Shaila Khan Registered Psychotherapist (RP) - OEATA Member Directory

I believe that every individual has a right to live from a place of vivacious agency — where your needs and desires can be fully actualized. You have a right to feel safety, belonging, and internal nourishment within your own body as you navigate life.

My practice encompasses embodied and somatic forms of psychotherapy, drawing primarily on sensorimotor psychotherapy and dance movement therapy (DMT) as the foundational modalities of treatment. This is body-centered therapy rooted in the understanding that nervous system regulation and trauma healing cannot happen through thought alone.

My background as a belly dance performer and teacher for over a decade has given me deep insight into the power of somatics. As we continue to decolonize therapy and move beyond older models focused on cognition alone, we have an opportunity to reinvest in the ancestral wisdom that understood mental well-being as movement, dance, community health, and belonging. Neuroscience affirms what our ancestors knew: we cannot heal collective trauma or intergenerational trauma through the mind alone. Somatic therapy requires the body.

I continue to offer body-based movement and dance workshops in Toronto focused on embodied transformation — creative explorations that support somatic resourcing, innate resilience, and the reclamation of pleasure and sensuality as a form of empowerment. I integrate practical somatic practices that support nervous system regulation beyond sitting meditation, making embodiment therapy accessible and alive.

I am completing my final year of studies in Dance Movement Therapy at the National Centre for Dance Therapy in Montreal, and my training through the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute. I hold a Masters of Dance from York University and haved served in leadership positions  as the former Vice-President of the Dance Movement Therapy Association of Canada.

As a somatic therapist in Toronto, I hold that individual mental health histories are inseparable from experiences of racism, classism, sexism, and other forms of systemic trauma and oppression. I am committed to anti-oppressive, trauma-informed care — integrating the most current frameworks through ongoing education and quality mentorship, in service of healing justice.