Whole-istic body-centred acupuncture and Japanese/Chinese body work
I have been an embodied holistic acupuncturist for 17 years and since my original training in London, my work has continued to change and be informed by my lived experience and the people I have the privilege of working with.
I have been influenced by continued study in Eastern medicine over the years and by the study I have been drawn to in process work, natural horsemanship, shiatsu, Eco-psychotherapy, embodied relational therapy, Radix®, Gestalt, meditation, Hakomi, Qigong, breath work to name the foundational influences. My practice and approach have been shaped by my growing awareness and response to what people need, what is not supported, what is marginalised and oppressed in our culture and society and what feels alive and in keeping with my own nature to work with.
The changes I have made within how I practice reflect my own learning and my own healing and my own growing capacity to be present and embodied, in touch with the moment to moment experience of what it is to be alive in all its intensity.
A large component of my work currently is at and around birth providing care and support, in encouraging safe arrival and welcome and to help promote opportunity for experiencing a healing birthing for mother and baby, coming from a place of resource and support at the many transitions for mother and baby. Working with embodiment and presence to greet your baby, skin to skin contact and breast feeding support.
More recently I have been companion to peoples dying process looking at what needs to happen and being responsive to emerging processes and unfinished gestalts and giving space to healing and deep contact.
I have worked alongside many minority groups giving me more awareness around social justice and how oppression is embedded deep within the body.
I have been deeply informed by the preverbal contact work with many individuals who have never formed healthy attachment and contact, have never felt safe in their bodies or environment.
My work with the parkinsons recovery project developed my sense of following aliveness and not a disease label or trajectory, and made me sensitive to the fix it nature of some therapies and the draw back of this way of working.
As I have practiced over many years spanning my early 20s to now my early 40s my capacity to be with, to work with has been made greater by my own personal growth work and being moved and changed by each person I have worked with. I have now personally experienced more as a human being, more deaths, more births, more transitions, and that has made firm and rooted something in me allowing for more capacity to work with more aspects of what it is to be human.
By my nature I seek to understand what I do in my offering of acupuncture, reflecting and questioning and feeling my way to what my place of being is that I work from, to keep my practise safe, I have regular supervision, and continue studying and experiencing my own growth work journey.
I have tried to avoid practise that preys on fear and a have chosen many times not to specialise in an area of dis-ease, but to specialise in seeking wholeness and aliveness in people.
My hope in sessions/treatments together is to co-create an environment for you to experience better contact with yourself with another and with the non-human that we live with. That you live more fully, with more available feeling that you grow awareness about yourself a knowledge that offers you more choice, greater capacity, more feeling, more tolerance for, more presentness, more robustness for living, being adaptable to, responsive to, receptive to and allows for more resource and energy for life. When this is the aim, pain diminishes or goes, patterns stop reoccurring and changes happen. By working with the whole human, the mind, body, emotions, and spirit as intertwined and not separate but affecting causing, transforming, impacting, and showing as manifestations of each other big changes are possible.
My original training has patriarchy and comes from a culture that supresses feeling, sees some feelings as good and others as bad and denys the expression of feeling as healthy. I come from a tradition that celebrates the guru outside rather than inside of ourselves. There are lots of privileges and shadow work in any modality and it has taken many years to feel into what is embedded within traditional acupuncture training and it has taken many years for me to start to unpick this and find my own way of being an acupuncturist that is true to my own unfolding, and with awareness of the power that I hold as a white, married, heterosexual woman of middleclass, able bodied and educated in a practice that does to another. Acupuncture comes from the tradition of giving treatment to, there being a giver and receiver, a touched and an untouched, the expert with the knowledge and the person without the knowledge, the fixer and the unfixed. I continue to grow awareness around these practise edges for me and soften the fix it model by my sessions being orientated towards health and vitality and not the eradication of pain, disease and ill health and by listening, responding and supporting, creating space and opportunity for the knowledge that my client is discovering about themselves and brings in by their moment to moment experience.
Embedded within my practise is a deep trust that we will get to the work together we are meant to.
I draw on many aspects of different trainings, but mostly I draw on my experiences of being an acupuncturist in my own clinical practise over many years and what I have seen and felt, I have treated over a thousand people in my 17 years of practice. I work with Traditional Chinese Medicine and Wilhelm Reich character structure/ body armouring both models informing my choice of how to work, the holding in my session and my capacity to adapt and be open to emerging processes within my sessions come from my training in embodied relational therapy, with process work, gestalt and Radix®.
Within wholistic body-centred acupuncture sessions I use frequently a combination of modalities, acupuncture, moxibustion and massage, with embodied awareness. They combine to be stronger than the sum of their parts allowing a dance of experiences to be felt and within these explorations new awareness and unconscious aspects can be better understood and felt, rigidities softened and the capacity to have more choice, capacity to feel have a greater emotional range, and a life led by an integration of mind, body and spirit.
