Pulsation Supervision

Pulsation Supervision is a body orientated, experiential, personal growth work, that include all the areas usually supported and included in a more traditional verbally/mind-based supervision that is the usual supervision shape.

Pulsation supervision brings awareness to and includes with seeing it as valuable right brain to right brain relating and ways, seeing what right brain to right brain brings to supervision space as vital and important, when they are usually not worked with or included effectively or dominantly, are given less weight to or value. Pulsation supervision seeks to not only include but privilege it.

Within pulsation supervision more of what is under privileged, less visible is placed as valuable into the supervision space. Pulsation supervision includes the body and orientates from the body, rather than just includes it, the non-verbal language not just verbal, the relationship, feelings, the unconscious not just the conscious, resonance, synchronicity, prosody, sounds that are not words, movement and expression, this brings more connection to the self, more connection to others, more compassion, creativity and choice, greater embodiment, more capacity and robustness in working with feelings and emotions, increasing personal capacity for deeper human connection, empathy, compassion and allows for more opportunity to see creative and adaptive possibilities.

When we work with the body as central, in coming into contact and connection with our own bodies as practitioners/facilitators/therapists we become more able to track ourselves whilst simultaneously tracking what is happening in another person’s body, to feel what is happening, to have intuition and understanding about what another is experiencing and feeling.

By working with the right brain as dominant in pulsation supervision sessions, we are changing the culturally focus and tendency, this brings, new aliveness, novelty that allows new perspective and brings about new areas of awareness and consciousness.

Supervision that comes from embodiment, what does that mean? In the context of supervision, it means that awarenesses, understanding, reflection, growth comes from you and is derived from not your mind but your mindbody, the wisdom that you hold within you that is less surface and has deeper connection to all of life, not just our own individual life. It holds all of life’s thriving.

Pulsation supervision encourages curiosity and not knowing and looking at not just the conscious awarenesses brought to us by our clients/patients but seeing within what is being spoken to, the deeper wounding and repressions, the preverbal and unconscious patterns in our clients’ /patients’ presentations.

Supervision is focused on person growth as well as professional guidance and support, how do we become safer spaces, bodies to be with, the healing ground for our clients, and be connected to our work. Every practitioner who works in a caring profession has the responsibility to those bodies that they work with to be aware of what their own bodies hold, what relational trauma and experiences and how they have been left feeling about them. Our greatest healing as practitioners is to heal ourselves.

It is all too easy to overlook the inbuilt risks and hazards of a helping professions, the accumulated, largely unacknowledged, stresses that can build up to burnout/exhaustion and secondary trauma. These stresses can undermine the foundations of our practices, making them unsustainable if we do not attend to self-care. In pulsation supervision the wellbeing of the practitioner/therapist is at the foreground rather than an afterthought or in the rescue of a collapsed practitioner/therapist who is burnt out.

Supervision needs to be beneficial, to do more than fulfilling a criterion for insurance or professional standards, it needs to be more than something we must do.

Supervision is placed to give opportunity of keeping our practices accountable, reflective, growth orientated, supportive and safer for ourselves as practitioners/facilitators’/therapists and our clients/patients.

As a body psychotherapist in ‘Radix’ which is a body psychotherapy a body work and a growth work. Radix is a humanistic, somatic work that works with trauma and developmental interruptions, character structure and the body as process. It centres it work around ‘feeling’ and ‘purpose’. Radix works with the person’s life force and looks at the ways that this life force is interrupted within the body. By looking at this interruptions as interruptions to pulsation, embodiment and presence that are brought about from chronic bands of muscular tension in the superficial and deeper layers of the body, that we have built up as defence to feeling from overwhelming and or painful experiences, most frequently in our formative years, in our early development, but can be at any point in a human life. These muscular tensions that are chronic in nature, are held in the unconscious aspects of the body as blocks to feeling and are seen in the character and rigidities of the individual and in the incongruences of their bodies and the incongruences in the individuals thinking, behaviour, feeling and action.

