Body awareness

Over the years our understanding of how people get stuck in suffering their lives has developed, from the early days of Freud’s ‘talking therapies’ and the birth of psychoanalysis. 

Today we are more likely to take account of how difficult experiences take hold in our minds and bodies, and how working holistically can help us be far more aware of the impact of experience or lack of it, and start to build new pathways towards healing and connection.

When we are challenged by life our nervous systems go into fight/fright/freeze freeze – an unconscious process – which helps us get away from a situation or person. If they are habitual or sufficiently traumatic then these patterns of behaviour can then become locked into our muscle tone, posture, thought patterns and ways of seeing and experience ourselves and the world. When we bring body awareness into our work we are starting to bring compassion and energy to those stuck places in ourselves.

What we all really want, at the heart of it all, is to feel better in ourselves, in our bodies, to be kinder to ourselves in the moment, to be able to allow emotion to flow rather than getting stuck, and approach ourselves with self-compassion and curiosity, instead of grim determination to get rid of whatever predicament we find ourselves in. 

Bringing awareness to our moment to moment experience brings us to the richness of being human, and the miracle of being. It teaches us to be the witness or observer, the one who knows, rather than the one who is identified with the difficult emotions and feelings, pushing them away or denying they even exist. 

For many centuries the body has been denied and seen as a source of sin, so it’s no wonder we hold such a lot of tension and judgement around being present within ourselves. 

I’ve learned to work with the body and the story it tells through Gestalt therapy, as well as exploring somatic therapy, trauma work, mindfulness, and embodied learning through Tai Chi.  Together we can experience grounding, mindfulness, emotional regulation and awareness, taking you beneath the thinking mind into the world of feelings, sensations and phenomena that make up your amazing body.