Who We Are

Nicole Ortega is a Licensed Massage Therapist, Structural Integration practitioner, and Ayurvedic practitioner. She co-founded Somaraja Clinic with her husband Neeshee, where her work forms the somatic ground of the clinic's multimodal practice.

Nicole works at the level of connective tissue, structure, and the body's inherent organizing intelligence. Her primary tools are palpation, presence, and deep listening—the capacity to hear what the body is saying before the mind has found words for it. Through Structural Integration and Ayurvedic therapies, she engages the fascia as a living record of experience—the place where the history of the person is held in form, and where genuine structural change becomes possible.

The work of Somaraja Clinic is fundamentally psychosomatic—the body and psyche are not separate domains but a single field approached from different entry points. Where Neeshee's practice enters through the word, the needle, and the reading, Nicole's enters through touch and tissue. Both are forms of structural integration: the same principle operating at different focal planes of the whole person. What releases in the fascia echoes in the psyche; what shifts in the symbolic finds its way into the body. Nicole's work enacts this at the most tangible level—the living tissue itself.

Her approach is rooted in a simple clinical truth: the body holds what has been lived. Shock, loss, illness, the ordinary weight of a life—all of it is inscribed in the connective tissue long after the mind has moved on. Nicole works with that inscription—reading it through palpation and responding with touch that is both precise and unhurried.

Whatever brings a person to the table, Nicole creates a container in which the nervous system can settle, the tissue can release, and the body can begin to remember its own coherence.

Nicole's somatic formation began in Hawaii, where she learned from herbalists, shamans, Rolfers, massage therapists, and traditional healers over fifteen years. She trained in advanced massage therapy and connective tissue work in Kilauea at the Pacific Center for Awareness and Bodywork under Lee Joseph, Carole Madsen, and Dr. Mark Olsen.

In 2012, Nicole was invited to receive the ten-series of Rolfing as a class model under the supervision of Emmett Hutchins at the Guild for Structural Integration. The transformation in her body and awareness through the work showed her the full potential of Rolfing—not only in aligning and mobilizing the physical body, but in supporting mental, emotional, and spiritual growth.

In 2013, Nicole was formally trained in the Rolf Method of Structural Integration by Emmett Hutchins—one of the original handful of students Dr. Ida Rolf trained and designated as a teacher of her method. Emmett embodied and intensively contemplated the work of human potential and structural integration that Dr. Rolf initiated in him, and was profoundly dedicated to teaching the next generation of practitioners until the end of his life in 2016.

Near the end of his life, Emmett personally encouraged Nicole to pursue advanced training with Jan Sultan—one of the few teachers personally selected and trained by Dr. Ida Rolf. In 2023, Nicole completed continuing education at the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute and completed her Advanced Rolfing Certification with Jan Sultan and Tessie Brungardt in 2025.

2024-2025

Advanced Rolfing Certification, Jan Sultan and Tessi Burgardt, Rolf Institute, Boulder, CO

2016

Ayurvedic External Therapies, Dr. Marc Halpern, California College of Ayurveda, Grass Valley, CA

Studies in Wuji Qigong Therapy, Masters Jane Yang and Paul Litchfield, Melbourne, Australia

2013-2014

Rolfing Training, Emmett Hutchins, Guild for Structural Integration, Kapaa, HI

2013

Massage Therapy and Advanced Connective Tissue Bodywork, Dr. Lee Joseph, Pacific Center for Awareness & Bodywork , Kilauea, HI

2006-2010

B.S. in Interdisciplinary Global Health Studies, University of Alabama, Birmingham, AL

Neeshee Pandit is a psychoanalyst, licensed acupuncturist, doctor of Ayurveda and Tibetan medicine (vaidya /menpa), and Vedic astrologer. He co-founded Somaraja Clinic with his wife Nicole, and is the founder of Parlêtre Press and co-host of the Parlêtre Podcast.

Neeshee’s clinical approach draws on Five-Element Acupuncture, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Vedic Astrology, Ayurveda, and Tibetan Medicine simultaneously—not as a menu of modalities but as a field of inquiry into the multiplicities of the individual.

Neeshee practices in the tradition of the scholar-physician and the physician-analyst—a figure found across Asian medical cultures whose clinical practice is an assemblage of philosophy, poetics, and spirituality. In Chinese medicine this tradition is embodied by Sun Si-Miao and Zhang Zhongjing; in Ayurveda by Caraka and Vāgbhata; in psychoanalysis by Lacan himself, whose clinical work was simultaneously a philosophy of language, subjectivity, and desire.

Neeshee's name, Pandit, means "learned one" in Sanskrit and is a classical designation for the scholar-physician in the medical and philosophical traditions of India. The name is both inheritance and vocation.