In Radix I work individually and in groups/workshops and have experience running workshops in both Chinese medicine and Radix. I have a background in teaching Chinese medicine and have been working with mentees, supervisees and apprentices for nearly 20 years, with my main subject area was point energetics and the meridians which I was senior lecturer and tutor. My background and current practice allow for supervising eastern medicine practitioners where I have clinical experience and theoretical understanding of the framework that you work from, and my Radix body psychotherapy training and other trainings in group facilitation and embodied relational therapy gives me the opportunity to extend this supervision to those in other health related practices and therapeutic theoretical frameworks. My supervision offers body workers, somatic workers a body orientated focus and trauma informed approach to have supervision and support that has an understanding and experience in the different challenges that working with the body more directly brings, and working in different configurations, of group work and workshops where emotional content is being held and processed. I offer supervision for the more verbally orientated practices which is traditional in psychotherapy and counselling to give a different lens and prospective to practice, it is frequent that pulsation supervision is found helpful for those moving more into incorporating the body more consciously in their work supportive to growing this confidence to making this transition. Because pulsation supervision is less orientated around techniques and modality and more on personal work, embodiment and right brain to right brain ways of being, new awareness, perspective and areas of growth are addressed regardless of what your therapeutic model. Pulsation supervision is personal growth focused and experiential in nature, in the belief that what we experience for ourselves, within our own bodies, gives us the route to choice and change, from inside to outside, rather than information that has been imparted by another, towards our self, that is not experienced for ourselves in our bodies, to come up against ourselves in different ways, to have opportunity to feel inside ourselves for ourselves what we do and why, allows for growth, it is not always comfortable, growth in nature tends to carry an element of the unknown and previous unchartered territory. If all supervision provides is comfort being comfortable all the time, then we are unlikely to be learning anything that is new. This does not mean that we will always be working with what is uncomfortable, pulsation supervision comes from a compassionate and caring place, sometimes the personal growth is staying more with what is comfortable, especially if you are someone that is always striving, pushing forward, being at your edge.

Pulsation supervision works with both ‘Feeling ‘and ‘purpose’ which are arguably at the root of the challenges that our clients/patients seek our support for as therapists/practitioners. It is also arguably at the root of what supervisees seek support for in their workspace’s supervision. In the depth of our being we hold a similar need and humanity to feel our existence and lives more deeply, to have greater intimacy with ourselves and others in different shapes and to be connected with an aliveness within ourselves and to feel our interconnection to other life, with a sense of our life having, value, meaning and purpose, a sense of our lives moving rather than standing still. These human challenges may well present very differently both with our clients/patients and within ourselves, may be defended very differently from, but at the root this is the field that we are working with in most of our therapeutic spaces, what makes this person more connected to their aliveness, and how can I support this aliveness within them, what needs to happen for this to be possible in the modality I use. This is the same in our supervision, the challenges that we seek support for whether they are practical and clinical in requirements to scaffold more knowledge or in the challenges to emotional processing, practitioner sustainability and confidence or seeing things in a different way, growing new awareness around. The root of what we are working with is based on ‘feeling’ how can we use how we feel to enhance our richness of our lives, to create deeper connections to life and its process, with deepening a relationship to self and others. How does feeling allow for decisions to be made that allow for more feelings of value, meaning and purpose in what we bring out into the world, within our work and lives. Can we see how to scaffold and channel our energy and can we stay connected, to keep relating and being guided by our internal, our bodies as a source of wisdom and intuition, and a place that we can make new awarenesses from, even when we live in a culture that celebrates less feeling and pulls you away from the body as wisdom, as feelings an inconvenience or weakness, how do we stay with ourselves when we have been taught not to?

Connected to how we feel, are our core beliefs about ourselves, our lives, the depth of our contact that is possible for us with another human being, and what obscures our capacity to see clearly what is happening by the lens that we see the world through and by what material is unconscious/available to us. Our practices hold much of what we are blinded to, unaware of, Pulsation supervision is a way of becoming aware, more conscious of what was previously unavailable to us. This allows for changes and choices in our practice to occur, we may hold on to our clients/patients more, get to deeper material and deeper healing, you may notice that you work opens up and you start working with a different capacity in different previously challenging areas to you, you may feel less exhausted and more invigorated by you work, more alive to it, you may notice feelings and emotions that you previously ignored, more of life becomes available and alive for you to feel in your own lives and for you to work with in your practices. As practitioners and therapists, we don’t see what our bodies are defended against seeing and this occurs in our sessions. This plays out in numerous self-limiting, unsafe and potential damaging to another ways.

