Our bodies are apt to be our autobiographies.
Body-centered Psychotherapy is a way to help you process your experience through your body. It aims at creating change within the deepest parts of your being.
- Have you talked about your problems over and over and not experienced any change in your life?
- Do you keep getting stuck in the same old patterns and can’t find your way out?
- Do you, deep down, know that more is possible in your life?
“Talk Therapy” is a very valuable form of psychotherapy and sometimes it only goes so far, because it mostly engages the cognitive part of ourselves. There is so much more to us. Many limiting patterns and negative belief systems are held in the unconscious parts of ourselves, including our physical bodies. Our bodies hold our stories – literally in our tissues, our emotional body, our nervous system, our dream world.
Body-centered Psychotherapy bypasses the rationalizing, analytical mind and lets you connect to the direct experience in your body and emotions. It does not focus on your story and analyzing the past, but works with the way your past shows up in you in this very moment. Right now – what becomes possible when you become present to your experience.
Your entire history has shaped the the make-up of your body, your emotions, your belief systems, your relationship to the world and to others. Through working with the way that history has molded your body, limiting patterns can be processes directly on a body level and discharged from the cells and the nervous system. Releasing patterns from that core level allows your entire being to re-organize.
My approach to body-centered psychotherapy has been mostly influenced by Hakomi Therapy and body oriented trauma therapy. Hakomi Therapy places trust in the body’s ( and mind’s) ability to heal and re-organize through it’s natural intelligence when enough support and presence are available.
Then new choices become available to be incorporated into your present life.
In my practice I am able to use body-centered psychotherapy in conjunction with hands-on bodywork. That combination has the potential for very powerful transformation to occur, because we are working very directly with different aspects of your make-up for the most effective results. Often, when the body releases a structural pattern, there will be shifts in the emotional body and the belief system that might have been held in the physical pattern.
