings were held in Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Marin County, Hawaii, and beyond.

    During this decade, the founders and senior graduates published The Lomi Papers, a collection of essays articulating the theoretical and experiential foundations of the work. A 35mm film, An Approach to Growth, was also produced, helping to bring Lomi’s ideas to a wider audience.

    As teachers traveled and graduates carried the work into new communities, Lomi’s influence spread nationally and internationally. Robert Hall and Richard Strozzi-Heckler taught in the Psychology Department at Naropa Institute, while other faculty offered trainings throughout Europe and Latin America.

  • The 1980s: Professional Training and Community Service

    In the 1980s, the Lomi School deepened its professional training programs. Four-month intensive trainings expanded the curriculum to include a 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat, anatomy and kinesiology, supervised clinical work, and advanced somatic and psychotherapeutic methods.

    The Lomi School Bulletin was launched during this time, exploring the relationship between awareness practices and pressing social issues such as birth and death, conflict resolution, education, violence, healthcare, the arts, and community life.

    In 1984, the Tomales School of Psychotherapy was founded by Robert Hall, MD; Mary Merrill, PhD; Ernestine Ward, LMFT; and Thomas Pope, LMFT. Designed as a master’s program leading toward MFT licensure, the school was grounded in the belief that psychological health requires integration of mental and physical functioning. Students were trained to work skillfully with both the body’s subtle signals and the mind’s conceptual capacities.

    In 1987, the Lomi Psychotherapy Clinic was established in Santa Rosa, California as an outgrowth of the Tomales School. The clinic was created to meet a critical community need for low-fee counseling while providing advanced, post-graduate training in somatic psychotherapy.

  • 1987 - Present: A Community Anchor

    Since its founding, the Lomi Psychotherapy Clinic has provided hundreds of thousands of low-cost, sliding-scale therapy sessions to residents of Sonoma County and surrounding areas. More than 500 therapists have received clinical training, supervision, and mentorship through the clinic.

    Over the decades, Lomi has become an integral part of the regional mental health care system. As public mental health resources have diminished and insurance deductibles and co-pays have increased, many nonprofit clinics have been forced to close. Lomi has remained a vital and stable provider of accessible care, offering sliding-scale services and pro bono crisis support to individuals and families in need.

    The clinic is a licensed mental health facility through the Department of Public Health (License #110000511). It is an approved internship site for psychologist interns through the California Psychology Internship Council, a member of the Bay Area Practicum Information Collaborative (BAPIC), and a training site for numerous graduate programs.

    Lomi Clinic receives referrals from Child Protective Services (CPS), mental health court diversion programs, schools, Veterans Affairs (VA), Sonoma County Behavioral Health physicians, psychiatrists, and other community agencies. The clinic serves individuals seeking personal growth as well as those facing acute crises and immediate threats to emotional, psychological, and physical well-being.

  • Lomi's Legacy Fund Program for Mental Health

    Since 1998, Lomi’s Legacy Fund Program for Mental Health has provided pro-bono, short-term counseling for individuals impacted by crisis. Supported through grants and donations, the fund serves community members with no financial resources who require immediate stabilization and care.

    The Legacy Fund has played a critical role during times of collective trauma, including multiple Sonoma County wildfires and the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. It has also provided ongoing support to unhoused and low-income individuals navigating acute life challenges. Through thousands of hours of donated clinical care, the Legacy Fund has been a life-saving resource, helping to stabilize individuals, support families, and strengthen the resilience and safety of the broader community.

  • Into the Future

    Lomi is committed to our Mission and Vision of providing integrated care to the community and serving as a training center for developing therapists and continuing education for licensed clinicians.

    Our work is essential as less options for care exist, insurance coverage is limited or unattainable, and the world is more stressful. We remain dedicated to ensuring compassionate care for our community, and a vital center for training.

    We have survived with help from generous donors. We are extremely grateful to our supporters. As we map the years, our sustainability goal will allow us to expand care, increase programming, and create a ground of funding to support mental health care and training for the next generations.

    Your contribution to our Mission and Vision is gratefully received.

Over the years, we have grown tremendously. As governmental support for psychotherapy dwindled and the insurance industry cut accessibility for treatment, clinics such as the Lomi Psychotherapy Clinic have become the backbone of community mental health.

The Lomi Psychotherapy Clinic is an integral part of the Sonoma County mental health care delivery system. We are a licensed mental health facility by the Department of Public Health (License # 110000511). We are an approved internship program for Psychologist Interns by the California Psychology Internship Council. Referrals to our clinic from Sonoma County Mental Health, from court diversion programs, from Child Protective Services, Veterans Affairs, psychiatrists and doctors, and many other agencies, allow us to serve an ever-widening portion of the Sonoma County population, as well as other nearby counties. Since 1987, the need for non-profit mental healthcare has grown as government resources have shrunk and as the insurance industry has found ways to limit reimbursement. We have taken the role of providing care to people who cannot pay full fee for treatment, but who are in extreme need for care. Our clientele includes many who come to us for understanding and growth, but also those who are in crisis and face immediate survival issues mentally, emotionally, and physically. Our staff increasingly serves those with major mental illness.

Lomi’s Legacy Fund for Mental Health is a long-standing program that provides free short-term counseling for community members impacted by a crisis. Lomi has activated this fund several times throughout the last 30 years. More recently, it was used to support fire survivors during the aftermath of multiple wildfires (1,017 free sessions provided), youth impacted by the wildfires (115 free sessions provided), individuals who were struggling during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic and could not afford care (837 free sessions provided), and unhoused and low-income community members as they navigated a time of crisis (284 free sessions provided). Since 2017, Lomi has provided 2,253 free crisis counseling sessions to Sonoma County community members in need through our Legacy Fund for Mental Health.

Help us to continue providing affordable, accessible, and quality mental health services for Sonoma County.

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