Heart Healing helps you connect deeper with your heart, the hearts of others and the heart of life…. feeling through what’s ready to open into more love so you can live it as ever increasing presence, passion and pleasure.

Welcome to a connection designed to support your healing and enable your endless awakenings… into embodying your sovereign presence, engaging life with passion and purpose, and fostering sensually alive relationships with deepening heart communion.

Heart Healing is a form of Integral Psychotherapy that can involve 1on1 or small group embodied talk therapy, and sometimes includes, or even starts with and focuses on, a transformational modality like those named and explained below the overview of Integral Psychotherapy.

Integral Psychotherapy

Integral Psychotherapy approaches each human holistically, appreciating their unique situation in the context and trajectory of their life. It intentionally attends to and works with all main bodies (physical, energetic, emotional, mental, subtle, casual), addressing the self system, and its relationships to others and groups/cultures, and life practically and existentially.

A view of multi-intelligence development informs the practitioner’s approach, but development is not a primary aim of the therapeutic relationship, although it can be an outcome. The main aims of the therapy are increasing healthy integration and deepening conscious embodiment. The transformative means for both is increasing awareness of the being’s unique experience, sometimes involving what’s called awakenings, that occur as becoming aware within various aspects or dimensions of consciousness, and fostering these activations within various bodies where increased awareness as the consciousness in and as the substance of the bodies is awoken (embodiment) and incorporated into the self system (integration).

There is a key paradox here that is critical to understand: Less identification can equal more individuation. It is the lynchpin for integrating what is commonly thought of as eastern spiritual awakenings with western psychotherapeutic concerns: releasing identifications into Beingness (a deeper non-conceptual identity) can be a doorway into integrated, embodied individuation. Less (limited) self to become more of your innate/divine (expressed) self. It is important to note that it only ‘can’ be such a doorway, as it ‘can also’ be a pathway of dissociation or bypassing of what’s manifest in the lived condition.

These transformations are generated through a wide range of tools, types of interactions and structured processes. The tools and techniques vary between practitioners, based on their competencies and interests, but in each case ideally they are selected to meet the unique individual and their presenting challenges and goals in a way that attunes to the organic wisdom of how their being is distinctly unfolding. The approaches are also underpinned by a client-centric, appreciative, relational disposition. Modelling and fostering a healthy self-and-other relationship dynamic through the transformational process is the key alchemical foundation to the therapy. Therefore both client and practitioner are encouraged to be vulnerably real, sharing from their lived experience authentically.

For Integral Psychotherapy the foundation of connection is nondual awareness, the field of activity is consciousness, the forms attention is focused on in a session are multi-modal sensing, sense making (tacit referents, insights, knowledge, and schema and process mapping), and the substance or structure of the subject being addressed. The mode of engagement is inherently transformative, whether that is subtly or overtly present. This mode is anchored in the alchemical nature of the intentional co-presencing in, and dynamics of, the therapeutic relationship. In contrast psychiatry and it’s pharmacology is more about means to limit negative experiences and behaviours, psychology about diagnosing and mitigating or resolving pathologies, and counselling primarily about adjusting to and processing life’s experiences. By adopting a transformational mode all of these goals can be addressed to some extent, and more fully as needed provided the practitioner has competences in and, for example as in the case of pharmacology, has the licensing for their means of action.

Heart Healing’s Integral Psychotherapy is informed by and integrates aspects of somatic therapies (like Somatic Experiencing, NARM and Core Energetics), emotionally focused therapies, psychodynamic/depth psychology, cognitive psychology (like CBT, ACT, DBT), transpersonal and nondual psychology, trauma, multicultural, feminist, internal-family/gestalt/systems and humanist focused therapies, archetypal psychotherapy, process psychology and more esoteric and/or ancient approaches to human wellbeing and spiritual experience. The key understanding of Integral Psychotherapy that illuminates how these various approaches can be integrated is that each has a piece of the truth of the human experience and condition. Each approach includes a sense-making lens and process competence focused on working with, for example, a specific body (or bodies) and/or dimension/s of life from specific perspectives. Their common limitation is that in prescribing such a focus they often accidentally, or sometimes overtly, exclude others that also have utility. All of them do have value, but best known when engaged as relevant to the presenting client situation and issues, and competencies of the therapist and context of the engagement.

As Dr Mark Forman, author of the first book on the subject, A Guide to Integral Psychotherapy, states: “Integral Psychotherapy is… a meta-orientation – an orientation that can connect the central ideas, understandings of the therapeutic relationship, and different forms of interventions provided by the major schools of therapy. The goal is to move beyond eclecticism to create a deeply comprehensive clinical approach and empower therapists to be more flexible, confident, and attuned.”

Integral Psychotherapy draws on Ken Wilber’s Integral Psychology and Integral Spirituality and its AQAL 8 indigenous zones model incorporating perspectives, bodies, states, types, lines, and levels of human development. In addition a process based inside-out view is added to Wilber’s top-down outside-in structural philosophical disposition. Wilber’s body of work, and many related and/or comparable works (such as Jean Gebser, Kazimierz Dabrowski, and Human Design), have directly informed my undergraduate and postgraduate studies and organisational strategy and leadership consulting practice before commencing working explicitly therapeutically. The AQAL model does not need to be taught or used as a conceptual device in and of itself. Only aspects of it are made obvious in client centric languaging if useful or raised by them.

Personally I have chosen to be a practitioner, not an academic, but still inform how my practice evolves through self and mentor guided professional development that includes staying in touch with the emerging evidence base of what works, how, why and for whom. My interests, skills, and the nature of the clients drawn to work with me has led to being an explorative practitioner, innovating in the creative field of integration, beyond the edge of standards conformed practice of formal psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists or counsellors adhering to a modality’s pre-defined mode of operation. Accordingly, to ensure safety for all involved, the ethical foundations and core boundaries of the nature of the work are discussed up front in detail with every client, and referred to throughout engagement as needed, and I remain in connection with multiple long term mentors and guides for supervision and processing client feedback.

The modalities outlined below are themselves integrations of different streams of practice both ancient and modern, eastern and western. They are detailed as some of the more distinct processes of engagement that may be incorporated into a client’s transformational journey in my practice.

After considering all this, please remember, the foundation of the engagement is simply good human relating. Having a meaningful discussion, one where you, the client, is met with loving, compassionate, curious presence and we walk forward together into more heartful aliveness.

If you have any questions, please contact me.

Blessings,

Chris