What is Counselling / Psychotherapy?
Counselling/Psychotherapy is a process of self-inquiry, engaged in with the support of a trained therapist. Through counselling/psychotherapy, you will learn how to pay attention to and work with your mind’s thoughts, as well as contact feelings and sensations registered in your body, in order to become more of who you want to be.

Some of what counselling/psychotherapy involves are:

• Developing new skills in self awareness and communication.
• Practicing new ways of being and feeling.
• Gaining courage to speak about things that feel challenging.
• Allowing yourself to fully have your feelings, without needing to hide or repress their expression.
• Challenging your internal “critic” and committing to self-compassion.

A Somatic Approach to Counselling/Psychotherapy
Soma, from somatic, means body in Latin. In the somatic approach that Anna is trained in, the therapist works not only through talk therapy methods, but pays attention and works with your relationship with your body. This might include bringing your awareness to your breathing, posture, movements or gestures, as you talk about or feel into something important to you. This process invites deeper self-awareness and healing. You will always have choice in therapeutic direction and activities.

Your body is the vessel through which you move through and experience life. As such, this vessel contains your history as well as your present feelings and thoughts. Through the nervous and neuromuscular systems, which are body-wide, not just located in the brain, all of your direct experience from the beginning of life gets imprinted, remembered, in your psyche.

It is through your body that you can know joy and sorrow, communicate and express yourself, and through which you developed your first sense of self as an infant. It is through the tool of body awareness, that you can also now recreate your sense of self as an adult. This understanding of how we develop and grow as an integrated body-mind is the basis of a somatic approach to therapy.

The question that Somatic Psychology helps answer is how can we make use of body awareness and movement to move into a future that is not simply a repeat of the past. How can contact with our bodies and movement expression facilitate shift into a more desired present and future?

By including your body in your therapy experience, you engage and integrate more parts of your brain, and can make lasting change in yourself and your relationships.

Call Anna to schedule an appointment or consultation: 604 781 6040, or email anna@annakemble.com