Pulsation supervision offers support for setting up practice and starting out as a new practitioner and for experienced practitioners/therapists and facilitators, sessions are individually adapted and collaborative.

Pulsation Supervision combines both Radix and Chinese medicine philosophy and concepts within it. This has the advantage of you being held in a holistic framework, an energetic framework that holds the belief at the heart of, that life is an energetic process, that our organism, our body is alive and responsive, moving, evolving and seeking life enhancing ways of being. Within pulsation supervision there is a deep respect and trust for another’s individual process and aliveness, and for that individual life to know and be able to follow what is right and in their natural unfolding moment to moment.

The opposing movement to ‘feeling’ work within the body is ‘purpose’ work, it is part of the same pulsation, we move inwards to feel, and then we move outwards into the world with purpose, connected to our internal we move outwards. This is often interrupted this flow, this pulsation, sometimes in the moving in, sometimes in the moving out, and sometimes in both the moving in and the moving out. In Chinese medicine we can view this through yin and yang primarily and then within the imbalance and disharmonies within the Zang fu and meridians, and within the five phases the pathways that connect us to ourselves more deeply and the pathways that connect and bring us into relationship with our environment and other.

The traditional supervision that is offered is taking the same shapes as the cultural bias and value system that is mainstream in the west. Less focused on the body, less personal growth, less embodiment, not including the non-verbal and instead follow what is conscious, rational, can be figured out and understood, relating verbally, mind to mind, and is based more on skills, techniques and further training. Pulsation supervision turns that model on its head, and prioritises what is seen as less important, less valuable in mainstream culture, thus providing much more new ways of seeing what was previously obscured. It is not that the traditional aspects of supervision are not addressed, but they are re-framed. What is side lined, minoritised, becomes easily invisible, has less of a voice or prominence in mainstream supervision is reprioritised in pulsation supervision, and awareness drawn to. Pulsation supervision places the body as central to the supervision as a place to gather awareness and understanding, feeling and purpose work is at the heart of what we address, we prioritise personal growth, the creative and the adaptive, the body as organism and the body process, being holistic in approach.

In traditional mainstream supervision intuition carries less weight than the rational and logical the visible carries more power than the less substantial more refined and invisible qi/ki, spirit. This is seen in our professional bodies as they look at ways that they can gain more power, space, voice in the shadow of the dominance of western medicine and the value system of being victim of disease, and in the knowledge and expertise the knowing being external to self. Our Supervision spaces have remained verbally dominant, less focused on feeling and more on purpose, success, like our culture it celebrates being outside of yourself rather than deeply connected to the aliveness within yourself and bringing that into your life. Success and value are placed on achievements and successes from our cultural value system, trainings, CPD, further training, techniques, not ever being enough, in fear of falling behind, becoming irrelevant, failing, not being known, not being busy, not earning enough money, just generally not being enough, always searching, always striving, never reaching a resting. If we are not careful, we can feed into this same unhealthy value system in the supervision we have to. We often come to supervision with a problem, a challenge, an outmoded way of being those needs updating within us, a view of ourselves or another that is no longer helpful, limits and restricts, and a time for more adaption and choice available to you is needed. Often as a new practitioner or one that is changing the way they work, to include less of or more of, or those that have been in private practice can become dissatisfied, hollow and with little to attach to themselves, for many they ‘do’ without really knowing what the value is to them of this doing.

A wave is a good way of seeing right brain and left brain difference, when one or other is more dominant, a wave if viewed as the ego and the left brain, the intellect, the mind what we are conscious of, what our clients are conscious of and bring to us to support. The wave can often become viewed and in disconnection from the water, the sea that it is a part of. The right hemisphere of the brain offers us connection to the larger interconnection, to creativity and intuition into the realm of feeling and to embodiment. In Chinese medicine to our Jing, our essence, in Radix to our instroke, our contact and relationship with ourselves, and to our source and aliveness to our feelings and interconnections to all of life.

If we support the wave (the individual) without reconnecting it to the fact that it is water, that it is connected with the bigger ocean, that it is connected to all that is water. If we relate only to the wave as if it is the whole without seeing the environment from which it has grown and the interconnection it has with all life. Then we and our clients/patients remain cut off from source our own resource and aliveness and our interconnection and resource by being part of all that is alive that surround us, accessing a deeper knowledge and life. When we focus on just left hemisphere ways of being we keep our client/patients disconnected from themselves, their resource their wholeness, their intuition, their creativity, their connections to their own aliveness flowing through them that is also running through all of life that surrounds us in this world, these universes. In this disconnect from source we as practitioners and our clients/patients fear both living and their dying.

