Embodied Therapies draw on the use of movement, dance, visualisation, sensory awareness, relaxation, meditation and ritual as ways of accessing, unlocking and making sense of deeply held experiences within the body that cause emotional and relational blocks and affect emotional, spiritual and physical wellbeing.

Emotion-Focused Therapy emphasises the specific role our emotional patterns play in the pursuit of creating change. Emotion-Focused Therapy techniques seek to help identify feelings, sensations and emotions in the body and effectively integrate these emotions and sensations with our experiences. Drawing on art therapy modalities and nature and, integrating them with emotion-focused and embodied work, offers powerful ways of enhancing and developing greater emotional awareness and understanding. With greater awareness we then have greater mastery over our emotional responses, expression and experiencing, allowing space to explore new emotional ways of being.

Eugene Gendlin coined the term ‘felt sense’ as a key aspect of his Focusing Approach. ‘Felt Sense’ goes beyond what is tangible. Gendlin described the felt sense as not a mental experience, but a physical one. It is the ability to notice, be present to, and attuned to one’s entire body with the view of developing greater bodily and sensory awareness and connection to situations, people and events. When we become more familiar and aware of our body sensations and responses we are better able to identify and name the feelings and emotions associated with them. And when we can identify our emotions we are in turn, able to more effectively understand our emotional experiences and reactions that may be creating stuckness and obstacles to healthy and effective relating and functioning.