Our therapeutic work is based on four fundamental principles:
- Collaboration and non-violence
- We believe that the therapeutic relationship between therapist and client must be based on kindness, collaboration, empathy, and open-heartedness.
- The body is the primary source of experience and aliveness
- When we are hurt or frightened, we protect ourselves by organizing defensive patterns, constricting our breath, our bodies, our emotions, our thoughts, our feelings, our hopes and our dreams.
These survival strategies protect us as we grow up but restrict our authentic, spontaneous, pleasurable life as adults.
Including the body as the central vehicle for the therapeutic process facilitates and deepens growth, creativity, and transformation. Our bodies directly experience life as it happens, with all its richness and difficulty, with all its joys, wounds, and conflicts. With a greater understanding of these issues, it is possible to develop new psychological and physical resources to support clients opening to new and more creative options.
We all have innate healing potential
Painful childhood experiences and emotional injuries compromise our natural development toward health, maturity, and relatedness. Somatic psychotherapy focuses on unblocking our physical and emotional defenses thus supporting the normal human tendency towards health, wholeness, and integration — the fully experienced, alive self.
We all have the right to more pleasurable relationships with others, the world and ourselves
Because somatic psychotherapy works directly with embodied experience, it offers the possibility of recovering from past hurts, restoring our emotional, physical and spiritual wellbeing by helping to change physical patterns that obstruct our natural capacity for pleasure, fulfillment and loving relationships.