Welcome
I offer Psychotherapy and supervision in West London. You can go directly to these pages to find out more.
I am also a writer, trainer and speaker on the significance of embodiment. This is a multi-faceted subject, a web of connected themes, that I cover from many angles. (Link to archive of my writing).
Our Bodies
Human bodies are complex organisms. Like trees, or soil, our bodies reveal our long ancestral history. The ‘wisdom of the body’ is in accumulated knowledge: the elaborated and concentrated learning of more than two million years of human life on earth. Our embodiment is our connection with the matrix of life.
Embodiment
Embodiment is the sense of inhabiting our bodies in a meaningful way, as lived-and-felt experience. It is being able to listen to sensations and emotions and impulses- it is trusting that this information is relevant and of value to us in the present moment. It also refers to how we use our bodies to express, reveal, protect or contain feelings, identity, inner conflicts or pain.
Troubled
The way we feel towards our bodies is profoundly shaped by our early experience of family relationships, by trauma, by our sensory environments and the prevailing attitudes of our cultural context.
Many people do not feel at home in their bodies. Bodies are given a lot of negative attention – objectified, feared, over-medicalised, punished and neglected. They may be indulged but not nourished. They become targets of prejudice or impossible demands to be or look a certain way.
Furthermore, changes in our sense of human embodiment and consciousness are occurring with the very rapid changes in technology (digitalisation, AI, robots). [link to chapter]
Why embodiment matters
In all my work I consider the roots of the way we use our bodies to connect, listen, move, dream and gesture. Being able to experience ourselves and the world through awareness of the body is potentially incredibly rich. This is precisely because it derives from diverse and complex forms of bodily intelligence have which developed over different stages of our evolution, from single cell to homo sapiens to the advanced social human culture we know today.
Our lives have layer upon layer of meaning, emerging from our personal and ancestral histories, woven through with the colours of our culture, and unfolding anew with every day. That sense of depth of meaning needs some anchor. A felt sense of the body, an inhabited body, a body welcomed and recognised in community, can be that anchor. Being in our bodies is a process that enhances life if we can bear to feel them and know them and be curious enough to keep re-discovering them.
It is resonant interconnection – between our senses and our feelings, with others, with the creaturely and living earth– that enhances our sense of being embodied. We are an intrinsic part of the web of life. It is essential to us as a species, as well as to the global ecosystem we inhabit, that we recognise this.
