Talk Therapy

A confidential and understanding chat, listening empathetically, discussing what’s on your mind, how you’re feeling, finding solutions and relief.

 Somatic Therapy

Your body, health and well-being knows your story, through sensing and breath we discover the core of the issue, where it began, why it comes up and how to heal.

Somatic counselling applies to personal growth a therapy approach that expands the counselling experience beyond mere talk to include working on our issues with felt experience of them in our emotions and body.  (Soma is greek for body).  This felt experience is essential, if we are to bring forth lasting change, because we experience our issues not just as mental preoccupations, but also as habits of feelings and patterns of muscular tension, gestures, postures and other physical phenomena.  As a therapist counselling with a somatic approach, my work brings forth comprehensive change on all levels of our experience. 

Somatic approaches to therapy are rooted in psychology's increasing understanding of the interdependent unity of the body (soma) and the mind. Not only does the mind affect the body as in psychosomatic illness, but also the body affects the mind as with drugs prescribed for mood disorders. This mind-body unity explains why throughout the world emotional and experiential counselling treatments are propagating such as Somatic Experiencing, Radix, Bioenergetics, Hakomi, Core Energetics, Alexander technique, Breema Bodywork, Bodynamics, Focusing, Rubenfeld Method, and Hellerwork.

Contemporary scientific research tells us that there is a cognitive brain and an emotional brain. The emotional brain is intimately connected with the body, much more so than the cognitive brain. That is why it is so much easier to access emotions through the body than it is through language.

Understandably, the mind-body unity frees somatic based therapy practices from the sometimes ineffective constraints of talk-only therapy. When we just talk about our issues, certainly we may achieve intellectual insights, but often our habits of feeling and patterns of physical tension remain untouched. Many of us know persons who have undergone years of verbal counseling only to discover that despite their comprehensive intellectual understanding of their problems, their problems still shackle them and inhibit their aliveness.

A somatic therapy approach honors the emotional and the cognitive components of our lived experience. It allows our personal growth to more integrated, deep, and lasting than just an intellectual understanding. I am a teacher of Focusing, a special way of listening to the inner Self as experienced through the breath and body's felt sense.

Body Centred Art Therapy

Using water colour paint, or oil pastel crayons to unlock your true feelings and heal the wounds

Somatic art therapy is an integrated somatic and body centered approach used with art making. You can gain awareness of your sensations and feelings in your body as you express yourself through art.  This process facilitates a deepening of the body/mind connection and allows a richer integration of experiences with the resolution of traumatic or overwhelming events.

Somatic psychology links neurophysiology and psychology with the wisdom of the body as it relates to trauma resolution and the inherent stress of daily living. Through art you can explore and expand the authentic creative imagery that comes from the bodywork. Through body awareness and creating imagery, you can work towards transforming trauma.

You will experience:
- exercises that work with the felt sense
- how art therapy can be used to help regulate the autonomic nervous system
- self regulation and soothing exercises
- exercises for hyper arousal and dissociation
- 'repairs' that transform the activation of the autonomic nervous system

Art Therapy and Trauma Resolution

When you have experienced trauma, your autonomic nervous system [ANS] has been affected. I use right brain therapy techniques to help regulate the ANS. Working in the present moment allows access to firing of neural networks so that new wiring can occur creating new patterns of regulation. Through imagery, art, dreams, and archetypal work I can help you create new ways of knowing and regulating. This moves the body away from holding, constricting or collapsing with the event.

Beginning in infancy and early childhood traumas accumulate in the body. The degree of dissociation reflects the intensity of the trauma. Therapy intends to create association with the disconnected parts of the self.  Repairs happen through art therapy, visualizations, somatic experiencing, EMDR, focusing and other right brain therapy techniques.

Many of the emotional problems we have can be traced back to disturbing events in the past. These may be significant traumas, such as rape or a car accident. They may also be less dramatic, but still have a lasting impact: for example, being ridiculed by a teacher or rejected by a best friend in childhood.  I help you bring forth the different aspects of the memory as it is at that moment (the image, thought, emotion, and body sensation). The theory behind it is as follows: when a disturbing event occurs, the memory can become "locked" into your body incorporating imagery, emotions, body sensations, and negative beliefs.