In pulsation supervision we prioritise differently, placing embodiment and presence as top priority, experiential rather than purely theoretical or being told, the body language and non-verbal as having more space and more voice than just the rational and logical, creating more awareness to unconscious parts, feelings being deepened and encouraged and expressed, the relational, pulsation supervision also encourage not knowing, not being expert, being unsure, growing curious and trusting in our own process as well as another.

When we are looking at the possibility of change, in the possibility of growing new awareness , in growth we look to the unconscious and the experiential, creating experiences and opportunities that we can feel and see for ourselves what is happening more clearly and come upon new awareness and understanding that we were not previously aware of, unable to see. Most of the decisions we make on a conscious level are supported, influenced, motivated by the unconscious feedback, and influence that runs beneath that conscious stream, in fact 90-95% of our decisions making are made by our unconscious processes and not our conscious. Our unconscious has a huge influence in what and how we life our lives, and we are not aware of most of the information gathered, feelings, non-verbal, intuitive, parts that guide that process of decision without us even knowing it happening.

In pulsation supervision it is not that we don’t use the left brain, it’s just our focus on its dominance within sessions is less, it’s not that we can’t speak to techniques, or more left brain supervision focus, on business strategies, time keeping, but we are not dominated by it, we have capacity to move to left to right and to right to left, we are aware of the tendency of the left brain to dominate spaces and we have a choice and see value in re focusing sessions to be more right brain, to right brain focused.

It is within the unconscious and not the conscious that the deeper healing lies at the heart of what connects us to life, to ourselves and to each other.

The woundings that have occurred in our clients/patients are woundings that have been experienced in relationship and therefore deep healing is possible in the relational as well as the techniques we may use.

Supervision is something that requires us to look deeply at the relational and at ourselves, what the felt effects of the experiences we have had, our own body stories, our own relational woundings, our own capacity or reluctance for deep connections, our own relationship to ourselves, to different others. It is important that we are more aware of the impact our unconscious processes have in the therapeutic spaces we offer for others to heal in, our blocks to both feeling and to different aspects of our embodiment and to the effect of trauma.

Our own personal work is not separate to our professions and work it is intrinsically interwoven.

Much of what happens in therapeutic spaces happens at the level of the body and in the unconscious rather than conscious aspects. Our Clients/patients know somatically, through right brain to right brain synchronising, through the autonomic nervous system whether we are online, whether we are present, whether we are regulated, whether we are synchronised with them. They know at a deep level through their nervous system connecting with our nervous system, they know if we are present, they know through our micro outputs through our body language, our prosody, in our eyes contact and turn taking. Our clients/patients in this same vain know when we are disassociating, when we aren’t present, when we are working hard to stay regulated ourselves, you may not think your clients/patients notice, they do, they may be the ones that discontinue sessions, the ones that you couldn’t help, the ones that you felt you didn’t connect with, it might show in the depth of the healing you were able to work with.

It’s important so we don’t deny another’s experience, that we are able to be present to and have capacity to enter deeper healing spaces, and because healing happens at a body level, between two bodies relating to one another, right brain to right brain, they are deeply listening to one another, beneath the words, nervous system to nervous system, in your presence and availability of what you can be with. In this same way as practitioners/therapists/facilitators that care and provide care giving, spaces there is a lot of information that we are receiving and a lot of emotional process to be present to, our nervous systems are working hard to stay online and to stay regulated as others dysregulate and then regulate with your own. As practitioners/therapists we also need supervision space to process, to share and unburden our bodies and to allow for our systems to practice moving from up states and down states, this movement between para sympathetic, and sympathetic not getting stuck in one mode of being allows for a more sustainable practise, less burn out, and a cleaner way of practicing, that allows our clients/patients to be met in the moment with more presentness and ease. As practitioners/therapists one of the most healing experiences is our capacity to remain present with our clients/patients . We often lack presentness if we are not embodied, or have unprocessed body stories coming from trauma and or developmental interruptions.

Pulsation Supervision is grounded in embodiment (not just having a body, but inhabiting, coming from the body as a resource and to deepen understanding, to create awareness of) As practitioners/therapists one of the most healing experiences is our capacity to remain present with our clients/patients.

