My Work

Healing the rupture in the sense of self is a life-long journey. My intent is to help the person in therapy embark on this journey by finding his inner compass through reconnecting to the body. The process entails revisiting developmental issues from childhood and in-depth somatic work with the intent to increase awareness, foster emotional expression and restore the body's feeling capacity. This creates space inside so that the self can emerge. In the therapeutic relationship the disowned aspects of the self are recognized and mirrored, anchoring them in the felt sense of the body. 

Reconnecting with the body requires work. We disconnect from our body and our feelings at such an early age in response to overwhelming and traumatic experiences. Over the years our defensiveness, behavioral patterns and modern lifestyle reinforce and crystallize this division. As a result we become disembodied and dispirited. We lose our enthusiasm for life. So coming back to the body means "rolling up our sleeves" and doing the basic work, in therapy and in our lives. 

I work with Bioenergetics and its principles of grounding, breathing, vibration and contact to help people feel their body once again. Bioenergetics is a modality of body-oriented psychotherapy created by Alexander Lowen. According to Lowen, a person is their body and the identification with the body leads to basic wellbeing. The approach is a combination of body, analytic and relational therapeutic work based on an energetic understanding. Energy on a body level translates into our basic aliveness, our healthy emotional and instinctual flow. This flow is blocked and stagnates due to psychological defenses against past trauma. We tense and deaden our bodies not to feel the pain of these early traumatic experiences. Emotions and impulses are then held in the body in the form of tension. On a psychological level this manifests in a variety of ways including depression, angst, phobias, emotional imbalance, feelings of despair, lack of self-worth, compulsivity, hyperactivity, apathy and others. On a deeper level we disconnect from our core resources, our essence, and we feel empty or we compensate against this feeling with defensiveness. This compensation then becomes our character structure, our way of surviving in our family environment and later in the world. 

With Bioenergetics, the person in therapy is helped to become aware of these defenses, to work with and express their psychological and emotional content, which leads to expansion beyond the character structure and more self-possession. The goal of therapy is more than just the absence of symptoms - it is restoring the aliveness and feeling to the body, the foundation upon which we can flourish as human beings.  

Without this basic aliveness, our enthusiasm for life and our feeling capacity which come from being fully in the body, we cannot live our potential. We cannot live in line with our essence and embody its attributes. More importantly, we cannot connect to ourselves, others and the world around us. We were closer to our essence as children and closer yet when we were born. Most of us find ourselves far from it in our current lives. 

Essence is being and the original meaning of the word in ancient Greek, “ousia,” implies "she who is, she without whom a thing no longer is.” The Greek words for "being", "God" and "I am" all derive from the same root, which is “on.” Our essence can manifest in many ways. It is the surge of strength to face life’s challenges, the sense of certitude when rooted in our guts, the compassion we feel when our heart is touched, our tears which flow from the wellspring of life, the joy of being alive, the feeling of contact and intimacy with the self and others. The connecting principle between these states of being is our felt sense. Without this fundamental capacity they are merely conceptual. I work with essence in the course of therapy as taught in the Diamond Logos approach, which offers an in-depth look at how our psychological issues and wounds impair the flow of essence in our system. 

In Orphism, an ancient religion of Greece, in the instructions to the soul for the afterlife, the soul is asked "Who are you?" and is then told to answer "I am a child of the earth and of the starry sky." Upon uttering this statement of identity, the soul is then allowed to drink from the water which flows from the lake of memory. We can see the embodiment of our essence as the meeting point of body and spirit, of earth and sky within us. I believe it is the birthright of every one of us to meet this place in ourselves in this life so we can remember who we truly are.