How and why I got into therapy work (a slightly longer version)

One of the biggest dreams of my childhood was to become a doctor.

Instead, the ebb and flow of life saw me dip into a short service as a diagnostic radiographer in a busy A&E in post-communist Bulgaria, then throw myself into navigating a lengthy finance career in the city of London.

Then one day, I paused for long enough, to recall my childhood dream. Only this time I understood why it never came to life in its original shape – I wanted to simply help people feel whole and happy, not treat their physical conditions.

My own healing journey began early on in life as I had to learn to fight for my right to be here, as who I am and I feel this is what encouraged me to look for so many answers ever since. And I looked for them everywhere.

On that path, I learnt about and experimented with, numerous holistic tools such as nutrition, running, meditation, breath-work, yoga and many varieties of counselling and psychotherapy.

These practices have also, collectively helped me quench an innate desire to make sense of a tiny flame within me.

I recall this flame first emerging. My brother used to get some intense headaches as a teenager and I would lay my hands over his head to try and soothe the pain. He used to fall asleep briefly then wake up suddenly, shake his head to check if the pain was still there, then smile and jump up.

And in those moments, sitting perfectly still and quiet so I don’t interrupt the pain on its way out, I recall feeling strangely connected to something within me; with no idea what it was back then, it felt like a speck of warm light, somewhere deep within my chest.

Over the years, I felt this each time a friend trusted me enough to let me get close to the tension in their head.

Back in 2014, I trained as a yoga teacher. My favorite part of teaching was giving our students a relaxation protocol they taught us in yoga school, during savasana. It involved resting my hands at the base of their head for a little while at the end. I noticed that few began to fall asleep then report some unfamiliar relaxation having washed over their bodies. While I sat there quietly, waiting for them to stir back into life, I felt that same speck of light in my heart starting to grow bigger and bolder.

Around then, synchronicities in my world helped me realise that what I had been doing might be given a name after all – Craniosacral Therapy.

Living in Bali, Indonesia at the time, I was fortunate enough to train with Dr Leonid Soboleff and upon my return to the UK, with Thomas Attlee, at the College of Cranio-Sacral Therapy in London.

At that time, I felt the essence of the craniosacral work resonate deeply with the core of my being. It allowed me to use my intuition, love for deep listening and high sensitivity, to be in service of something bigger than myself – the tides of life, expressed through the subtle rhythms of our being.

In the course of my work with clients since then, I noticed a significant number of people had such a strong, innate need to be heard so they can give voice and meaning to a story, a memory or an event, something they had not been able to share previously because they either hadn’t grasped the significance of it or they never felt enough safety and support, to re-visit the story.

I began opening up space and time for these stories to unfold in our sessions and to combine the conventional craniosacral work with elements of talk therapy.

I found within me an innate ability to tune into my clients’ emotional states and to pick up on what it is they were truly saying, what was being expressed between the lines of their words and feelings and in this way, to close in on what was hiding in the shadow realms of their psyche.

In these combined sessions, people started to experience shifts and insights, which were happening at a faster pace and so these sessions became more popular with time.

Nowadays, I intuitively blend sessions with the needs of my clients on any given day and am continuously adapting and evolving my way of working and relating, of becoming an informed and compassionate mirror for those who reach out to me for support.