I'm an English speaking therapist based in Leipzig, Germany. Below is a brief introduction to the work I offer:

We develop our attitude towards life and the world when we are very young, and this shapes our choices, behaviours and relationships as an adult. Some people call this our 'life script'.

A lot of the key foundations for our life script are laid before we've even learned to talk, and they are held and expressed in our body through habits, postures, muscle tensions, breathing patterns, gestures, movements and expressions. These ways of inhabiting our body enabled us to survive when we were young, but the cost of this is often a limitation on our ability to feel and meet our own aliveness now as an adult. We begin to feel stuck, lost, low or worried - and this is often when we seek support.

Body-Oriented Counselling helps us to become conscious of how our background life script is influencing and limiting us right now - both in our mind and in our body. This can be a very empowering process. By becoming more conscious of our habitual ways of being in the world, we discover that we have the power to change them, we have more choices and we are no longer a victim of our past.

As a Body-Oriented Therapist, I believe that deep and lasting personal change cannot come through intellectual effort alone. All emotional experiences are physical, bodily experiences, and our emotions, if we will let them, can be the guides to showing us what we really want and need in this life.

In this context, I see your problems as messages from your innermost self, and similar to a foreign language that needs translating, we need to decipher their meaning.

Repetitive worries, feelings of stress, low moods, difficulty sleeping and chronic muscle tensions are all seen as communications from your inner world to you – and often the message is “Something isn’t right here and needs your attention!” My job as a Body-Oriented Therapist is not to ‘fix’ or ‘change’ you, but to offer a safe and supportive space in which you can slow down and meet what is going on inside of you. By doing this you can begin letting go of your old, unhelpful 'script' and start reflecting on what is most important to you in this life.

In Body-Oriented Counselling, true health is seen as much more than just the absence of problems, and our focus goes far beyond becoming 'less unhappy'. Exploring your pains and sorrows is an important part of this work - but ultimately the focus in Body-Oriented Counselling is to support you to feel more fully in contact with your own aliveness. This involves developing an increased capacity for joy and pleasure, unlocking your potential for more creativity, spontanaeity and the discovery of meaningful work - and the ability to enter into a mature, loving relationship with another human being.

I also believe that this type of personal growth and development is inseparable from finding a bigger sense of meaning and purpose in life, a sense of belonging to the wider world. We must each find our place in relation to the universe, and to do this mind and body need to be working in harmony with each other.

INNER LANDSCAPES, OUTER DIALOGUES