My work draws on my training, research and experience as a somatic movement therapist enriched by my background in contemporary dance and improvisational practices. The somatic approach, or experiential bodymind unity, has been the central focus of my life work, my subject of study at Master’s level, and the core of my profession for over thirty years. Embodiment provides a way to support and nurture one’s emergent uniqueness. (Whether that is understood as life-force or libido, authenticity or soul.) My approach is through attunement, a form of mutual embodied presence which allows and supports the emergence of fresh insight into our innermost experiences. My practice holds that one’s body keeps the score, honouring and enabling an innate movement towards wholeness. The body is held as revered source of knowledge, learning and creativity. I endeavour to accompany, to ‘hold space’ for you to emerge to yourself. Sensing bodily impulses gives space for the emergence of emotion and image, (imagination/metaphor/dream). Through creative processes we encounter our depths and begin to experience and understand the unseen motives for our actions. I think of this as soul work. In alignment with depth psychologists, I hold soul as vital to life, and the care and nourishment of it as our first responsibility to ourselves. Such embodied imagination plays a large part in my work at certain stages in therapy and is the rich soil of my work in embodied enquiry. My interest and focus lie in the creative, imaginal and intuitive aspects of working from body whilst rooted in the science of body-mind connection and the nervous system. The work cultivates presence and supports bodily awareness through qualities of curiosity, listening, feeling, sensing and intuition. Intuiting and thinking into theory, myth, story, image as they emerge as we work is part of the meaning-making process.

Somatic and embodiment influences are Authentic Movement, Linda Hartley, Peter Levine (Somatic Experiencing) Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen (Body-Mind Centering), Anna Halprin (Life Art Process, dance as a healing art), Miranda Tufnell (Body and Imagination/experiential anatomy), Andrea Olsen and more... The theory and practice of Authentic Movement, as developed by Jungian analyst Janet Adler and movement therapist Joan Chodorow, led me back to the works of Carl Jung and to Marie-Louise von Franz, and post-Jungians, such as Marion Woodman, James Hillman, James Hollis’s works on midlife, and Mary Antonia Wood’s focus on the Archetypal Artist.

The inner language of metaphor...image, symbol, Myth and archetype come alive to us through my approach to embodied practice and somatic therapy. These depths offer paths towards healing and meaning as we encounter and 'dance' with the metaphor which stirs deep truths we ca