In the mindfulness classes (as well as the private therapy sessions) I often talk about acceptance. Sometimes people think that by accepting their problem, that it means that they will be stuck with the problem forever. That’s how it feels to the intellect. There is a feeling that you have to keep fighting this disease, ailment, pain or negative behaviour pattern, to get rid of it or else it will never go away, or ever heal.

This is not the case.

If you can stop and feel what the problem is and its location in your body, and actually stay with it, accept that it is there and not try to fight it, it then has the space to release properly. But acceptance is the hard part because it means accepting exactly how it feels in your body right now, and that’s not always pleasant to allow. But if you can take the step to let go judgment and just fully allow the problem to be in your body, then amazing things happen.

In classes and personal sessions, you have the opportunity (for an hour or more) to stay with and accept parts of you that you have denied, hated and avoided for a long time. And when this allowing happens, your body then has the freedom to actual heal the issue in ways that your intellect could never fully understand.

That book is Eckhart Tolle’s THE POWER OF NOW.

That book is by my bedside where ever I travel. I highly recommend it above all other books. If I was stuck on a desert island and could take only one book, that would be the book I’d have with me.

The Power of NOW encapsulates beautifully what all the therapy work is about in the end, if you take it all the way. Some people just want to feel less pain, some just want to stop a bad behaviour, some just want some peace of mind, some want to improve a relationship, some want to feel happy or safe again in the world. When you get all these things, and take it further to its conclusion, you get the power of living in the present. For my mind, no one explains it and lives it better than Tolle.

Stillness is not reading a book while lying on a beach or watching TV numbed out on the couch. Stillness is being comfortable with silence and doing seemingly nothing in that moment for a period of time. Whether with yourself alone, or with another.

So in Body Psychotherapy and in fact with all the work done in a session with a client, once the initial talking is done and we move to deepening, there is a lot of stillness time. The stillness can be quiet or active, but there are few words if any, it is simply still. The thinking becomes less important and the attention moves to the body and the inner workings of the subconscious.

Stillness breathes in fresh air to a crowded over thinking, over worked mind and gives the body a chance to speak and heal itself in areas that had been locked and pushed away for far too long.

This is why Mediation is a good practice. To meditate you need to accept stillness.

It is very important to step off the over worked ‘doing’ cycle and allow yourself to have ‘arrived’ in the present moment, to just ‘be’ again. (Which is what the over doing most times is trying to accomplish, to get you to where you can just ‘be’ again.)

Most people don’t realise that they can just ‘be’ and still get everything done that they need to. Rather than the other way around that we are brought up with (and much less efficient way) in our western culture, ‘I’ll do do do, so then I can ‘get there’ to relax and be myself. You rarely get there in this way.

So if you allocate some regular time to ‘being’ each week, your ‘doing’ becomes much more efficient, creates less drama, is much less erratic, more fulfilling, and you feel more in control of your life. No one else or thing is running you.

How slowly or quickly this happens will depend on how much you are carrying from the past and how easily you can accept, feel, release and let go that past, over time.

If you are a person who Meditates, what it says about you is this:
that you know deep down that you are not your thoughts, that you are something greater and deeper than that. That you are a being that thinks, rather than just a thinking robotic machine.

This ‘being’ in you, that resides throughout your entire body holds the key to your fulfillment in life. It is your spirit. The real you. Taking time out to contact this directly is the road to complete freedom. Along that road you will bump up against the road blocks of your past. The blocks you put up to survive but which you then forgot to take down afterwards.

This class gives you the time and space to firstly remember who you truly are, get in contact with the real you again, and then take time to release the old road blocks that are not helping you move forward today.

I look forward to helping you further along your journey.

One is a great tool to bypass the intellect and drill down straight to the feeling cause of a problem (PSH) and the other is a great tool at keeping a person in their body present enough, for this to happen effectively.

Most people do the P.S.H. Therapy three session process first. If that process isn’t showing results within a month or two, then I bring in the Body Psychotherapy work to help them stay in their body better, to clear the original cause more effectively. The original cause of a problem very often releases in a minute. Once that release has occurred, then you give your body time to work through all the adjustments and renovations required to clear it out of your system fully.

It can be hard to tell if the cause has been released, which is why I give the person at least a month to see what changes arise. After the month, the client rings me for a follow up call, a stock take, to work out what has happened. From that call, there a number of ways things can go. Some of the typical options:

If things are…..
1. Going amazingly well! – Give it 12 months for the full effect, no more sessions required
2. Noticing some improvement, going okay – Give it another month and check in again
3. Not quite 100% – Book in a fourth session
4. Still very stuck – Move onto the second stage, Body Psychotherapy three session process

Sadly, some people do not ring back after a month, and then ten months later, I receive my questionnaire back from them with feedback that the sessions didn’t help them much. If only they had rung and went that next step. Most of the people that do ring back when there is little shifting, make big breakthroughs when they move onto the Body Psychotherapy process. Like one client commented after their stage two sessions, “Yep, that did it George!”

This is a new Healing Meditation type class designed to help you self-heal. It is a combination of all my experience is various therapies and practices over 20+ years. It encompasses your mind, body, emotions and spirit. A holistic approach.

