““Get out of your head, and come to your senses.””
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.””
The body remembers.
From the moment we are born, we meet the world through sensation,
As infants we are rocked, soothed by song, feel joy ripple through us
and are comforted by the rhythms of a heartbeat, not our own. We are in an embodied relational space that we know as our movement and energetic essence.
As we grow and develop, we carry those early rhythms in how we hold ourselves, in how we move, express, and protect. We’re often taught, directly or indirectly, to silence big feelings, to behave, to suppress,but the body keeps remembering and attempting to speak. It clenches, trembles, softens, and expands. It tells the truth even when the mind is not present to listen or fears, and is disconnected from the body.
Our bodies and minds are in constant conversation.
What we feel, can shape what we think; what we think can shape how we feel.
This flow moves in both directions: from mind to body, top-down,
and from body to mind, bottom-up.
Talk therapy often begins from the top down, helping us understand and organize our inner world. But healing and change can often arise from being in our body,
through sensation, breath, movement, and awareness.
In body-centered, or somatic therapy, we listen to the subtleties of the nervous system,
the gut feelings, the tight throat, the heavy chest and begin to understand ourselves from the inside out. This awareness helps regulate, restore, and rewire, so we don’t just survive, we live more fully, honestly, and freely.
Science shows that tuning into the body awakens the part of the brain linked to empathy, kindness, and connection. The more we feel ourselves, the more we can feel with others.
The body does not lie and it holds memory and trauma. It holds our pain, fear, hypervigilence, shutdown, our resilience, and our becoming. The body has layers of our experiences and is constantly changing as we take in and interact with the external world. It is dynamic and always in process, even in stillness.
I offer a space to explore this embodied wisdom, especially for those navigating trauma, anxiety, depression, disordered eating, or a disconnection from self.
Drawing from dance, somatic practice, body-mind psychotherapy, and bodywork (ILM), I bring presence, curiosity, and compassion.
I work with gentleness and deep listening to your unique body’s rhythm, tension and movement to help you reconnect to your body’s intelligence, so you can feel more integrated, more alive, and more at home in yourself.
Currently I am apprenticed practioner with the Ilan Lev Method (ILM). ILM is a body-mind method of movement and energy, to support and help with the release of held, unwanted physical tension, pain and emotional stuckness and overwhelm. The body has its own natural wisdom to reorganise and repattern to a state of overall body, mind and emotional joy, playfulness, balance, mobility, flow and vitality. ILM is for all ages. It is a process-oriented practice that tends to the entire body, not pathologize or treat specific symptoms. Not only is the client treated but so is the practitioner, as everything happens with ease, care and play. www.ilanlev.org
““Research has shown that the more a person is aware of their own body, the more their insula lights up in an MRI. The more active their insula is, the more empathetic they are to other people, which is the foundation of compassion and loving kindness.” ”
““There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.”
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“...breathe in very deeply and connect with the feeling, and breathe it out on the exhalation. I call it compassionate abiding. It means staying with yourself when, probably for your whole lifetime you’ve always run away at that point.”
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Image: Kathryn Samaras
An ILM training.