Dreaming

Dreams are not just stories we see while sleeping. For me, they are embodied experiences I live with daily—a map connecting me to messages from the Spirit. They are a loving voice helping us expand our limited, constrictive narratives and rigid ways of being.

My approach integrates Jungian, Gestalt, and Process-Oriented psychology.  This isn't just about conceptual understanding. It is an embodied, sentient-level exploration. We explore symbols as deeply personal experiences, never as rigid, fixed interpretations.

As my process work teacher, Arnold Mindell, beautifully writes, dreams are messages from what Aboriginal peoples call the Great Spirit or The Dreaming. This perspective allows us to access altered and mystical states to see the deeper meaning of our nighttime visions.

Ultimately, dreaming is an invitation to expand our everyday awareness. By accessing the mystery of the "here and now," we allow the dreaming mind to guide, inform, and enrich our daily lives.

How to Resolve Painful Relationship Dynamics and Grow Together - Couples Therapy

Couples often find themselves caught in painful relational dynamics, which can lead to feelings of resentment, disconnection, doubt, and helplessness. However, conflict presents a valuable opportunity for personal growth.

When examining relational patterns and the dynamics between partners, it’s crucial to approach the situation from a systemic perspective rather than focusing solely on individual issues or faults. We are interconnected and influence each other on psychological, emotional, and energetic levels. Quantum physics suggests that we create fields of interaction, and in our relationships, we shape one another's experiences.

We often cling to fixed roles and become polarised in our responses.

Healing involves delving deeper into our wounds and exploring our internal relational dynamics. This exploration must be approached sensitively, without the need for interpretation. Instead, we should trust our intuitions, images, perceptions, and deeper insights. This approach enables us to shift our perspective and gain a deeper understanding of our partner's role in the conflict.

Gaining deeper understanding and insight can help us disidentify from rigid role patterns, enabling us to become more fluid and creative in our responses rather than reacting impulsively.

To break the vicious cycle of a stuck dynamic, we need to adjust our approach, understand our roles within the relationship, and foster a greater sense of fluidity. We can work on our roles, coping strategies, and breaking patterns of criticism to create healthier interactions.

Life Myth

Process work psychology works with life myth, a life pattern. The concept comes from Jungian psychology. Life myth can be accessed through sensing the energies of childhood dream/ earliest memory, peak experiences, and addictions. Life myth reflects our life journey, and it is present in the struggles we have in our daily lives.

In Process work psychology, we work with finding myth's core energies, getting familiar with them, and integrating them into our lives.

I have been on a journey of growth and intense inquiry for over a decade, and I find that working with the myth of life encompasses, organises, and helps me to see my journey from a different perspective and sheds light on how to integrate these very present energies.

It gives me context and helps me to make sense of the complexity of my inner experience.

The ways therapy works.

Our history and lifetime of conditioning often shape us in a way that makes us disconnect from who we are. We lose contact with ourselves. It can lead to dissatisfaction with life, illness, breakdown, burnout, depression, hostility, or lack of self-esteem.

The energetic impact of the therapist's connection to herself and her capacity for deep listening and mirroring helps restore one's connection to what was once lost, inner knowing. In the process of therapy, we have a chance to recall parts of ourselves, repressed qualities, live a more authentic, meaningful, and fulfilling life.

Healing our relationship with food

Eating too much or not eating enough is a problem of the soul. It is not food we actually crave. We are hungry for what is unavailable to us emotionally and psychologically, foods that would nourish our broken soul.

Most of us eat emotionally at a times. As our culture is obsessed with food: celebrity chiefs, tasty instagram photos, smug healthy eating food bloggers, eating and cooking are becoming one of the most popular hobbies of our times.

Indeed preparing meals when done with love and care can be healing and grounding. Eating can nurture our souls and bodies. There is nothing alike the experience of creating delicious meal and devouring the results. 

Very often however the picture is not that convincing, especially when eating becomes so intertwined with our emotional difficulties. In a culture that praises lean body and perfection relationship to food becomes even more strained.

Overeating can be about needs we have not recognised and satisfied yet, like fulfilling, authentic relationships, tenderness, reconciliation, support in times of difficulties, satisfying and challenging career, happy sexual life, creativity, good life balance.

