Breath Based Embodied Psychotherapy

Processwork or process oriented psychology is a psychotherapeutic approach developed by Arnold Mindell that incorporates Jungian dream theory, somatic body awareness and transpersonal psychology into a unified multi-levelled awareness system. 

It aims to facilitate deeper understanding of our unique individual expression, as well as how these processes may manifest in our relationships, by providing tools that help us to follow the natural unfolding  of our experience.

Processwork places a high importance on our dreams - whether they be when we are awake (via day dreams, body symptoms or metaphor) or asleep. By following our dreams, body signals and symptoms we may gather greater understanding of ourselves and help us to process stored tensions and trauma in our body.

Gestalt Therapy is a fantastic technique that focusses on bringing our attention to what is happening in the here and now - in that trauma and issues are not often what happened to us but how we think about and perceive them now. The event may indeed have been traumatic and have caused long lasting effects, but often It is our memory of the event and how we perceive the event that causes us distress.

By bringing awareness to feelings and physical sensations that arise in the moment of working through an issue we are working directly with the core of the issue. As such Gestalt therapy seeks to avoid abstraction and theorising about an issue but rather asks the question - what is my experience of that issue right here and now. 

I incorporate Gestalt therapy into my psychotherapeutic practice by ensuring that each session is highly attuned to physical, emotional and mental responses to the topic of the session in the moment. By attending to the phenomenology (the felt experience of the process), we can bypass overly rationale responses to situations and come to a deeper more cellular understanding.

Incorporating Transpersonal Psychology 

and Holotropic breathwork



Holotropic Breathwork and Transpersonal Psychology underpin much of the way I approach my work. The word Holotropic literally means "Moving towards Wholeness" and was coined by Stanislav Grof as a way to describe the way that non-ordinary states of consciousness can be used to facilitate personal transformation - healing fragmented parts of the self through powerful experiences of inner transformation. 

The non-ordinary state offers the participant a unique way to experience the psyche's builtin capacity to heal - what Stan refers to as the Inner Healing Mechanism or Inner Healer. In Holotropic work, the participant is encouraged to open to the Inner Healer through various breath and body work techniques, in order to allow material to emerge that will help support the further unfolding of the participants process. In this way the participant may experience the processing of stored energy from traumatic events, experience shifts in awareness that bring clarity to issues or simply feel the relief of being in touch with a hitherto unseen part of the self.

These experiences may include elements of literal or personal experiences they may have had, as well as transpersonal experiences which may include powerful embodied experiences of myth, metaphor and archetype.  With any type of deep experiential work it is important to ensure the experience is contained and grounded in a way that makes it possible for the participant to integrate the experience.