A revised and updated new edition of a body psychotherapy classic, Reichian Growth Work sets out to convey the essential features of Reichian therapy in concrete and easily understandable language. The style of body therapy which it describes is democratic, growth-oriented and undogmatic, while still committed to Reich’s radical description of human beings and their difficulties. ‘This book is for people who want to change; because only by changing, profoundly painful as that sometimes is, can we stay alive and growing.

Embodied Relating is addressed both to body psychotherapists and to verbal therapists, and argues that embodied relating is the soil from which all therapy grows, and that conscious understanding of this makes our work more powerful and accurate.

Embodied relating is embedded in our everyday life: we can all ‘do’ embodied relating, though some do it better than others. Like many other important aspects of life, it generally happens of its own accord, but sometimes benefits from the sort of close examination which tends to happen in therapy. However, psychotherapy has a history of keeping embodiment out of its field of awareness, and of preferring language-based relating to all other kinds – indeed, until quite recently, of downplaying here-and-now relationship altogether. All these things are now changing; and this book is intended to be part of the change.

In this short and hopefully easy-to-read book we aim to throw open some windows, to bring fresh air into the discourse about what makes a good or bad therapist and to offer some redefinitions of therapy. We suggest that therapy isn’t an expert knowledge system, open to being standardised and manualised, but is more akin to local, indigenous, embodied and relational forms of knowledge. Therapy isn’t primarily an academic activity, and we would argue is not best taught in an academic, rigorously assessed context. We are interested in questioning who sets the rules? Are the rules and expectations of how to be a good therapist the most helpful ones? In the search for high standards and protection of the client has something been lost? We believe that the core skills of being a therapist are human and innate. Rather than offering a restrictive model of what should and shouldn’t be done, training could reframe itself to look at what’s getting in the way of the practitioner’s ability to be in contact, offer intimacy, create and maintain an appropriate relationship. Training to explore how to work creatively with, rather than act out from, our wounding. Counselling and psychotherapy, especially when we work relationally, is often an unpredictable process. We will explore how to embrace the inherent messiness, awkwardness and un-knowableness, of working as a therapist.

What can the theory and practice of somatic/body psychotherapy, ecopsychology and Buddhism offer to each other? For the past five years, Kamalamani has shared life and work at the confluence of these fields in her quarterly Bodywise articles for Somatic Psychotherapy Today, an independent international publication representing various modalities in body psychotherapy, somatic psychology, and pre-natal and perinatal psychology. This volume brings together these quarterly Bodywise articles. Kamalamani explores client work in embodied and relational ways, drawing upon her practice of Buddhism. With her characteristically warm, immediate, accessible tone, Kamalamani encourages personal reflection and professional consideration as she offers insights illuminated by traditional Buddhist texts along with personal and clinical anecdotes that range from birth to death, from meditating with character to Reich’s character structures, from trauma and terrorized bodies to diversity, embodied spirituality and pre-natal and peri-natal psychology. She often provokingly offers more questions than answers and writes in a way that offers not only a sacred space for opening, sensing, being quiet, but also joining forces with our global communities in feeling the outrage, the love, the fear, the bliss that comes with interaction. She reminds us again and again of a whole-earth perspective, bringing sentient life and living processes into awareness in the course of everyday life, practice, and the work of healing.

NB All proceeds from this book will be donated to the ongoing costs of creating and publishing Somatic Psychotherapy Today, helping to defray the costs associated with an independently run international magazine. It is through generous gifts like Kamalamani’s and others’ who donate to Somatic Psychotherapy Today that it continues to exist.

Available as a paperback and ebook. More information on Goodreads