As human beings we are at once beautifully unique and remarkably alike.
We come with our own ancestral history and vastly different maps that ultimately guide the way we live. These maps are largely a construct of our formative years, but can be influenced through our significant relationships and life experiences. They inform our beliefs about ourselves and the world, how we relate to our emotions, the quality of our relationships and our engagement in life.
Therapy involves elaborating on existing maps, and building new maps that incorporate the tools, resources and beliefs you need to steer your life in the direction you want.
At the same time, we are not so very different. When we feel the fragility of life, when we are facing difficulty or find ourselves gripped by longing, intense emotions, or unrelenting beliefs and patterns of behaviours. When we sense our happiness and our contentment – this is the shared human experience.
Whatever it is that brings you to therapy, I draw on these shared principles of Sensorimotor and Hakomi Psychotherapy to guide my work.
Organicity
Organicity refers to the innate capacity within each of us to grow and change, as well as our body-mind's capacity to do whatever is necessary to maintain self-organisation in the face of challenges. Organicity validates your body-mind's natural tendency to move towards healing and wholeness. As well as honouring the natural rhythm and unfolding of this process. Change really is possible. Through taking the time to attend to yourself, healing ultimately comes from within.
“I can give you nothing that has not already its origins within yourself. I can throw open no picture gallery but your own. I can help make your own world visible – that is all.
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Collaboration
I value a collaborative approach, which means sharing my thinking, knowledge and tools with you. I pay special attention to helping you establishing collaborative communication between the different parts of you and their unique interests, needs and concerns. Whilst holding your longterm goals and moment to moment experience in awareness, the innate intelligence of your body-mind system will guide our work together.
Kindness
Therapy offers you the space to bring all the different parts of you present, along with their respective questions, interests, longings, fears and concerns. Through many years of my own personal therapy, and experience with clients, I have come to understand the vulnerability that this invitation poses for people. Nowhere else does this uncovering take place. Only in an atmosphere of safety, trust, respect and utmost care can the fullness of the therapeutic conversation take place.
“There is no one method. Only time and space – and the gentle invitation for you to be exactly as you are, moment to moment. ”
Body Mind Unity
Perfectionistic ideals, self-numbing and a culture that values productivity and consumption over presence and meaning, are at the root of modern day suffering. In order to 'keep-up and keep-going', we find ourselves embarking on yet another self-improvement campaign, reaching for quick-fixes that promise instant relief, and leading insanely busy lives. In all of these very ordinary coping mechanisms the rhythms, the soft cries and signals of the body are denied or buried deep beneath the grounds of our awareness. And what is truly lost from this constant movement away from ourself is the wellbeing, vitality, meaning and insight that comes from our own embodiment. More than ever it is imperative that we re-learn how to really be with and tend to our whole selves, mind and body and soul – to recover our natural embodied state of being-ness. This is where our ease, joy, clarity, creativity and connection lives. This is our buddha-nature.
Image credit: LEVEKUNST art of life