This can be triggered when any kind of associated or related experience comes along. This can cause an overreaction in the present situation that may result in you feeling almost as upset or powerless as you did in the original event. The traumatic memory is stored in the body

Focusing and Breath

Focusing is "direct access to bodily knowing." It is a practice that takes a person towards a state of conscious perception that goes far beyond knowing something on a mere conceptual level. As with Somatic Experiencing, Focusing refers to this bodily knowing as a felt sense. As the Focusing Institute's website explains, "You can sense your living body directly under your thoughts and memories and under your familiar feelings. Focusing happens at a deeper level than your feelings. Under them you can discover a physically sensed murky zone, which is concretely there. This is a source from which new steps emerge. This murky zone "opens" as you learn to stay with it longer. Being with it increases the ability to sense feelings behind words or images, even when those are not yet formed. Eventually, you can learn how to let a deeper bodily felt sense come in relation to any problem or situation. It is a subtle process, hard to define in words."

The philosopher Eugene Gendlin developed Focusing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, while he was working with the famed psychologist Carl Rogers.

Somatic Experiencing

Dr. Peter Levine developed Somatic Experiencing (SE) by observing how animals regulate and discharge high levels of energy when encountering life-threatening situations in the wild. Unlike humans, who have been trained to use the rational faculties of the mind to cope with stressful situations, animals exhibit an innate ability to restore themselves to equilibrium after being attacked. They do not hold in their bodies the intense energy they needed to temporarily mobilize for survival. Thus, they do not get traumatized as people do are after a frightening trigger event. As Dr. Levine puts it, "Traumatic symptoms are not caused by the dangerous event itself. They arise when residual energy from the event is not discharged from the body. This energy remains trapped in the nervous system where it can wreak havoc on our bodies and minds."

Dr. Levine argues that humans also possess this energy-releasing ability, and can learn how to employ a body awareness he calls felt sense to renegotiate and heal the trauma. Learning how to access this felt sense in the moment and release residual tension is the basis of SE. SE is considered valid for both shock traumas-single-episode traumatic experiences such as war, rape, or natural disasters-and developmental trauma, which refers to interruptions in the predictable psychological stages of growth.

Body Sensation

Awareness of sensations in the body can be blocked through habits of dissociation and repression. This is because the sensation may be uncomfortable or painful, and we are not trained to focus on this inner knowing and awareness of the body. Transformation of trauma involves the acknowledgment, and information of the inner movement of sensation. This energy and awareness is essential to reconnect what has been fragmented by a trauma. Fragmented aspects involve the disorganization of interconnecting systems. Reconnection can occur when we stay in the consciousness of sensation long enough to experience the sensations of both the discomfort of the unresolved trauma as well as the vital healing life force.

Questions to help you increase an awareness of sensation:

1. When you describe what happened to you, what do you notice is going on in your body?

2. Notice the sensations that are triggered with the thought you just expressed.

3. Feel the sensations that are beneath that emotion. What in your body is telling you that you have that emotion?

4. When you scan your body, what sensation do you notice?

 I will help you learn bodywork for:

  - connecting    - postioning      - balancing      - centering       - grounding

  - boundaries    - managing energy      - self expression      - releasing      - resourcing

Body Mapping

I will introduce you to several ways of working with art in connection to somatic bodywork such as: resourcing, strengthening through imagery, and body mapping. A body map shows where you are holding your trauma and where your resources are in your body. It also includes defence mechanisms, schemas and archetypes.

Clay Therapy:

Using a clean earth based clay for a hands on experience to express and discover yourself, releasing stored issues through to healing.

I use various forms of meditation either in groups of on an individual basis.  Gentle guided meditations either laying, sitting, walking or dancing.  Meditation is used to regenerate your energy, through breath, stillness of mind and vision work, bringing both vitality and groundedness providing you with a sense of yourself and your surroundings.