Only when we take care of our soul, learn to understand ourselves and attend to our needs the relation to food can become healed.

Eliza

Change in perspective

We often live our life on a loop where we are not satisfied with what we achieved and where we are. Deep dissatisfaction with a path, career or relationships we have chosen, caught up in a story of unfulfillment, disillusionment, loss of meaning.

We are choosing to live in pain when we get trapped by our outdated subconscious belief systems, and the stories we are constantly telling ourselves, the blame, guilt, rationalisations.

The only way to move from this place is to acknowledge your pain and then accept full responsibility for your life. It is about transcending difficulties instead of feeling victimised. Such a change in perspective leads to a sense of empowerment, maturity and growth.

There is nothing we can control in life, neither the past, other people, nor the inevitable, but our attitude.

Starting with today’s idea to rephrase your experience and ask yourself what can I learn from this situation? It shifts as to a place of being open to wisdom, solutions, makes us stronger and more connected to life and relationships. 

Eliza

Embodied

Only if you stop you can get access to your intuition which will lead you to a life that has a meaning, to growth and empowerment. We are often so used to being active, achieving, perfecting, pleasing others and conforming to society pressures that we lose contact with ourselves, natural cycles of life and our well being. 

What if all we have is here and now, our journey to better life starts and ends in the present moment.

The way you feel right now is like a reality check. How are you really doing? Do you feel you are enough, whole, relaxed and present in your body, how are you self-relating and what your relationships are like? Do you respect and like yourself?

If you are caring pain or feeling stressed, anxious and burnt out it is a time to do some internal work and reach for help.

Our purpose in life is to grow, enjoy our lives and relationships and it is the best time to take care of it.

Eliza

Gabor Mate on Addiction and our True Self

When changing feels hard...

When you start a new activity, like morning meditation, running, practising yoga, seeing therapist or anything else that matters, there comes a time when you hit a wall and your internal resistances come up.

Once you start, it feels joyful and you are proud of yourself but after a week or two for some reason you can't be bothered anymore, maybe it is too much of an effort or you don't see the changes or it just that you would rather sit with ice cream and tv show of your choice. Pleasure and comfort are crucial for our wellbeing and assuring that we have, as much as we need, is very wise but letting go of activity we care about is not.

It is in our nature to resist change so when defences come up, it is a time to take a breath, acknowledge excuses and doubts and say to yourself that what you do matters and push through. Go for the next meeting with your therapist although you don't want it badly, sit in meditation for 10 more minutes, practice. You can do it. It can be really hard but this is when the fun starts.

According to neuroscientist, it takes at least 3 month for a brain to create new neurons and form new pathways and if you strengthen them, gradually it will become much easier.

Give yourself a chance. As Gabrielle Roth says 'It takes discipline to be a free spirit'.

Eliza

wounded child

Acting out, dependancy, depression, apathy, rage are one of the many symptoms of wounded inner child. As a trunk of a tree is made up of layers gradually build up year after year, we also carry within our personalities layers from different stages of life since the time we were born. Any scars, mistreatments we experienced in the past are present in us, contaminating daily experiences. They bring not only pain but inhibit our capacity for joy,wonder, playfulness, curiosity and uniqueness.

Transpersonal therapy deals with the core of our wounding, with the hurt one experienced in the past. It needs to be processed, grieved and finally healed, bringing us to the discovery of our true nature, the lightness of being.

Eliza

On becoming whole

What would it be like to say yes to life, to affirm that no matter where I am, who I am and what I have done, my life counts and I will do anything to make it work. I will find peace, joy, meaning, connection to others and the world or whatever it is that is important to you.

We are spiritual, emotional, physical and mental entities and we need to acknowledge all of the dimensions in which we exist but too often we focus on our bodies or intellectual capacities and deny ourselves the right to take care of our spirituality or the world of feelings. Don't take me wrong, I consider physicality or intellect as really important and in fact to be balanced we need to attend to both.

How about committing this year to finding out what gives us meaning and fulfilment, asking ourselves every day what is the true calling of my soul, what am I longing for, what really touches me. What is my heart's desire?

I encourage to contemplate those questions as the morning practice or in nature, when running or walking so we can tune into ourselves and our hearts. Answers will come spontaneously, not necessarily immediately and then it is up to us to follow through.

Eliza