Your Teachers

Neeshee Pandit, LAc

Psychoanalyst • Acupuncturist • Professor

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, is the founder of Parlêtre Press, co-director of Analytica Institute, and teaches five-element acupuncture and Western psychology at the Middle Way Acupuncture Institute.

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. His 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.

His 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.

Clinical Lineage

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, he lived in the ashrams of his spiritual teacher, Adi Da Samraj, engaged in intensive spiritual disciplines and temple arts, which formed the contemplative foundation of his clinical work.

Ayurvedic & Tibetan Medical Lineages

Shaka Vansya Ayurveda • Initiated under Vaidya R.K. Mishra one of the last living lineage holders of an unbroken family tradition of
Ayurvedic medicine.

Sowa Rigpa (Tibetan Medicine) • Completed a four-year doctorate under Menpa Phuntsog Wangmo in the lineages of Chögyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche and Khenpo Troru Tsenam.

Acupuncture & Psychoanalysis Lineages

Classical Five-Element Acupuncture • Trained in Classical Five-Element Acupuncture, practices in the French lineage of Soulié de Morant and its associated styles. Master’s degree in Acupuncture from Middle Way Acupuncture Institute.

Psychoanalysis & Schizoanalysis • Trained with Dr. Scott Von at the Analytica Institute, tracing directly to Jacques Lacan's clinical
transmission in Paris and the broader schizoanalytic tradition developed
by Félix Guattari at La Borde clinic.

Nicole Ortega, LMT

Massage Therapist • Bodyworker • Herbalist

Nicole Ortega is a licensed massage therapist, advanced structural integration practitioner, herbalist, 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. 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. 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.

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. Her approach is rooted in a simple clinical truth: the body holds what has been lived, and she works with that inscription — reading it through palpation and responding with touch that is both precise and unhurried.

Nicole's somatic formation began in Hawaii, where she learned from herbalists, shamans, structural bodyworkers, massage therapists, and traditional healers for over fifteen years.

Structural Integration Lineage

Guild for Structural Integration • Formally trained in 2013 by Emmett
Hutchins—one of the original handful of students Dr. Ida Rolf trained
and designated as a teacher of her method.

The Rolf Institute • 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. Nicole
completed her Advanced Rolfer Certification with Jan Sultan and Tessie Brungardt.