Supervision with Pulsation supervision works with trauma and developmental issues at a body level, our own and those of our clients/patients. Being trauma informed comes with personal responsibility as practitioners/therapists that provide healing and caring therapeutic spaces, with current research and knowing, we can no longer not work with trauma, we have to always presume we are working with it and it is held within the bodies of those we seek our support.

It is unsafe to ignore it, but how to work with it safely and effectively takes understanding and knowledge as to how trauma looks, and can be processed, integrated. In pulsation supervision the first way we work with trauma and the most important start to anyone who works with trauma with another, is by processing practitioner/therapist trauma first, allowing for our bodies to be safe and have capacity for another's system to remain with our own, cleanly and in relationship with us. By processing our own trauma we make ourselves safer for others who are processing their own trauma whether that is our clients/patients or anyone in our care and who we have relationship with in our lives, our children, our partners, our friends and family, our work colleagues. What we think is happening, the subjective interpretative aspect of our information gathering, is shaped by our own history and experiences.

Much of what becomes invisible in sessions will be the oppressions and social injustices that don’t want to be seen, and you may not want to identify that are there as a practitioner/therapist as they serve you. It is only when the voices that have been silenced have a voice and the oppressors do their work that the therapeutic spaces have an opportunity to be healing spaces for all bodies and not just some and allows possibility for healing at a greater depth.

With pulsation supervision you will be encouraged to feel and be informed by your body, to learn to trust it, to be guided by your intuition, and to follow the aliveness of yourself and the aliveness of your clients/patients. In pulsation supervision we focus less on what is dis-eased or pathological, in what is going wrong in their bodies, in what needs to be fixed, but instead focus on what is alive, and what is wanting to occur. The focus changes from fixing to exploring, to growing curious and supporting the growing awareness of our clients/patients own understanding of themselves. This does not mean that we don’t use our techniques or modalities, your practice is your practice, and your individual practice is what will always be supported in pulsations supervision, it is more about a refocusing and re-orientation an exploration around, what changes when we as practitioners take less credit, carry less ego, have less power, but instead use the power we attain by being in an expert role, in therapies that do to another, such as is the case in acupuncture, body work, and some somatic practices, to see what we apply as interventions, as ways of showing or bringing more awareness, to facilitate a process or to enhance an embodied feeling, in facilitating we help another's own capacity to do or experience, rather than doing something to another, without there participation, without increased awareness and understanding of, one gives power to the other in this case facilitator/patient/therapist, and the other the client/patient and is in service of another's aliveness and seeks to increase personal power and capacity.

In Chinese medicine we are used to seeing the interconnection of ourselves and our patients/clients within our environment with nature. We see no separateness between the mind and the body, or of the separateness of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of a person like in the west, but believe in the holistic nature of the human being, and in balance. It is not possible to treat one aspect of a person, in isolation, if we address the physical we will also impact the spiritual, mental, emotional, if we treat the emotional, it will have an effect beyond that of the emotions to the physical, emotional, mental aspects of a person. We perhaps need as practitioners/facilitators/therapists to not loss sight of seeing our clients/patients in isolation to their environment or culture that they are held in, I am often seeing the sickness being in the environment and spaces, the culture and its value and bias as being the sickness and imbalance rather than within the individual, and I am sure you do to.

All processes move and it is the same with human beings felt processes, they do not stay stuck in the body, unless they are not able to be processed, completed integrated in someway. As therapists/practitioners/facilitators the providers of healing and caring spaces we perhaps need to be able to see the the bigger than individual disharmonies, the imbalances and unconscious invisible aspects of the times we live in, and where the world patterns of healing lies, we need to be aware of this in our clinics and within the modalities we use and within our own individual life.

When we relate right brain to right brain, we create new awarenesses and come to new realisations that come from deeper parts of ourselves than the left brain is able to offer, the left brain is a surface brain, the right brain holds our intuition, our gut, our wisdom accessed in our body and into wards our core.

