What are body-mind practices?
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
For a truly holistic approach to healing, we need to listen to the wisdom of the body as well.
Our thoughts, feelings and behaviours, our physiology, our environment and lifestyle, our relationships, our society and culture, our inner landscape and our spiritual life are all equally important factors in achieving optimum health and wellbeing. I draw upon a variety of evidence-based body and mind practices to facilitate a holistic healing process, which aims to treat each person individually, based on their unique context and complexity.
“Western Medicine would have us believe that we can separate the body into parts, isolate certain structures, understand their function, and then prescribe how to fix them. This may be a convenient theory, but... it does not ring true when dealing with a complex living being."
~ Tammi Sweet
PROCESS WORK
Process-oriented psychology offers a unique, non-pathologising approach to working with the challenges in our lives. Through the cultivation of awareness we can begin to find meaning and understanding for the full spectrum of the human experience. Process Work integrates principles from Jungian psychology, quantum physics, Taoism, somatic therapies, alchemy, and indigenous healing approaches to explore the body-mind connection, relationships, and our connections with society and culture. Everyday disturbances, illnesses, body sensations, dreams, and even traumatic experiences can be unfolded to reveal inner wisdom, strength, insights, and innate capacities that can help us to live more fully in each moment.
The body is a dream, trying to happen...
~ Arnold Mindell
SOMATIC THERAPY
Trauma is NOT the event itself. It's what happens inside your body in response to the event. ​In order to heal from trauma it is crucial to address the feelings and sensations that are held in the body, giving them the opportunity to emerge, be expressed, and resolve. If these feelings and emotions remain suppressed, they will eventually become hardwired in our brain and nervous sytem, manifesting physically as painful symptoms and chronic health issues. Body centred therapies can help us to slow down, listen, and follow the innate wisdom encoded in the body, so our emotions, thoughts and beliefs shift. As we reconnect and learn to feel safe in our body again, we begin to dissolve old patterns, so that new practices can emerge - reconnecting us with life, and the people in our world.
PSYCHONEUROIMMUNOLOGY
This fascinating field of work explains how our physical and psychological processes interact. The constant bi-directional communication between the body and mind, means that our bodies can affect the thoughts we have, while our thoughts can also affect our physical bodies through the nervous, endocrine and immune systems. This helps explain how things like gut health and inflammation can lead to psychological dysfunction and mental illness; and how unresolved trauma and chronic stress manifest in our bodies as major disease and illness. It is deeply connected to my work with the Endocannabinoid System and its role as a master regulator of our most vital life functions, including nervous system function, emotional processing, immune response, hormone secretion and digestion.
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