Lauri’s Philosophy on Therapy ~Connection, Clarity, Confidence & Capacity

I believe each person is able within him or herself to move towards individual fulfillment, health and wholeness. We all have the capacity in our own beings to heal. However, sometimes we encounter blockages or stuck points in our life, and the flow towards fulfillment may become muddled. These situations may arise due to transitions in our life, unresolved issues from our past, family patterns and survival skills while growing up, or specific character or attitudinal ways of being and thinking that impede our health or flow.

Through therapy we can come to an awareness and understanding of what keeps us from being the person we know we are or want to be. We can find out what limits our capacity to stretch out in our world the way we long. By identifying and gathering our innate resources and by gaining new skills we are empowered to move through our “obstacles or stuck points” with more ease.

In life each of us is driven towards our unique interests, goals, dreams, and preferred ways of connecting to our world. We make meaning out of our life in a way that makes sense to us. I will endeavor to understand your meanings and perspectives and together we will look at how you move in your environment.

We will discover and identify how you flow- or how your flow is blocked – what areas you want to grow in or what areas you feel stuck in, whether it is emotional, mental, physical, relational or spiritual. We will then tailor the treatment plan according to your goals and desires so that you can move in your world with more connection, clarity, confidence and capacity. 

I offer a range of services to fit your needs including:  Traditional "talk therapy" and other more body/mind/soul/spirit modalities, hypnotherapy, meditation/mindfulness teachings, the use of Energy work, and Reiki.

What is Body Psychotherapy?

Body psychotherapy simply put means remembering that we live within a body and counseling from that vantage point means that the body is acknowledged in the processes of thought and emotion. This can be called the mind-body connection. A very basic example would be if we are sad, does our face, tone of voice, and body posture show it? If not, there may be a disconnect between our emotions and our body. We may have learned that we could not express emotions so perhaps when our body sends signals that it’s going to cry, we stop the process in some way and ignore the emotion. In addition, our body is our vehicle by which we move to accomplish our desires. For example, if we are unable to speak our truth in a situation, it is not just our tongue that can't move, there is usually an attitude, belief, and/or emotion held in the body which impedes our ability to flow the way we want to. 

The idea in body psychotherapy is that emotion is just energy in motion, meant to go through us and out, but many of us learned to suppress this sensation, or let it out sideways so to speak. Sometimes we ignore our bodies, or don’t realize how the body communicates with us. In therapy one would become more attuned to how our bodily sensations and emotions are there to aid our movement, to inform us or warn us of how we really feel, what we are really sensing so we can respond effectively and congruently.

In therapy one would learn how their core beliefs, emotional and interpretational thoughts, attitudes that impede movement, and experienced traumas are “held in the body” in psychological, characterological, bio-physical, or muscular skeletal ways. In other words…how we experience and deal with what we experience can be stored within the body. The good news is we can learn to release this and loosen the habitual or characterological ways we respond to life and expand our ways of living.

This would be accomplished through techniques such as breathwork, mindfulness, discovery of core beliefs and attitudes, body awareness exercises, and body positioning, learning and experiencing our "felt-sense", and then increasing contact of emotions and sensations. By including the body, mind, soul, spirit connection in therapy we experience a holistic way of regulating ourselves during stress, anxiety, or depression while finding more beneficial ways of being. This brings about a more expansive state allowing us to create more space within ourselves to move and feel the way we desire. We begin to flow more authentically experiencing our core self, or our true self.