My Approach
Perceptual Integration
Perceptual integration assists us in moving from experiencing our inner and outer world as separate, conflicting, or fragmented pieces toward experiencing what is asking to be noticed as a coherent, meaningful whole.
“I know everything is fine, but something doesn’t feel right”
Perceptual integration invites us to become curious about the whole experience: the words, the tone of voice, facial expression, breathing, posture, emotional response, bodily sensations, memories, relational experience and in relation to the response of the listener. We listen for how these different forms of information fit together.
Perceptual integration involves
- Body/mind: noticing into where body and mind are having different responses to the conversation.
- Emotion/meaning: allowing an emotion to be experienced.
- Present/past: recognizing when an old relational pattern is shaping perception of our current experience, or where multiple experiences become tied together.
- Self/other: noticing experience in relation to another.
- Sensation/language:finding words for what is felt, and feeling into what words carry.
- Different parts of self: allowing contradictory experiences.
How I listen
What is being said?
What is not being said?
What changes as they say it?
What happens between us as this emerges?
Perceptual integration happens between two people. It creates the conditions where we can perceive and integrate experience.
Perceptual integration is about increasing the dimensionality of experience: being able to perceive more of what is actually happening, internally and relationally, and therefore having more availability to choose.
How we perceive
We experience the world through perception, information.
Sensory perception as visual, auditory, scent, taste and touch.
We perceive through being and time.
We perceive through movement, breath, visceral sensation, emotion, thought, relationship, attention, intuition, dreams, imagery, energetic awareness, and forms of higher knowing that may not have explanation.
My work is interested in our experience and our ways of perceiving that experience.
You and I are listening to what presents, and you will find your own way into understanding your experiences.
Attuned Listening
Attuned Listening is how I meet perception.
I listen to what is being sensed, felt, seen, known, remembered, imagined, or experienced and attend the sensations for your observation.
A physical sensation may reveal a pattern, unconscious or inherited.
An emotional response may bring something forward that asks to be attended.
An intuitive perception may be a question.
A spiritual or energetic experience may ask for attention, choice or integration.
Listening allows us to observe the experience.
What integration can look like
Perceptual Integration brings different forms of experience into relationship and community.
This could look like recognizing the relationship between posture and emotion, noticing how an old pattern might be present within current perception of a situation.
There may be discovery of a different possibility within posture, movement, experience of self within space and your immediate environment.
It could be having new access to an intuitive or energetic experience and finding a way to understand and live with it.
Integration does not require every experience to have one explanation.
It asks us to become more available to what we perceive and more discerning about how we understand it.
Perception is personal
Our perceptions are shaped by our history, our expectations, our relationships, our habits, our bodies, and our ways of making meaning.
What one person experiences as intuition may be understood differently by another.
What feels spiritual to one person may be understood through consciousness, energy, psychology, or another framework by someone else.
We do not have to share the same explanation in order to meet an experience with attention.
Discernment is part of the work.
Developing perception
Development of Intuitive, sensory, and spiritual availability could be understood as awareness of perception.
It may also involve learning how the body participates in perception.
This may involve becoming quieter, more attentive, and more capable of noticing subtle experience.
It could mean developing the capacity to tell intuition from expectation, imagination from perception, fear from knowing, and personal interpretation from what is unfolding.
The more familiar we become with our own patterns, the more able we may be to recognize what is familiar and what is new.
Higher knowing
I am interested in experience that extends beyond what is immediately available to ordinary senses.
My understanding of this possibility has developed through meditation, intuitive practice, energy work, body-centred practice, self-inquiry, spiritual study, and many years of working with others.
I am interested in our higher knowing, information that comes through knowing, and developing a relationship to that knowing through attention, practice, discernment, and relationship (with our own experience and with others).
Body, perception and being
The body is not separate from perception.
How we move affects what we perceive.
What we perceive affects how we move.
Our histories become expressed through posture, movement, sensation, attention, and response.
Our physical experience can therefore become a doorway into awareness.
This is one of the foundations of Body-Centred Therapy.
The same principle extends into intuitive work.
Whether we are listening to a sensation in the body, a feeling, an image, an intuitive impression, an energetic experience, or a sense of higher knowing, we are exploring perception.
Perceptual Integration in practice
Perceptual Integration informs both of my practices.
In Body-Centred Therapy, we listen through touch, movement, sensation, posture, breath, and the physical body.
In Online Intuitive Sessions, we may explore intuition, inner knowing, energetic experience, spirit, soul, dreams, transition, and experiences beyond ordinary sensory awareness.
Knowing is an understanding that exists within the expansion of the unknown.