Healing : An Integrative Approach
With holistic healing, you can let go of the idea of being “fixed” and instead receive healing.
After years of therapy and coaching, many clients report not achieving the changes they have long desired.
While for some, the traditional talk therapy and coaching methods are enough and work like a charm. But for others, a more holistic approach is needed.
Holistic healing seeks to integrate and align the body, heart, mind, and spirit in a way that supports you, honors your story, and allows you to experience more freedom and aliveness.
The issue in the tissue…
What the mind and heart may have forgotten, our body remembers and holds deep within the tissue of our being. What we experience in our lives, our tissues retain.
The physical body remembers physical, mental, or emotional trauma. To help us feel safe and so that we know how to respond and survive in any given experience, the body’s nervous and muscular systems develop a durable and robust defense mechanism to protect us from future threats.
But when this function no longer serves us, you will find the body resorts to shutting down, avoiding, dissociating, and creating habitual tension patterns. This over-functioning of the sympathetic system becomes an endless cycle of tightness and exhaustion where your body asks itself – do I fight, freeze, or flight?
You do not need fixing. You are not broken. What we all are in need of is healing. Healing helps us forgive the past and unearth our own brilliance. Healing so that we can reawaken and connect more fully to a vibrant body, a loving heart, a creative mind, and connected to life itself.
Body-focused and nonlinear techniques utilize movement. It helps bring into awareness, shifts, and ultimately releases that which does not serve us. We then can make space for growth and vitality. This along with breathwork provides experiential healing and understanding that may not be present in traditional sit and talk therapy.
But wait, does holistic healing fix the problem?
To answer that, no it doesn’t. However, it does help us find ways to release and heal the body, heart, mind, and spirit. We teach the body to let go – to unravel the habitual mental loops while opening up the heart space and reconnecting with our body’s energy more “wholly”.
Ultimately empowering ourselves in love, intimacy, sexuality, embodiment, and life mastery.
So, why include the body?
Breathe! Everything begins with the breath.
Connecting with the breath allows for a greater sense of relaxation, which can also create greater connection and alignment. This encourages habitual tension to be released allowing for easier integration of body, heart, mind, and spirit.
Different breathing techniques – connecting the inhale with the exhale – are used to assist clients in relaxing the body. In return, clients better understand and release habitual patterns.
Breathing also helps a client to connect more deeply to their body. This in turn, allows a space where thoughts, memories, feelings, or blocks that have been held down, be able to rise to the surface and be released.
Our physical bodies are channels for our own innate wisdom…
The body speaks through tension, aches, relaxation, and pleasure. As a result, when movement and physical awareness practices are integrated into sessions, a more holistic manner of healing occurs.
This leads us to transform and liberate ourselves from the retelling of old stories that no longer serve us — those stories that keep us stuck in negative behavioral and relationship patterns.
Clients learn to tune in to the body’s cues as a response to their emotional, mental, and behavioral states. Tics, aches, sensation, and pings, along with specific movement, allows the client to develop a keener sense of self-awareness and observation.
This assists clients in replacing unwanted and unproductive emotional, mental, and behavioral patterns. Ultimately healing the whole of the person.
Sensuality and Sexuality
The practice that engages and helps us embody our innately sensual body is sensuality. Sensuality helps us align and integrate the body, heart, mind, and spirit, which creates a connection to the Divine within.
Sexuality, then, is the expression of this alignment. Sexuality is the expression that supports us in desiring an intimate connection with others.
"The root of all health is in the brain. The trunk of it is in the emotion. The branches and all leaves are the body. The flower of health blooms when all parts work together.”
Embodiment… Movement… Tantra…
These core concepts are threaded into my work with my clients because they have proved the most effective in getting my clients the results they most desire.
Embodiment
Embodiment is the ability to feel what you are feeling.
It is the practice of remaining present and aware of what one is feeling, thinking, and experiencing while still feeling the bodily responses to what is occurring rather than engaging in habitual responses that trigger avoidance, the squelching of feelings, or other negative coping skills.
Movement
I am slowing down, being deliberate with movement, and engaging in techniques nourishing the body, heart, mind, and spirit so one can experience life in the present moment.
Mindful movement is about learning how the body communicates with you and how it wants to surrender to a more relaxed and pleasurable state.
Clients are taught to use tension and relaxation to break free from habitual patterns and tune into their intuitive wisdom. This helps the client feel more comfortable in their own skin as well, creating more aliveness and sensuality.
Tantra
In the West, there is a misconception of what Tantra means to people like Sting, who refer to marathon sexual events. Tantra can and often does consist of sex, but that is a tiny part of the practice.
Tantra is a practice of feeling everything without attaching stories or false beliefs to what is experienced. It is a practice of being fully present to what we say “yes” and “no” to.
Paying attention to what you’re experiencing in your body, how you are breathing, and learning what feels good and what does not are vital.
In the classical sexual ritual, the participants worship each other as embodiments of deities. Partners are encouraged to bring an attitude of reverence into their lovemaking and all their interactions.
Tantra then becomes a practice of giving and receiving through devotion, love, and open-heartedness.