With right brain to right brain we can develop curiosity, we can experientially become more aware of our bodies, our sensations, our feelings, we can move into wider range focus, more evenly suspended attention, in waiting for the moment to meet us, rather than anticipating or moving ahead or behind. Supervisee’s who embark in supervision with pulsation supervision are given opportunities to experience themselves and develop new consciousness and awareness about themselves. These new awarenesses free up previously blocked aliveness, parts of themselves that have previously been unavailable and in turn allows for greater self understanding, more capacity to feel, to regulate and to be present with their clients stories, to have more choice, creativity, and insight to their own personal challenges and in their practices with the challenges their clients seek support for, and see how they interrelate.

Pulsation supervision encourages embodiment and presentness in both patient/client and practitioner/therapist and encourages working at the pace that this is possible regardless of the modality.

Interruptions and trauma held within our patients/clients bodies will all be different, all our patients/clients will have experienced what they have experienced differently, they will feel differently about having had those experiences, there will be no same response, we cannot assume or make judgement but gain awareness from the growing capacity to track what is happening for them, in their embodied experience, and what they can, and cannot feel, what they are aware of and what they are not aware of.

Not all bodies have the same opportunities, the same choices available, the same access to support and care, there are inequalities, prejudices, oppressions, different powers that allow for different visibility, different inhabiting of space, that have more or less access to movement, that the individual voice as more or less value and impact, different bodies of different colour, gender, religion, class receive different access to resource, healthcare, employment etc.

We as practitioners/therapists/facilitators also hold different powers in relation to our clients/patients in differing ways, depending on who the individual is, their gender, their sexual orientation, their educational background, their religious beliefs, their attractiveness, their age, their neuro typicalness or diversity, their ableness or disability, their skin colour, their heritage, their employment or unemployment. As practitioners/therapist/facilitators we need to be aware of where power is placed in our sessions and where deeper healing is possible or further damage can occur.

As practitioners/therapists/facilitators we must hear at different levels, we must hear our patients/clients, what they are consciously aware of and what they hope, and at the same times we must sense what needs to take place in our clients/patients at deeper levels, becoming more aware of the conscious or primary process and of the secondary, unconscious process that is wanting to be made more conscious and to integrate.

Most clients/patients want the work to be done for them, a problem to go away, an uncomfortable feeling to stop, to enable them to continue without change having to happen internally or for new awareness and understanding of themselves to occur. Our culture fosters this in the guru, specialist and expert that tell people about themselves, or take the responsibility of their health and wellbeing away from them, disease and illness being something we fall victim to, rather than being part of that person.

Our core beliefs about ourselves and our core beliefs about the world are often hidden to us as individuals in the main unless we have embarked on personal work and have become more aware of the themes and stories that our bodies hold. These beliefs are there effecting, shaping and restricting our experiences and obscuring our lens and reality, about ourselves, about what’s happening for another, about what another is experiencing. As an eastern medicine practitioner or as a therapist. We are often information gathering by using our own interpretation and judgement about what we see and feel that is happening in another body and so what we have access to, what is available to us to see is of direct relevance to the treatment sessions, the accuracy of those interpretations the reality of them affects all aspects of our sessions, how we relate to our clients/patients, how we form a diagnosis, treatment plan, treatment priority, treatment principle, priority for treatment, point prescription, life style advice, application of our modality, and ultimately affect profoundly the success of our support to facilitate change in our client/patients challenge/complaint. As practitioners/therapists/facilitators what we are unconscious of directly affects what we miss in our sessions with our interpretations of our clients’ experiences and in the interpretations of any of our subjective gathered information from palpation, touch, body language, pulse. There will be parts that our client/patients’ presentations that are available to be integrated and worked with that we do not take up; they will remain invisible to us.

As acupuncturists we are often gathering information and doing at the same time, we are often treating with some time constraint, we are constantly filtering and prioritising what the client/patient is saying, seeing patterns that add to our already establishing patterns and ignoring the parts that don’t fit or is out of place, not enough to form a significant pattern, often this information is seen as irrelevant. I have found over the years that when your grow curious about what doesn’t fit, what isn’t part of a pattern or is an anomaly, doesn’t want to be included is interesting in terms of the shadow work, the unconscious or secondary process that underlies.

