Embodiment and body-based work

Body-based work explores experience as it is actually lived—in posture, gesture, movement, breath, sensation, and the small adjustments you make when interacting with others and while physically moving through your day on your own.

People come to this work for different personal reasons. Some want to feel more physically confident, understand their sensations and responses, or become more at home in the way they move and take up space. Others are navigating marginalised identities and want to explore how marginalisation, gender, or sexuality lives in the body, including what happens when they are seen, read, desired, or touched. You also do not need to be questioning your identity, identify as LGBTQ+, or have a particular relationship with movement to engage with embodiment in therapy. You may simply feel disconnected from your body, uncertain about what it is telling you, or less physically confident than you would like to be.

What this work is

We begin with slow attention to what your body is already doing, both outwardly and inwardly.

We might work with posture, gesture, weight, breath, pace, distance, tension, and movement. We may notice where you feel open or guarded, what happens when attention turns towards you, and how your body responds to particular people, places, or situations. The internal work is about interoception and connecting thoughts and beliefs that arise alongside different internal experiences.

Some of the work is observation. Some involves small, deliberate experiments: trying a different way of standing, allowing a gesture to develop, staying with a movement a little longer, or noticing a sensation without immediately needing to explain or change it.

The aim is not to create a “correct” way of moving or experiencing yourself. It is to give you more awareness, choice, range, and confidence. You do not have to think of yourself as a “physical” trying to perform here. Quite the opposite; when we strip down the strivings to meet the worlds expectations, we can make space for your authenticity to emerge. There is nothing here to get “right” but rather we move toward what feels right.

Physical confidence and understanding your body

You might come because you want to feel more present and assured in your body, but do not know how to begin.

Perhaps you find it difficult to recognise what you are feeling until the sensation becomes overwhelming. You may notice that you tense, withdraw, freeze, become restless, or go quiet without understanding why. You might struggle to tell the difference between discomfort and danger, nervousness and excitement, or wanting to pause and wanting to leave.

Together, we can explore:

• How physical confidence feels from the inside, rather than how it looks to somebody else.

• The sensations associated with comfort, discomfort, interest, uncertainty, and overwhelm.

• How your body communicates boundaries, preferences, and the need for space.

• What happens physically when you are watched, approached, touched, or asked to respond.

• Patterns of bracing, shrinking, freezing, rushing, or disconnecting.

• How to remain present without forcing yourself to tolerate too much.

• Developing greater ease in movement, posture, voice, and taking up space.

• Finding more choice in how you respond, rather than expecting yourself to react in one particular way.

Physical confidence does not have to mean appearing fearless, dominant, or composed. It can mean recognising your own responses sooner, trusting the information they carry, and knowing you have options.

Gender, sexuality, and being seen

For many LGBTQ+ folks, and for anyone questioning or exploring gender or sexuality, the body is often where being seen becomes most immediately felt through the cisheteronormative gaze.

Some people seek therapy at the beginning of a coming-out journey and find that the hardest part is not the conversation itself, but being visible. When your body is read before anything is said, and may have been watched, labelled, or corrected long before you had the opportunity to explore it for yourself, a wound develops around self that is embodied in nature. Whether the other’s intentions were benign or a microaggression, comments on physicality and gender expression sometimes continue to linger in the body itself.

This lingering may show up as a vigilance or bracing, or it could be a highly developed physical presentation that just doesn’t feel true or right to you. For others, this experience may show up as the authentic self going into hiding and leaving. Becoming quiet, flat in expression and emotion, or stepping back from engaging with others, while the desire to be more present is suppressed.

Still, some people arrive to therapy after having been out for years, finding that their body has not yet completely caught up with what they know about themselves. It can look like confidence in words, but not yet in deeper and fuller expressions of the embodied self.

The work begins and remains in curiosity, so that the destination is guided by your impulse to feel and know yourself into something that feels more you.

Somatic therapies and movement work can offer space to explore:

• Being seen more fully without feeling you must perform an identity.

• Shame or self-consciousness held in posture, gesture, or movement.

• Bracing or withdrawing in particular rooms and relationships.

• Wanting to move, dress, speak, or hold yourself differently.

• Having been read and labelled before you could explore for yourself.

• Finding more range in your gender expression.

• Sex and touch, particularly when visibility or being perceived feels difficult.

• The gap between how confidently you can describe yourself and how confidently you inhabit your body.

• What feels affirming, neutral, complicated, or uncomfortable in your physical experience.

Where we start

We usually begin by tracking rather than changing.

Before doing anything else, we find out what happens and when: which rooms, which people, which kinds of attention, and which moments in the day. Naming a situation precisely helps us get very specific to touch the places of wounding and hurt.

We may also begin with simple questions: What can you feel? Where do you feel it? Does it change when you move, speak, slow down, or create more distance? Is the sensation familiar? What does your body seem to be preparing for?

From there, the work is gradual and experimental, and you set the pace. You will not be expected to push through discomfort, disclose an identity, use language you do not yet have, or do anything in front of another person.

Individuals, couples, and intimate partners

I work with individuals, couples, polycules, and people in other relationship structures.

When more than one person is present, the work often involves how you see and respond to one another: what one person’s body does when another person’s body changes, how closeness and distance are negotiated, and which signals have gone unnoticed or misunderstood.

We can explore differences in confidence, visibility, desire, boundaries, or how out each person is, and how those differences are felt physically within the relationship.