Neeshee's theoretical and clinical thinking is developed in a body of published essays available through Parlêtre Press. Notable works include Méridiens du Parlêtre—which maps the historical and clinical intersections between the French acupuncture tradition and Lacanian psychoanalysis—and his Master's thesis Spirits of the Unconscious: Possession and Resurrection in Acupuncture Therapeutics.

He is currently completing Schizosutras—a book-length work that maps the intersections between Lacanian psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis, five-element acupuncture, and the Eastern esoteric traditions. He teaches five-element acupuncture and Western psychology at the Middle Way Acupuncture Institute.

Neeshee comes from a family lineage of scholars, physicians, and astrologers rooted in South Asia—a lineage the name Pandit signifies. His grandfather, Dr. Y.I. Dixit, was a Professor of History and a renowned palm reader whose own father was a Vedic astrologer—an inheritance that shaped Neeshee's early understanding of medicine as inseparable from cosmology.

From 2008-2023, Neeshee lived in the ashrams of his spiritual teacher, Adi Da Samraj, engaged in intensive spiritual disciplines and temple arts, and served as an editor at the Dawn Horse Press for fifteen years. This period formed the contemplative foundation of his clinical work.

Neeshee’s lineage spans three Asian traditions and carries a significant French dimension. He trained in Ayurveda at the California College of Ayurveda and was subsequently initiated into Shaka Vansya Ayurveda under Vaidya R.K. Mishra (1952–2017), one of the last living lineage holders of an unbroken family tradition of Ayurvedic medicine. He subsequently completed a four-year doctorate in Tibetan Medicine under Menpa Phuntsog Wangmo in the lineage of Chögyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche and Khenpo Troru Tsenam.

His acupuncture lineage traces to the French classical tradition through George Soulié de Morant—a diplomat, sinologist, and acupuncturist who brought the tradition of five-element acupuncture to France in the early twentieth century. It was France, more than any other Western country, that preserved and transmitted the classical streams of acupuncture as energetic meridian therapy, at a time when China itself was moving toward a standardized, biomedically inflected form of Chinese medicine (“TCM”).

What became known in the West as "five-element acupuncture" is a French classical tradition finding its English-language form through the work of J.R. Worsley, who absorbed these streams and developed them into the five-element system he taught for decades.

Neeshee traces his acupuncture lineage directly to Soulié de Morant and Worsley. He trained at the Worsley Institute and completed his Master's degree at the Middle Way Acupuncture Institute—inheriting a transmission that is as much French as it is Chinese.

His psychoanalytic lineage is equally French in origin. Neeshee trained in Lacanian psychoanalysis with Dr. Scott Von at the Analytica Institute—a lineage that traces directly to Jacques Lacan's clinical and theoretical transmission in Paris. Lacan's seminars at Sainte-Anne Hospital and the École Normale Supérieure, and the broader schizoanalytic tradition developed by Félix Guattari at the La Borde clinic, form the theoretical ground of Neeshee's analytic work. It is within this French psychoanalytic and schizoanalytic framework—where the body is understood as a desiring flow and the symptom as source of creative production— that acupuncture, astrology, and medicine find their clinical coherence.

These two French lineages—the acupuncture of Soulié de Morant and the psychoanalysis of Lacan and Guattari—meet in Neeshee's practice in a way that is historically grounded rather than merely synthetic. Both traditions developed in Paris in the same cultural moment, both were shaped by the encounter between French intellectual life and Asian medicine and thought, and both share a structural understanding of the body as an assemblage of flows—a living network of signifiers and vital forces.

2022-2024

Master’s in Acupuncture, Middle Way Acupuncture Institute, Mt. Vernon, WA

2020-2022

Worsley Five-Element Acupuncture, Worsley Institute, Portland, OR

2016-2020

Doctor of Tibetan Medicine (Menpa), Shang Shung School of Tibetan Medicine, Conway, MA

2016

Initiation in Wuji Qigong Therapy with Masters Jane Yang and Paul Litchfield, Melbourne, Australia

2015-2017

Pranavid (Certified Shaka Vansya Practitioner), Vaidya R.K. Mishra, Los Angeles, CA

2015-2019

Studies in Vedic Astrology and Homeopathy with Ernst Wilhelm, Prescott, AZ

2014-2015

Ayurvedic Health Practitioner, California College of Ayurveda, Grass Valley, CA

2013-2014

Ayurvedic Health Educator, California College of Ayurveda, Grass Valley, CA

2009-2023

Editorial apprenticeship with Dr. Jonathan Condit, Dawn Horse Press, Middletown, CA