HORÓ Psychotherapy - Aleksandra Staneva, PhD

07/08/2026

The four wings of HORÓ Psychotherapy
🦋IFS
Internal Family Systems is a model that sees the mind as made up of many parts, not one unified self. Some parts protect us by managing daily life, some protect us by pushing pain away, and some carry the pain itself, often from earlier wounds. Underneath all of them is Self: a core of calm, clarity, and compassion that doesn’t need fixing, only access. As a Level 3 trained IFS practitioner, I work directly with this internal system, helping clients build a relationship with their parts from Self
🦋 Jungian-Informed
Since 2019, I have trained with Clarissa Pinkola Estés, whose work weaves Jungian psychology with storytelling and the wisdom held in myth and archetype. I am currently continuing that lineage through training at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. This shapes how I listen: to dreams, to recurring images, to the shadow material clients haven’t yet found words for, treating all of it as meaningful.
🦋Feminist and Eco-feminist approaches
My work is woman-centered, attentive to the particular weight of identity, body, and role that women carry across a lifetime. I work with the transitions that rarely get named properly: the shift into motherhood, the loss of a former identity, the renegotiation of self within relationships and culture that were never built with women’s full personhood in mind. An ecological and feminist lens means looking at distress not only as personal but as shaped by systems
🦋Trauma and Women’s Bodies
The body remembers what the mind sometimes cannot say. Trauma lives in tissue, breath, and nervous system long after the story has gone quiet, and for women this is layered further by bodies that have been judged, controlled, and disconnected from their own instinct.

For any inquiries please contact me at [email protected]

🦋Aleksandra🦋

07/08/2026

The HORÓ Psychotherapy nest

Hello, I’m Aleksandra. For seven years I’ve held my little practice, HORÓ, as a nest, a temenos: a sacred, protected space set apart from ordinary life, where the psyche can do its real work without judgment rushing in. I work at the intersection of IFS, Jungian depth psychology, feminist and ecological thinking, and trauma-informed care, because no single lens holds the whole of a person....

Hello, I’m Aleksandra. For seven years I’ve held my little practice, HORÓ, as a nest, a temenos: a sacred, protected space set apart from ordinary life, where the psyche can do its real work withou…

06/08/2026

Horó nest is stretching, adding a few extra staws aka hours and I am able to see a couple more brave souls, ready to cross the threshold ONTO THEMSELVES ✨

HORÓ PSYCHOTHERAPY weaves ancient and modern approaches to being with people.

This is a practice built on 2 old truths:

🩵that we are not one voice but many, each part carrying its own history, its own fear, its own reason for showing up the way it does; and

🩵that beneath the visible self runs a deeper current, full of symbol and dream and the parts of us we’ve disowned but never lost.

IFS and Jungian work meet in that current, offering a way to listen instead of fight, to welcome instead of suppress, to let the exiled and the shadowed finally sit at the same table as the rest of you.

If you’ve been circling something you can’t quite name, and you’re ready for real company in that search, there’s space here for a few more people willing to do that kind of looking.

With love at the 🚪
Aleksandra

05/08/2026

Seven.

In myths and fairy tales, seven is rarely the beginning.
It’s the number that appears after the long walk through the forest. After the years of service. After the descent. Seven marks the end of one way of being before another begins.

This month, HORÓ turned seven.

When I opened this practice, I thought I was creating a place to offer therapy. Over the years I’ve realised it has become something else. A place where women come to remember themselves. To grieve. To rage. To soften. To meet the parts of themselves they’ve spent years trying to silence.

I’ve had the privilege of witnessing extraordinary courage. Not always the loud kind. The quiet kind. The courage it takes to tell the truth for the first time. To stay with a feeling instead of running from it. To choose yourself when every part of you has learned not to.

The world keeps telling us that this work is a luxury. Something to do once everything else is sorted.

I don’t believe that anymore.

I’ve watched too many lives change from the inside out to think of inner work as an optional extra. The relationship you have with yourself quietly shapes every other relationship you live.

So today I’m feeling so grateful.

To every woman who has trusted me with her story over these past seven years: thank you. It has been an honour to walk beside you.

Here’s to whatever chapter seven is making way for me. For horò. For you.

