As a mind-body therapist and yoga teacher, through working with clients and from my own journey I know how important the mind-body connection is in successfully dealing with issues and stresses we face. Everything we experience gets stored in our bodies:
“The mind might forget but the body remembers!”
Habitual thinking processes and stress can become encoded in the structure of the body as a ‘survival’ strategy, leading to muscle tension, restricted breath patterns and degradative change in the connective tissue. Only through working with the body in conjunction with mindful awareness can the underlying, unconscious beliefs, memories and feelings that had been locked into the muscles and the surrounding tissue be released.
That’s why the current PACFA literature review on “The Effectiveness of Body-Oriented Psychotherapy” which I have written and researched with my colleague Julie Smith from Bringing Calm to the Body and Mind is so close to my heart. It highlights that body-oriented psychotherapy interventions provide safe and effective treatments for a range of conditions and offer promising psychotherapeutic tools in areas where traditional talking psychotherapies seem to fail.
