Working with the Body

Psychological patterns that constrict or inhibit us also live inside our bodies, in the ways we breathe, hold tension, or respond to stress. In the process of growing up we develop ways of adapting to the world around us, our best attempts to keep us safe and secure given the environments we live in. These patterns, essentially functional and helpful at the time they developed, may later in life become restrictive. We may find that at some point we are stuck or trapped by old ways of feeling, being, relating, thinking, reacting, and breathing, but can’t seem to find our way out. Working therapeutically with both the body and mind offers a profound potential for changing deeply held ways of being in the world.

My way of working with the body is based on the work of Wilhelm Reich as well as Authentic Movement (see Authentic Movement). These truly holistic modalities allow for working directly with the lived histories within our bodies, with the deepest processes of the self, and generate real change in how we breathe, see, move, feel, think and behave. Working directly with the body brings us to real experiential knowing of how we contain and inhibit the experience and expression of our life energy, and, in the safety of the collaborative relationship between therapist and client, we can begin to open ourselves up to new ways of being. The constrictive patterns that kept us safe and secure in the past can be replaced with a safety and security grounded in a present day ability to feel, express and act from our core. We can actually learn and practice new ways of living, enhancing the potential for greater freedom and aliveness.

Guided by your desires and goals for therapy, I invite you to attend to your embodied experience in the present moment, to sensation, emotion, thought, imagery, and impulse. Working directly with the body, for example by increasing inhalation and exhalation and observing what occurs emotionally and physically as your body breathes more fully, allows more deeply held feelings and thoughts to be worked with and explored. This process often results in the evocation of both subtle and strong emotions, as well as sensations, which is integral to the process of change. In order to develop the capacity to fully feel, express, and modulate our emotions, feelings of pain, fear, anger, shame, grief, and longing that have been buried must come to the surface, be processed and integrated. Trapped on the other side of these painful emotions are the emotions of deep pleasure, excitement, curiosity, and joy - emotions that become felt and accessible once again as the energy that is bound in keeping painful emotions at bay gets released and can freely flow. This allowing of expression of what has been inhibited in a safe and supportive environment is a major component of the change process. Deepening contact with one’s body, with one’s moment-to-moment mind-body experience, expands how you feel, know and express your self in the world.

Together we work at a pace that best facilitates your growth, supporting a sense of empowerment and integration even as old patterns are being worked through and released. Through this process you can experience better contact with your body and with your feelings, a more satisfying range of expression, and be better able to act in accordance with your core desires and needs. Over time the symptoms that brought you into therapy will diminish and constricting patterns will be unraveled, allowing you to move from a place of contraction and emotional pain to expansion and growth.