With love,
Aleksandra

25/07/2026

This Sunday mass ♥️

This multi award-winning film features Coleman Barks, the preeminen...

24/07/2026

I can not even begin to tell you about all the emotions stirring in me since last night. Since my encounter with the “Red Dress”. An experience of awe, tears and inspiration.
Kristie Macleod, a textile artist who came up with the project in 2009, and told us all about it, in, what I can only describe as a “sacred ceremony” at the Museum of Brisbane as part of the opening exhibition.

The Red dress, an exquisite embroidery of over 1 billion stitches, each one imbued with the energy of women (and men and non-binary folk) from 51 countries, focused on representing connection, identity, and a shared language of bodily expressivity.

A symbol of resilience and strength and stitched in stories of survivors of war, trauma, abuse and displacement, the pulsating Dress slowly unraveled its mystery in the hands of Kristie and museum staff.

Its energy was palpable and at times overwhelming. I couldn’t hold back my tears listening about hundreds of the women embroidering; the story of 6 Rwanda women called “From darkness to Light” whose life had been marked by the 1994 genocide represents a powerful image of a boy under a machete, burning tree and smoke turning into a radiant sun; Ukrainian women, Bosnia and Herzegovina “Speaking out” artisans who had fled Kosovo stitching up messages of hope in the face of inhumane suffering.
At 4am I am pouring over the book 📕 “The red dress: conversations in stitch” and deeply moved by the power of art to nourish us, truly nourish and feed, connect and inspire, and offer genuine connection and hope ♥️
The dress travels the world and is set to retire in 2030 so if presented with a chance, I encourage you to sit in its presence.
She will be at MoB until Sept 13.
Kirstie Macleod

23/07/2026

23/07/2026

Marion Woodman, an inspirational Jungian analyst, refused to see clients for therapy unless they spent at least one hour a day with their inner world: dreams, feelings, images, the ones that arrive uninvited and ask to be witnessed.

She understood something we forget between sessions. The psyche does not wait for Tuesday at 4pm. It is dreaming tonight. It is speaking through the tightness in your chest right now. It is sending an image, a memory, a small voice you keep talking over.

Therapy is the room where that inner material finally gets heard out loud. Held. Witness. Digested or spit out. But my room is not where the thick work happens. The work happens in the days between, when you sit with what surfaced and let it continue to stir you.

The parts of you that carry grief, anger, the exiled ones, the ones who learned to perform and please and disappear, they are not waiting for our next appointment. They are waiting for you.

Consistency in therapy was never about the calendar. It’s about staying in relationship with what’s alive in you, session after session, day after day, until the thing that was fragmented starts to feel less alone.

Aleks 🤎

17/07/2026

Been diving deep into the Shadow on multiple levels-personal, collective, global… and also as part of preparing for my next women circle ⭕️ on the Shadow in 10 days!!

Just pulled a shadow card in between seeing clients. I always seem to get a little jolt ⚡️ from divinations. And my rational mind still wants to resist all “the other ways of knowing”. But of course, my soul whispers, of course… I am that Hermit. And in its bright and supportive way it has gotten me in deepest of depths and I love roaming there. Inside the soil. Under the roots. Amongst the mycelium. Yet this can also turn sour aka the shadow side of the Hermit is indeed the way in which I sometimes do not come out for weeks and have no eyes for others, especially those closest to me. And for a therapist to sit with her shadow that states “refusing to help those in need” is a double whammy! Who? Me? Never!
And yes that is the deeply disturbing and sobering truth that our shadow holds. Truth is to often look at it and be reminded of our humanity. And to seek the fulcrum. Which we so easily miss.

🖤🤍🩶
Aleks

13/07/2026

Wild Woman lurks quietly amids the concrete urban jungle
She impatiently awaits her time
Peeking through the household chores
Of peeled potatoes and unwashed dishes.

But then - the forest.
So longed for. Craved.

She lives inside the waterfall
And the fireplace
The creaking wooden floors
And internet-free sunset among the trees.

She catches a ride on a butterfly’s wing
And sips on the raindrops brightly propped on fresh uncut wild grass.

You don’t have to look for her.
She is awaiting you there.
Impatiently.

A.