Translated from the Japanese, Reiki (ray-kee) means "Spirit guided life force".  Reiki practitioners, throught the use of light touch (or no touch if preferred) aid the recipient in balancing the flow of life energy in the body.  It is non-invasive and complimentary to all forms of healing.  When a Chakra becomes stressed or blocked this can have a negative effect on the organs in that region of the body and can also contribute to negative emotional states, such as depression or anxiety. Reiki, Pranic Healing and Polarity Therapy, are some of the forms of Spiritual Healing, which address chakra health. Unlike massage, Reiki treatments are performed with the recipient fully clothed either sitting or lyin down.  While Reiki is spiritually based and is practiced by people of all faiths, it is not necessarily for the recipient to hold any belief in particular in order to experience the benefits of Reiki. 

Spiritual healing is not Spiritualism. Spiritual healing is a therapy, whilst Spiritualism is a religion, comparable with any of the world's principal religions.

To be healthy means to be free of disease both emotionally, physically and mentally. Healing is the restoration of health and this can be facilitated in numerous ways.  Spiritual Healing is concerned with the subtle energies that are not commonly discernable. To be defined as spiritual healing, one of the key things is that the therapy or process needs to be therapeutic or healing without the use of medicines or remedies.  Healing occurs solely through the use of energy.  Spiritual healing channels a form of energy that cannot be seen or felt but is the essence of all living things.  It is often described as Light, Life Force or the Vital Force.  Many spiritual healers act as a channel for this energy, and then direct the energy to their client in a way that brings the client both benefit and relief.  The healing is effected purely through the use of Energy, Prana, Chi or Light, is the essence of all created and living things and is often described as Light, Life Force or the Vital Force. Many Spiritual Healers act as conduits or channels for this healing energy and once they have tuned in to their client and understand what needs to be healed, the practitioner can then direct it in such a way that it brings about benefit and relief for the client.

Many Spiritual Healers are also able to give their clients useful advice and information in the form of channeling, said to be through the use of Angels or Spirit Guides. Past life readings may also be included in the range of modalities used by these practitioners.

Spiritual Healing often picks up where many other treatments leave off. Many chronic, nagging or recurring conditions can be healed or greatly relieved through these more subtle processes. It is empowering for the client, as there is usually a desire on the practitioners' part to ultimately show each person how to heal themselves.

The benefits of Spiritual Healing is therefore very wide ranging. Where medicine, surgery, physical therapies, supplements, dietary adjustments or analysis begin to loose their effectiveness or are unable to bring about a complete recovery, this is the realm in which Spiritual Healing is most useful.

The type of people who would benefit from consulting a Spiritual Healer are often very sensitive; who don't like taking medication; who have been in prolonged forms of treatment without much result; who are frustrated with chronic or recurring problems; and especially those who are suffering emotionally and are unable to understand the basis of their unhappiness, anxiety or confusion. 

I am available as a facilitator for workshops on issues of self discovery and personal development. These workshops are interactive, creative, artistic and liberating.

TCM Movement / Dance therapy, increases fitness, health, joy and vitality and reduces the symptoms of stress, depression and obesity.  Based on the proven health system of Traditional Chinese Medicine, this movement harmonises energy flow in the body through dance and music and is closed with a beautiful meditation. It is a beautiful way to revitalise your Self!  The dances are easy to do and fun to learn and the flowing movements gently increase body tone and flexibility.  The dances are suitable for everyone and are easily adapted to individual needs including those of children and the elderly.  Movement is a proven healing force and this dance is the fun way to exercise your body and take care of your soul.  Speaking from personal experience the sensation you feel after a class in Wu Tao is similar to the sensation you feel after a yoga class.

• Counselling Current life issues
• Counselling Past Life issues
• Meditation
• Energy Work 
• Body Based / Somatic Therapy
• Breath Work
• Colour Energy
• Grounding Techniques
• Astral Cleansing
• Etheric Strengthening
• Bringing in your "I am"
• Balancing the Elements
• TCM (Tradional Chinese Medicine) Theory
• Movement / Dance incorporating TCM elements