Welcome

Psychophonetics® counselling and psychotherapy extends the art of conversational counselling to embrace direct experience through body awareness and the expressive non-verbal modes of knowing - Sensing, Movement, Visualisation and Sound work - transforming life's challenges into an empowering, transformational and healing process.

We urgently need these new ways of knowing as we are living in a time where there is a shift from being guided from the outside to being guided from within. This shift is portrayed in the following poem by Rudolf Steiner:

Psychophonetics (previously called Philophonetics®) is one approach that encourages the development of inner strength within each person, to express who they truly are. Psychophonetics is a body and soul oriented, expressive and artistic approach, which embraces an holistic view of the human being, as a living body, mind, soul, and spirit.

It was developed in the 1980's by Yehuda Tagar, and has its theoretical and methodological roots in the spiritual work of Rudolf Steiner in Anthroposophy and Psychosophy, as well as in humanistic psychology, and the expressive arts.

This is a phenomenological approach to human experience that facilitates a process of active exploration, self-discovery, and empowerment, so we can become more conscious in our own knowing and way of being in the world.

The process combines conversation with an action phase that incorporates experiential, creative and expressive methods.

In the counselling sessions, each person learns to see their life as an ongoing and unfolding process or journey that has an inherent wisdom. Each counselling session is both therapeutic and educational, in which our life experience or situation can teach us something.

Awareness through the living body is accepted as a way of knowing - through bodily sensation, movement and gesture, visualisation of internal dynamics, and the resonance of sound therapy. Drawing, claywork and other artistic mediums may also be included.

These modes of awareness of experience are non-verbal and pre-reflective, with the potential for understanding experience without distorting it. The premise is that experience is a real event taking place in the human psyche or soul, leaving traces, imprints and impressions that are stored in patterns of sensory dynamics, and these imprints of experience can be accessed through sensing, gestures, visualisation and sounds.

As I never quite understood what had happened to me in the past and what impact it had on me and why I was affected so much … It was amazing to find out and to have a greater clarity and understanding about past hurts and triggers … I mean first I had to gesture the situation, feel it, find a colour and sound and then at the end was the clay. I looked at the clay that was there and … to accumulate all this in front of me and bring it together in one clay model, was quite difficult … I had been fearful of revisiting and I revisited it, I felt great cause I actually did the process with clay myself, it was a really wonderful feeling to go through the gesturing and to do it through the clay … The clarity of seeing the relationships, seeing it in clay was quite profound for me … there was a different perspective completely.

Psychophonetics counselling/psychotherapy forms a bridge between approaches which operate primarily through the verbal dimension and those which operate primarily through expression, body awareness and the experiential dimension.

It combines the cognitive, experiential and behavioural aspects into one process, facilitated by the choice of the 'I' or self, thereby having a transpersonal dimension.

With a verbal, conversational component and an experiential, non-verbal, expressive component in each session, newly accessed experiential content can be integrated through consciously made choices and processes, enabling each person to learn more about themselves through relationship to self, others and the world.

It was a safe holding space and it was honored, very much honored and yeah, there was empathy there … She was present, she was using her intuition, as I was, going from one aspect to another. I think reverence for the other person, was really beautiful. After the third session it’s a lot more comfortable because you know the person, and you know how they work in that safe space, yeah...the counsellor encouraged me and yeah, there was a real connection for us as a counsellor and a client.