I have the privilege of walking an intimate and companionable path with people, to support them in times of change, some for a short while others for many years. These beautiful fellow human beings have shaped me and have taught and helped me just as much as I have them.
Within sessions/treatments I use acupuncture, moxibustion, massage and embodied awareness to encourage embodiment and to encourage the ongoing continual process of being embodied, that is to be in touch with our moment-by-moment experience, to be aware, present, to be guided by whole body.
I see acupuncture as an extension of a human hand, witnessing and seeing you and offering you something you have lost touch with or perhaps have not ever experienced but have within you or have blocked off from being able to receive. I work with acupuncture as a way of giving the opportunity to change the clients experience of their own embodiment. Acupuncture is a way of contacting your various wounding’s you have encountered in living, rather than leaving them frozen in patterns of bodily tension. I use acupuncture and the varying modalities on specific areas of the body to warm, release, soften, increase, to allow/encourage assess to cut off parts of the persons being. Acupuncture is a conversation with what it is to be alive, an invitation to bring you back to yourself, to your own belonging. Acupuncture can bring awareness to what part of your being/wholeness is denied or cut off, what areas flow freely, what parts of yourself do you make smaller, constrict and not allow, to feel less of something, to deny a felt experience to.
Your body gives me indications as to how you have interpreted and manifested the experiences you have had in your life, the posture you have taken, what you still hold, the excesses your body is burdened with and the deficiencies, or longings you crave.
With acupuncture within the spaces of your body at the acupuncture point sites, by use of fine shallowly inserted needles we create momentum and movement. Flow is encouraged where there is a slowing, counter flows corrected and deficiencies supported, expansion encouraged when there is contraction, contact and resourcing, acupuncture will work in fine tuning each organ and system that is out of balance. Wellness depends on the correctness and vitality of the relationships, functionality and support provided by all the systems in the body. Diagnosis and treatment depend on correctly seeing and applying or bringing felt awareness to what is the root (bo) catalyst of all the disharmonies or branches (ben) in the body.
I treat through heart-mind based thinking and action encouraging an exploration of this in my work. Within my own life I come from a place of gratitude. In treatment and within life I connect with my heart and what I instinctually know to be true, and this is encouraged in our work together. Heart-mind based thinking and action is allowing and trusting in your internal guidance; your body contains a deep knowing of what has been, and what is, it is the feeling of truth you hold inside. Agitation of the heart is calmed by stillness of the mind. Not stillness as in sleep, but a conscious stillness, a quietness of thought, a cultivation of peace and contentment within, a presentness of being. My hope when treating is to help others to live in keeping with themselves, inviting them to be to be authentic to themselves and others. To take an active role in their treatments towards wholeness and wellness beyond what was there before, to experience a new realm of wellness and being and in doing so exploring the transformational potential of illness to aliveness.
On the first acupuncture consultation I have with you, I listen to the story of your life, the things that you have experienced and how you felt about them. This will include any symptoms and pain, dis-ease process or sick-ness, treatments and intervention. In this meeting I get a felt sense of your embodied life up until this point. I am not there to judge nor to make decisions for you, but to support you, explore with you, bring awareness to give time to areas of your being that emerge to allow changes to happen.
Changes that frequently happen include pain areas diminishing or resolving, digestive disruptions, menstruation regulated or fertility issues, insomnia are but a few that are frequently no longer a problem and were the reason for seeking acupuncture. But those symptoms were tied up in other felt layers of being and relating that have changed too and leave you feeling more centred, having more ability to self -regulate, a feeling of being present, experiencing a greater depth of emotional connection and contact with another, feeling more comfortable in your own skin, feeling less anxious or depressed, less emotionally volatile, feeling more energised, feeling grounded.
As a practitioner of Chinese medicine, I can talk the language of western medicine, I hear your western diagnosis and it informs me in many ways, the interpretation of this information and how I work with this information with you is very different. Acupuncture is not just a treatment I don’t see your symptom in isolation of your character, the way you live your life, your environment, your constitution, I treat the whole of you, you as an individual.
Chinese massage provides a deeper conversation and insight into you, it is constantly feeding back information to the practitioner and to you. Where there is pain and tension held and what your core energy is. It tells me so much more about how you live your life than just your words, and gives you opportunity to feel what is held within the body.
Through the use of acupuncture and massage to unblock by holding, stretching and with application of heat (moxibustion), patterns are changed in the body: pain, disharmonies and disease processes addressed. The combination of modalities, acupuncture and massage together, feed greater understanding of the body and person and add great strength to each other in treatment. I rarely do acupuncture without Chinese massage and rarely do Chinese massage without some form of acupuncture.
If the above way of working excites or moves, you please feel you can make contact and if I have availability to be able to, we can arrange an appointment to meet. If the above scares you, trust that we will find our way.
Within our meeting together we can discuss whether I am the best person for you to see and I may either make a referral or we will discuss whether we are both happy to work together.