Blog & Articles

Weds 8 July 2026

The Mind – Body (and Spiritual) Connection – and how it shows up in life (and your Pilates class or Treatment)

Having regular therapy is a requirement of psychotherapy training – to work through your own patterns, mechanisms and triggers – so they don’t take over when working with clients!

When asked what I wanted from therapy, my flippant response was to reach my 50th birthday in a place where I ‘no longer gave a s**t about anything that didn’t warrant it’. And that was pretty true – I didn’t want to waste energy on things that weren’t mine, weren’t necessary, or about what other people think.

How many of us are held back, tripping over ourselves – restrained by things we’ve been told, ways we’ve moulded ourselves to fit it, bound by rules that have told us how things should be. It’s so tiring.

And I see how that shows up in our bodies and our nervous system.

If you come for Pilates or for Massage/Myofascial treatment you might wonder if this is relevant. Yet those beliefs and patterns are showing up:

The tight shoulders that pull you forward – no matter how hard you try to correct your posture.

The gripping hips that cause your lower back to complain when you lift your legs in Pilates.

The face tension as you clench your jaw and unknowingly hold your breath through an exercise.

And when those can let go (even for a moment), you realise you’ve been living with a discomfort that has become so normal you didn’t even realise it was there.

We might pick up an injury running – a repetitive movement pattern has caused a physical injury. But beneath that physical chain of events is deeper information.

The way we subconsciously hold our experiences, beliefs and how we feel about ourselves in our bodies is always there. When we start to bring this stuff into the room it can begin to change the way our body holds itself, and it can change how we experience just being – or doing an activity.

Integration Psychotherapy (which places the body at the centre of our parts) supports what I’ve been seeing for years. And sits perfectly with my holistic approach to movement and bodywork (which I will continue to do).

And my approach supports the part of us that can always connect to who we are, and can always bring us into the present moment – our body.