Adam Bambury | “Holding on and Letting Go: Insights from Body Psychotherapy into Working with Expanded States and Somatic Spaces”

The practice of engaging with embodiment in therapy has found wider acceptance and respectability in recent decades, much like what is happening with psychedelics. Whether it’s as a way to process trauma or as a route to a deeper wisdom within the unconscious, the therapeutic potentials can no longer easily be ignored.

Since the pioneering work of Wilhelm Reich in the 1930s, body psychotherapists have been working in this space between psyche and soma, where everyday consciousness can shift to perceive wider currents of feeling, breath and energy – or their absence. It’s an enquiry grounded in the here and now that is also an encounter with the past: the habitual ways we learned to hold on and let go in both body and mind in response the challenges of existence, relationship and society, and how we might now find greater flexibility in this, while also celebrating the particular ‘shape’ we take in the world.

In this talk I will share a brief history of the evolution of body psychotherapy, explore its relevance to psychedelic therapy and integration work, and touch on how a continued practice of befriending and attending to our own unique embodiment as practitioners can help our clients do the same.