The New Therapy
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Inner Bodywork

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Continued Professional Development

for counsellors, therapists, social workers, nurses and health professionals based on The New Therapy.
  • Talks, seminars, workshops (residential and in-house)

  • Individual or group supervision

  1. Soma-Sensitivity
     
  2. Soma-Psychology
     
  3. Medicine in the Light of The New Therapy

For enquiries about CPD contact us
at:cpd@thenewtherapy.org.uk
(please copy the address into your e-mail)

Article  'Soma-psychology and Soma-sensitivity'
              A missing Dimension of Psychotherapy

Inner Bodywork - Professional Training in The New Therapy

The New Therapy is ‘Inner Bodywork’.

Training in The New Therapy is intensive modular training in the use of whole-body sensing and receptivity to heal through transformative field-resonance with the inner body of the client.

A key element in this training is practice of The New Yoga developed by Peter Wilberg, a yoga of the inner body in all its aspects and dimensions.

For enquiries about TRAINING contact us
at:training@thenewtherapy.org.uk
(please copy the address into your e-mail)

We also offer
Communicative Receptivity Training
read more about it

1. Soma-Sensitivity

The central hypothesis of The New Therapy is that all forms of physical or psychological therapy are effective only to the degree to which they heal or ‘make whole’ the individual’s felt bodily sense of self and deepen the individual’s felt bodily sense of connectedness to others. Unfortunately both medical or psychiatric treatment on the one hand and counselling or psychotherapy on the other can also have the very opposite effect. Psychiatric or medical drug treatment may numb rather than deepen the client’s bodily sense of self and of inner connectedness to others. Counselling and psychotherapy, cognitive therapies and emotional empathy can all become a substitute for deep somatic receptivity and resonance – for ‘soma-sensitivity’. In The New Therapy the term ‘somatic’ does not refer to the physical body, but to the client’s own subjectively felt body - their felt bodily sense of dis-ease, their felt bodily sense of self and their felt bodily sense of connectedness to others. Phenomenologically understood, ‘dis-ease’ in any form, psychical or somatic, arises from a sense of ‘not feeling ourselves’. Only through feeling our body as a whole, can we once again ‘feel ourselves’ – feel our self as a whole and therefore feel ‘whole’. Our own whole-body awareness can also turn our body as a whole into a "sense organ of the soul", allowing us to directly sense the ways in which a patient or client lacks a full bodily sense of self and connectedness to others that is the basis of all dis-ease.

"The body as a whole is a sensory image of the soul."

Peter Wilberg

The client or patient presents themselves first and foremost not simply as a ‘person’ but as a body. To truly receive and respond to the ‘whole person’ is impossible without soma-sensitivity - sensitivity to the whole body of the client. Generally however, health professionals pay very little attention to awareness of their own body and that of the client

"The body as a whole is a sense organ of the soul."

Peter Wilberg

These talks and workshops aim to teach health professionals how to cultivate and sustain whole-body awareness in their work and to practice whole-body sensing or ‘soma-sensitivity’ with their patients and clients. Only in this way can they fully affirm and receive each individual they work with as some-body - not just a ‘talking head’ or therapeutic ‘case’.

When individuals turn to health professionals for help, they are not just seeking medical diagnosis and treatment and/or emotional empathy, insight and support. They are looking for someone capable of fully receiving them as ‘some-body’. By this I mean someone sensitive enough to resonate with those felt bodily dimension of their suffering that are so difficult to articulate verbally. Not finding professionals with sufficient whole-body awareness to ‘resonate’ with their own bodily sense of dis-ease, the client may feel no choice but to continue to communicate this dis-ease or ‘pathos’ through some form of diagnosable ‘pathology’ – mental, physical or social.
 

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2. Soma-Psychology

What body is it with which we feel ‘warmer’ or ‘cooler’, ‘closer’ or more ‘distant’ to someone – independently of our physical temperature and physical distance from them? What body are we referring to when we speak of being ‘touched’ by someone without any physical contact, of moving ‘closer’ to them or ‘distancing’ ourselves from them, of feeling ‘uplifted’ or ‘carried away’? What body and what organs are we referring to when we speak of someone being ‘warm-hearted’ or ‘heartless’, ‘thick-skinned’ or ‘thin-skinned’, ‘stable’ or ‘unstable’, ‘balanced’ or ‘imbalanced’, ‘solid’ or ‘mercurial’, ‘stable’ or ‘volatile’? Are we simply using organic or bodily ‘metaphors’ to describe disembodied mental or emotional states? Or are we describing felt states of the individual’s inner body.

"The body is an awareness."

Carlos Castaneda

The New Therapy is a form of ‘soma-psychology’ and ‘somatic psychotherapy’. In contrast to all other forms of bodywork or body-oriented psychotherapy however, it distinguishing the individual’s physical body from their own subjectively sensed body or felt body. It recognises the inwardly sensed body as an independent ‘inner body’ in its own right – not as an objective ‘energy body’ but as a subjective ‘awareness body’.

Just as our physical body constantly reconstitutes itself from nourishment provided by food and the essential nutrients it contains, so is our inner body - our bodily sense of self – in constant need of reconstitution through the nourishment of our lived experience, and the nutrients of meaning that are extracted from it. Human beings do not live by bread alone.

This workshop will explain the relationship between basic physical bodily function or dysfunctions - respiration, circulation, and metabolism – and the psychical functions or dsyfunctions of the inner body - that body with which we breathe in, digest and metabolise our immediate subjective awareness of ourselves, the world and other people.

The workshop will also offer an experiential introduction to the basic spatial field-configuration or ‘topology’ of the inner body, showing the relation between its inner and outer fields, its inner core and outer circumference, and its different layers and centres of awareness.
 

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3. Medicine in the light of The New Therapy

In what relation do psychotherapists and ‘mental health’ professionals stand to the medical model of illness, and in particular to the medical treatment of somatic symptoms? The question is a politically charged one, because the professional boundary between somatic medicine and psychotherapy is one closely guarded by the medical establishment. Many mental health professionals also still defer to medical authority and the medical model, at least when it comes to so-called physical illness. This is something of a paradox given that:

  • the majority of patients present to their local physicians with problems seen as ‘psychosomatic’ by the medical profession itself.
     

  • most physicians completely lack the professional training and skills to sense and resonate with the psychological dimensions of somatic disease (eg. the ‘loss of heart’ that may be experienced and expressed through physical heart symptoms).

Psychotherapists and mental health professionals of course, tend not to be sought out by patients who see their symptoms as purely somatic, and their ‘illness’ as something purely physical. Soma-psychology, on the other hand, recognises not only a hidden psychological dimension to somatic symptoms and physical illness but a hidden somatic dimension to so-called psychological symptoms and ‘mental’ illness. Many people recognise that the division between psychotherapy and somatic medicine, mental and physical health, is an artificial one, maintained only by its institutionalisation. Until now however, there has existed no framework of thought that truly transcends the artificial separation of ‘mind’ and ‘body’, ‘psyche’ and ‘soma’ – not only in theory but in therapeutic practice.

The New Therapy
provides such a framework, acknowledging as it does that the ‘soul’ or ‘psyche’ has its own independent bodily dimension and exists as an independent inner body in its own right – the psyche-soma. As a new form of soma-psychology it provides the key to a fundamentally new understanding of so-called ‘psychosomatic’ or ‘somatiform’ disorders. As a practice of whole-body sensing or soma-sensitivity it offers the key to a fundamentally new approach to both psychotherapy, somatic medicine and ‘somatic psychotherapy’.

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