What is online gestalt therapy and how can it help you?
Embodiment Sessions: Combined Gestalt and Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement sessions.
Who are you when you feel relaxed in your body, unencumbered by habitual ways of thinking, feeling, responding, behaving, and moving? How do you feel about yourself? How do you feel about others? What creativity flows from there? What kinds of decisions do you make? These are the kinds of questions you can explore in Embodiment sessions.
A powerful way of making changes in your life is to explore the relationship between how you feel about yourself and how you habitually think, feel, sense, move, and even speak. Awareness through movement explorations offer a unique way of delving into these things. They involve a series of gentle movements done on a comfortable mat at your own pace.
If we get stuck in unhelpful ways of
- sensing (or not sensing)
- feeling (or not feeling)
- thinking
- moving
we can become stuck in how we relate to ourselves or others and the types of behaviour we engage in.
Most emotions or feelings are accompanied by familiar types of thoughts, embodied sensations, and ways of tensing or relaxing your muscles. This impacts how you move, which also impacts what you might choose to do (or not do). This is why we use the body and movement as our way of exploring what is and what opportunities there are for change.
An example could be that someone may come with a deep rooted sense of ‘not being good enough’. The thought patterns will repeat in different situations and at different times of the day and will be accompanied by particular sets of sensations, as well as emotional overtones and specific patterns of muscular tension. The more this pattern repeats, the more entrenched it can become.
In the sessions, we explore the connections between these thoughts, sensations, feelings and movements as a way to gather more awareness. Paradoxically, doing this with compassion and curiousity, can bring about change in itself. Drawing on gestalt therapy, we can consider how and why difficult patterns developed and gain insight into what needs to happen for things to change. Moving the body can be a powerful doorway to uncovering the answer to this.
This is just one example, you will bring with you your unique pattern and desire for change. We also go further and look at the resources your body has to offer to support you.
Body as a resource:
Using Awareness Through Movement and the creative approach of gestalt, we also uncover the possibilities for something new to happen. While, the body can be home to anxiety, depression, sadness, grief, stiffness, stress, tension, and resistance, it can also be home to contentment, groundedness, joy, acceptance, relaxation, a sense of home or safety, and much much more!
The gentle movements of Awareness ThroughMovement can support the nervous system to relax and feel safe which can offer you new ways of understanding yourself and new ways of seeing the possibilities in front of you.
For example, a feeling of contentment will come with a set of thoughts, sensations and a corresponding relaxing/tensing of muscles. Or there may be embodied blocks to feeling this way, which is useful information. Uncovering and exploring capacities for feeling contented in the body in therapy with a therapist, can support you to nurture these in situations in life outside of the therapy room.
This is just one example, we can explore may other resources, it depends what you want to nurture in yourself. You may not even know that yet, in which case, we will enquire about that and support you to find out what you need.
This work can be organic, insightful and satisfying and may also involve stumbling blocks or feel scary or challenging at times. This is why it is helpful to have a therapist who can provide support and holding.
Who is it suitable for?:
People who are interested in therapeutic work and want to explore it from an embodied place. People come to this conclusion through many different routes.
More and more, the scientific community is recognising that healing, (whether from trauma, adverse life experiences or difficult childhood relationships with caregivers) involves more that simply talking things through. Doing that on its own, can in some cases simply be re-traumatising because something needs to change in how we feel in our bodies about a situation for that change to be integrated*.
Some people come with a sense that there must be other ways of knowing about things, rather than just thinking about them. Sometimes people want to integrate what they know from their spiritual meditation practices with their understanding of their psychological world in amore concrete way.
If you have had significant trauma and no prior therapy, I would recommend that we start with shorter therapy sessions first and build up some body awareness at a slower pace before moving on to the longer Embodiment Sessions
People who have already had experience of Feldenkrais and want to take it further: Some people may already have experience of the Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement, one to one or in classes. This is away of expanding on the movement exploration to focus more on your emotional and feeling world. We look at how discovering more physical ease can impact your emotional landscape.
We can also look in depth at how, when you move into your ordinary life after classes and encounter different situations and relationships, they impact that sense of ease. Sometimes feeling something and exploring for yourself non-verbally isn’t enough to integrate the change, there needs to be a dialogue with someone about the process. Something needs to be expressed about it in relationship with another person can hold the process. This is where gestalt therapy provides a sound base: we bring curiousity and creativity to the emotional and psychological elements of the process.
Sessions are a weekly commitment: you will decide on an initial number of sessions and then review what is needed next (for example, it could be more of the same, or shorter sessions or moving on to other types of exploration more grounded in gestalt). I offer these sessions in person only.
*some interesting resources on this include The Neuroscience of Human Relationships:Attachment And The Developing Social Brain, Cozolino (2014), The body keeps the score VanDer Kolk (2003), The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are, Siegel (2020)