No one can heal you but you. This class provides a space to help you focus silently, deeply, within for an hour at a time. And with some guidance and the group energy, assist yourself to accept and then release deep old habitual blocks that have been holding you back from being more of your real self.

These old holdings are the accumulation of unfinished business that most people have learned to conveniently push aside in order to get on with their lives. Only these issues do not go away, they just fester and build on-top of each other, weighing you down more and more as you live your life.

All anxieties, depression, worry, negativity, reactivity, suffering, most physical problems, even diseases and health, all have an inner component that can be accessed and released and healed. I have seen it many times in my practice over and over, people healing things that have plagued them with no resolution for years.

This is a powerful process to help you get back more of who you truly are, aliven yourself, free yourself and feel lighter freer, happier, healthier and more at peace than ever before.

The class is run at the Elwood Centre for Wellbeing – 1B, 41 Glenhuntly Road, Elwood in Melbourne, Australia.
On the first and third Monday nights of each month. 7.30pm to 9pm+
Each class is limited to 20 people. So booking is essential.

Why?

Because deep down you know that something has to change, that something has to be faced and let go. And that is very risky. The risk is that you will feel something that you have been trying hard for years to hide away and keep under wraps. In order to heal, you may have to feel a little of this, of what you have been doing your best not to feel for decades.

Good therapy work and good therapists, know how to help you face and take a risk that is manageable. A good therapist will help you safely face a manageable chunk of risky feelings and territory, that you locked away long ago.

Taking inner risks in a safe environment, with someone you can trust, who will be there for you whatever comes up, is a big thing, and it is extremely healing when such risk, releases old diseased and long forgotten areas and feelings within you.

That’s the bottom line with deep healings (ones that medical doctors scratch their heads and cant explain how it happened), the client took an inner risk  to open, access, release and heal areas they never felt comfortable doing with, with anyone else before.

So when a client comes in, sits down and says, “I was feeling very nervous about coming here today!” Or, “My mind was saying, as I was driving here, why are you going!? You don’t need this! It won’t do anything, you’re okay!” I have to smile, and I know that the client is right on track and ready to take that inner risk that will heal.

Why is that?

My three reasons:

1/ The therapist has been in your shoes. They have been a client and have sat in that other chair and know what it is like. So there is a greater empathy and care. The therapist doesn’t ‘look down’ on the client.  The relationship is more equal.

2/ The therapist believes in the work they trained in, because it helped heal them. So there is a high confidence that ‘you too can be helped’. It’s not just theory. They ‘know’ it can help the client. And many clients certainly need some hope that they can get better. It rubs off easier when the confidence is real.

3/ The therapist healing themselves most likely means that they have received an adequate number of personal  therapy sessions. Which means they are more clearer, less reactive and calmer when working with people. And the client feels that. The client tends to feel safer in the therapist’s presence. The technical work can be performed with more professionalism and care.

So it is always a good question to ask a therapist you are interviewing on the phone or in person: “Have you had session in this work yourself?”

The answer is a definite yes for me. And (surprise surprise) the work helped me so much that I decided to change careers completely and become a Body Psychotherapist. Originally I was a qualified accountant (with a University Honours Degree in Economics). I worked as a computer programmer /IT consultant for 12 years (in my 20′s) before switching, (saw my first client just before my 30th birthday.)  I was a client myself for about 500 sessions in Radix Body Psychotherapy. Plus many sessions in other body based therapies too. Amazing work. Completely transforming.

I also did the P.S.H. Therapy early on in my P.S.H. Therapy two year training. That had a remarkable effect also (See my story on my website My personal Story).

Now each year I am wise enough to see a body based therapist for a number of session (normally 3 to 10) to help maintain and improve things further. So nothing is allowed to ‘stick’ for too long. In the sessions I always discover something I had been carrying/holding onto that was weighing me down that I didn’t realise was there. Doing such maintenance work actually helps me feel better every year. Lighter, freer, calmer, happier.

I heard this line again recently from a client referring to a friend of theirs who had been seeing a psychologist and getting CBT for their anxiety.

“Learn to live with it.”

I’m glad my client wasn’t happy hearing that. And needless to say nor was I.

With what’s available in the body based therapies now, anxiety is completely healable. What I can’t tell you is how many sessions it may take.

I’ve lost count as to the number of clients I have worked with over the years, who now have no, (or virtually no) anxiety to speak of. They have no anxiety that needs to be “lived with” for the rest of their lives. It’s gone. Finished. Completed. No more. In fact many even forget that they ever had it.

There are very advanced therapeutic methods available now that help completely heal anxiety and panic. The key -  is that they are body (nervous system) based, not cognitive based. Go to a cognitive based therapist and they can only really help you to “live with it” because they are only cognitive based trained. And this has it’s value too.

My aim with every client who wants it, is to heal the anxiety completely, 100%. And I don’t care how bad it is or how long the person has had it. It is healable completely.

In fact once it does heal the person is rarely the same again. They frequently end up even better than before. Transformed.

This is very transformative work.