Integral transformative therapy weaves together a variety of different methods, practices, and techniques to move you toward healing, growing and changing in positive, enduring ways. These include: verbal discussion, bodywork, exercise, diet, and Somatic Therapy; Gestalt, Schema, Naikan and Cognitive- Behavioral Therapy; visualization, affirmation, imagery and dreamwork; subtle energy techniques and mindfulness practices.

The work initially explores the root causes of your problems and uncovers the schemas and patterns that have been organizing your experiences. The work shifts to the deep inner world, uncovering and releasing much that has been hidden or blocked. The work also integrates and explores new territory, new ways to nurture yourself, new life priorities and new ways to relate to others and the world around you. Firmly held beliefs, feelings, and patterns are replaced with new understanding, awareness and transformative practices that will sustain you when things go wrong on any level. Your own life and inner strength will become your most reliable sources of support and wisdom.

There are two phases to the work, briefly described here:

1. The Assessment and Education Phase

During the first part of therapy, we focus on identification, recognition and understanding of the schemas that are operating in your life, with their balances and imbalances. Schemas are ingrained and often hidden patterns of perception and response that include: memories, emotions, bodily sensations, and cognitions that lead us to react over and over to triggers in a maladaptive way. They are deeply held beliefs within the energy system of each individual about the self and the world, typically learned at a very young age. Through verbal discussion, self-reports, assigned readings and self-observation through mindfulness exercises, we begin to map the mind and build a clear intellectual understanding of your suffering and the experiences and life patterns that have shaped your life. Throughout this process you are educated about your schemas and the integral model of therapy, bringing new perspective, empathy and awareness to the organizing principles at work. When we have reached this point, we begin to transform your interior world.

2. Transformation Phase

In this phase we begin the process of change and transformation through developing an emotional understanding of your schemas. The work in therapy is about feeling your schemas, unwinding their origins, connecting them to your current life problems and eventually releasing the emotional patterns that keep the schemas alive. Through body-centered and experiential techniques, you begin to intimately connect with the interior world of your emotions – the raw senses and tender feelings stored in your body.

The word “emotion” derives from, emotere, which means “to move out” and healing starts when there is movement. In therapy we will work on opening and releasing the feelings that have been holding your emotional schema patterns in place for a long time. By feeling the underlying emotional pain and fear, letting it move through you, you realize you can survive this hidden territory of the heart when embraced by compassionate awareness. This emotional work also requires integrating the thoughts that drive the feelings and mindfulness is used between sessions as an ally, to track thoughts and feelings that come up. Mindfulness practices such as journaling, sitting meditation and body scan exercises complement the work in therapy, helping to break the chain of emotional habits and patterns. As a result, your schemas become transparent and your perspective on what’s happening becomes larger, clearer, and wiser. This process of working through your emotions is an organic transformation, unraveling memories, feelings, patterns of physically held tension, pain, energy blocks. You have started an ever deepening process of insight and transformation that has its own natural timing and evolution.

The clear, calm, stainless, moonlike quality where disturbed emotions and
the shakles of mental habits which bind the person to this and that, one
thing after another, are dropped and allowed to go----
this is what I call wisdom.
The one who has gone beyond the rough and dangerous
cycle of delusion and repetition, who has left it behind, the one who is
contemplative, ungrasping, and doubt-free—
this one I call wise.

The Buddha