The goal of therapy is more than the absence of symptoms - The affects of good therapy is a feeling aliveness, getting a taste of pleasure, joy, love, and taking things more easily – it is vibrant health.

The "Mind and Body" understanding is quickly gaining new ground.  Now backed by scientific evidence, it really does look as though the body can store trapped emotions.  And these trapped unprocessed emotions can have dire consequences on the natural rhythm of the body (homeostasis).

Bioenergetics is a way of understanding personality in terms of the body and its energetic processes.  Dr Alexander Lowen developed Bioenergetics (following the founding work of W. Reich) as a therapeutic technique to help people get back together with the body and enjoy the life of the body to the fullest degree possible.

Bioenergetics starts with essential functions of the body such as breathing, motility, feeling, and expression.  Bioenergetics examines the body-mind’s restrictions on these functions: physically in one’s body, emotionally in one’s feelings, and intellectually in one’s understanding.  Bioenergetics differs from other forms of therapy in that it combines analysis of personality and character with body techniques and physical exercises to recognise and release chronic muscular tension - a necessary step in overcoming feelings, behaviours, and attitudes that detract from life. Bioenergetics recognises the ability of the body to heal itself, and promotes that process.

Talking therapies (counselling) may "help a person become conscious of his tendencies to deny, project, blame, or rationalise, but this conscious awareness rarely affects the muscular tensions or releases the suppressed feelings." At the same time though, a purely physical treatment of "body work as massage and yoga’ish exercises has a positive value, but is not specifically therapeutic in itself."

Bioenergetics is an adventure in self-discovery. It differs from similar explorations into the nature of the self by attempting to understand the human personality in terms of the human body. This form of therapy has helped people achieve good health -- in body and in mind – for more than half a century.

More than any other modality, it explores the inexorable link between the body and the mind. "It integrates a work with the body, with the patient’s interpersonal relationships,  and with one's mental processes; each of which is correlated and interpreted in terms of the others." From a Bioenergetic point of view, the energetic processes of the body determine what goes on in the mind just as they determine what goes on in the body.

Our therapeutic relationship provides a place of safety in which changing begins. The Bioenergetic therapist reads your body, resonates with its energy, feels the emotions, listens, hears, and answers the words. The language of your body (posture, gesture, breathing, motility, expression) is in focus as it reflects the person beyond the guise of words, or a mask of expression – from the past into the present and future.

The physical Bioenergetic exercises address the energetic aspect of the individual, including self-perception, self-expression, and self-possession; one’s self image is aligned with the reality of one’s self. Work with body contact, boundaries, grounding, and the understanding of muscular tensions as indications of somatic and psychological defences against past trauma are examined diagnostically, and utilised therapeutically.

It is equally true that most people are unconscious of the bodily handicaps under which they labour – handicaps that have become second nature to them, part of their habitual way of being in the world. In effect, most people go through life on a limited budget of energy and feeling.