elaja Harder
Somatic Bodywork
delaja.harder@posteo.net

Are you dealing with anxiety, stress, life transitions, a chronic illness, relationship difficulties, or other difficult life situations on your own, and would like to have help?

 

Why Somatic Therapy?

While the different branches of Talk Therapy mainly use a cognitive approach (top-down) where therapist and client talk about thoughts, believes, and emotions, Somatic Therapy includes the body into the conversation (bottom-up). Here, we don't only talk about thought and emotions, but we also want to discover what we actually feel, and from there find out why we feel the way we feel. We want to get to the physical roots of things, find where our Nervous System stored a body-memory in the Body and follow up from there (bottom-up). We use awareness techniques for this, and depending on the session we may use breath, movement or touch. In Somatic Therapy, we combine talk therapy with awareness techniques and touch.

Nowadays we know that the Mind and the Body of a person aren't two different entities, but they are one and the same. What we feel has an immediate impact on what we think, and vice versa. Oftentimes it is not the Mind who provides answers, but if we ask the Body, things become much clearer. In Somatic Therapy top-down and bottom-up practices play together to help people reach the level of recovery they are seeking for.

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What is the Pantarei Approach*?

The Pantarei Approach is the Body-Mind-Therapy Approach that I'm using when I work with my clients. The word Pantarei goes back to the Greek "everything flows". In the Pantarei Approach practitioners want to bring together physical sensations with emotions and thought processes. It uses (or can use) touch, breath, and verbal communication and combines all three in a session. The basic idea is that: Everything we experience, we experience with and through our body. Thus, it can be very powerful and even necessary to take the body into account – rather than only use speech therapy – in order to heal physically as well as mentally.

The body plays a major role when it comes to dealing with trauma or other psychological issues. Moreover, there are often underlying emotional or psychological reasons for a physical expression of pain or illness. Inviting both - the mind and the body - into the conversation, can open up doors that have been closed for a long time, and thereby release long-held tensions.

Such a process can allow us to let go of old fears or patterns of behavior that are no longer useful for us. It can lead to a better knowing of oneself, help us getting to know our strengths and take decisions that fill us with energy, rather than taking it away.

What are your individual needs, your talents and strengths? How do you get into a state of inner power?