Pulsation Supervision is experiential and incorporates breath work, movement, sound and expression, as well as imagery, visualisation and meditation. It is only when we experience ourselves within our own bodies that we feel the ways we restrict and inhibit our aliveness and flow, in experiencing ourselves, we then become more conscious of, what was previous not conscious and available to us. If we are told about ourselves we can seldom change, it is only when we experience it for ourselves within our own bodies, we experience the way we do what we do, we can then understand why we do it, we can then become more aware when we are doing it, and in time catch ourselves doing it in present time, and in that new available awareness their becomes a choice that previously was unavailable to us as to whether we do something a different way, this is the case for ourselves as practitioners/therapists and for our clients/patients and is at the core of pulsation supervision sessions.

Healing and change is possible in a multitude of different ways, through the interventions we use, in the right brain to right brain connections that happen without our conscious awareness, in co-regulation, in dysregulation with another body that is regulated, in relationship, with empathy, presentness and embodied authentic relating, in felt experiencing and in deep human connection. In being witnessed in aliveness, in been seen and validated in your experience, in having space to feel and express, to be accepted and not judged, to have room to explore and grow curious about this is where healing and new awarenesses occur, regardless of the other healing modalities and interventions that you use as practitioner, therapist or facilitator and always alongside them.

When we connect with process, the aliveness of our clients and the aliveness within ourselves, the pulsation and life force that connects us to all that is alive and seeks life enhancing ways of being and unfolding into, the focus of supervision becomes more deeply connected to our nature to how the challenges we have in our lived lives effect our practice too and in what way.

As practitioners the more comfortable we can feel in the not knowing, the not understanding and being available to finding out, being curious and wondering about, in combination with our training and understanding, so that both can be there simultaneously, the more we can be in beginners and learners frame of being whatever our expertise and experience within our field and be with not doing enough to see what is already trying to unfold, on an organism level, at the level of aliveness, the more change will occur in our practices that nourishes all of life.

Most of our clients/patients numb themselves to their lives and to their feelings and many practitioners do to, the more capacity we have to be with all feelings, there being no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ feelings, but all appropriate, relevant energetic expressions and experiences for this human life. When we are fragile in our capacity to be with experience our clients/patients are experiencing, when we cannot be available, responsive, present with them, when we only have some feeling/emotions available to our own lives, then how can we heal these blocks to feeling and experience in others.

Healing supporting health and wellbeing is not something that can be done to another but in relationship with another human being.

As practitioners/therapists it is easy to fall into the trap of assuming and making judgements about the experiences, feelings and awarenesses of our clients/patients.

The more challenging you find staying with the emotional material that your clients/patients bring to sessions, the more you are having to try to stay available and present with them as they do so, the harder your body is having to work to stay regulated. This is often part of what burns out and reduces resource long term for practitioners/therapists/facilitators. Part of the problem is tolerance and capacity for emotions to be held in the practitioner/therapist’s body, that they are able to maintain regulation with relative ease and the other problem being there are few spaces that enable the practitioner/therapist to process the emotional content that they hold and experience are affected by within sessions. Pulsation supervision provides space for the processing of emotional content held at the level of our bodies for facilitators, therapists and practitioners. As practitioners/therapist we are always working with emotions, we don’t get to choice whether we work at the level or the emotions, we already are, it is just whether you have the capacity to work with emotions consciously and meaningfully. It is the same with trauma that is held within the bodies of the clients/patients we see, it isn’t a choice whether or not we work with trauma, we are already working with it, it is just whether or not we work with it more effectively, safely and more consciously.

It is difficult to stay with the body as alive and as part of process, we have as a culture lost trust in life as a process and our connection to being nature, we try and control it, rather than allow for it.

There is little supervision that is trauma informed, and that comes from the focus of the body rather than is purely or predominantly verbally focussed, there is an abundance of evidence now that show that the body holds how we have felt about the experiences we have. That trauma is held at the level of the body and held within the nervous system, it is through working with the body, in body orientated and informed ways that we can become more able to process with our client/patients the trauma that their own body holds and to be effective and safe in this work, we as practitioners/therapists need to be embodied, present, robust, have emotional capacity and have processed our own trauma by working with the body, at body level with our own history and felt experiences, blocks to feeling held within our bodies. This is a supervision style rooted in the understanding that trauma, whether experienced personally or encountered through others, can shape how we engage in our work, in our bodies, and in our relationships. Trauma informed supervision with pulsation supervision gently supports awareness, regulation, and resilience for those in healing and caring professions.

Pulsation supervision offers a compassionate, reflective space where practitioners can explore their work with care, curiosity, and safety.

Tessa Fergusson