present sensing psychotherapy

09/23/2026

🌳 With your back cradled by the ground, you awaken your receiving sense. Your frontal, motoring abilities can become background for a moment.

09/09/2026

👁️ Our senses are how we receive the world. 👂 Through our senses, our system learns what to allow in and what to filter out. 👃🏻 Usually this process happens other-than-consciously. 👅 By bringing intention and awareness to our senses, we can bring rest and aliveness into our being. 🖐️ What happens in your body as you welcome your receptive senses today?

09/03/2026

🎶 Humming - using vibration to shift your mood

You can use your own voice to create soothing vibrations to settle or enliven your being.

This experiment can be recuperative if you’ve been busy or stressed, or enlivening if you’ve been sedentary for a while and want to find more energy.

🧑‍🎤 Because the vagus nerve innervates your voice (larynx), humming is one way to directly stimulate a calming, rebalancing, settling response throughout your whole system.

🗣️The vagus nerve - aka Wandering Nerve - spans most of your body. So when you hum, it’s like you’re humming throughout your whole body!

👉🏻 Try this experiment and see how you feel before and after:

Release your breath on an unvoiced sigh of relief, breathing through your nose. Repeat a few times.

Add some gentle sound to your sigh on a hmmm, feeling the vibration buzz on your lips.

Place one or both hands on your face and sigh a hmmm.

Move your hand(s) to your throat and release a hmmm.

Repeat, moving your hand(s) down your torso:
Chest
Upper belly
Lower belly
Anywhere else you like

After the sequence, rest your hands, breathe normally, and notice how you feel now that you’ve hummed.

03/19/2026

Workshop reminder ✨

What happens when you listen with your whole self?

Hear and Now: Deep Listening & the Relational Soundscape�with Alison Taylor & Maureen Batt

A space for therapists to explore deep listening, voice, movement, and sound-making as pathways into embodied relational presence.

Together we’ll play with:�• listening inward and outward�• sound and voice as connection�• movement, spontaneity, and expression�• attunement to the relational field

No experience needed - simply bring your curiosity and a willingness to explore.

📅 March 28 | 10–5 (online)�🔗 link in bio to register

We look forward to sound-making with you!
� � �

03/06/2026

✨ Workshop alert - Hear and Now: Deep Listening & the Relational Soundscape
with Alison Taylor and

What happens when we listen not just with our ears, but with our whole self?

In this experiential workshop, therapists are invited to explore deep listening, voice, movement, and sound as ways of expanding relational awareness and embodied presence in therapeutic work.

Grounded in principles of embodied relational presence and deep play, we’ll experiment with practices that support listening to the world around you with openness, spontaneity, and sensitivity.

Together we’ll explore:
• deep listening practices
• engagement with internal and environmental soundscapes
• intuitive movement and creative voice expression
• relational attunement and aesthetic diagnosis
• playfulness, vitality, and spontaneity in the therapeutic relationship

Voice and sound become not only expressive tools, but pathways to connection with self, other, and environment.

No musical or movement experience is required - just your vibrant curiosity and willingness to experiment.

📅 Saturday, March 28
🕙 10 AM – 5 PM (online)
💲 $175 until March 13 | $200 after March 13
🔗 Register:
gestalt.on.ca/workshops/hearnow
(link in bio)

We’d love to explore sound-making with you.




 


03/03/2026

Anxiety - I get asked about it A LOT.

Anxiety often shows up in our body before it shows up in our thoughts.
A racing heart.�A churning stomach.�Tight muscles.�Brain fog.�Feeling scattered or overexposed.

Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with me?” what if we asked:
What is my body communicating right now?

In embodied relational Gestalt therapy, we don’t rush to fix or suppress anxiety. We slow down. We get curious. We explore sensations as messengers, carrying information about how you’re doing in a particular situation.

If you’ve been told you’re “too sensitive,” or if you’ve learned to distrust your body’s signals, therapy can be a place to gently rebuild that trust.

Anxiety isn’t always something to eliminate.�Sometimes it’s something to understand.

� �

02/26/2026

“I love you”�as in�“I will work ceaselessly to create a world where you are free.”�—

What if love isn’t just a feeling, but a way of being in the world?

Not possession.�Not control.�Not “I need you to be different.”

But a commitment to make the world you want to live in.�Cultivating response-ability in yourself.�A willingness to participate in your freedom.

In relationships (be they intimate, familial, or communal) love becomes a commitment to being free when the act of loving supports autonomy, growth, and belonging at the same time.

This kind of love asks:�How do I show up in ways that make it safer for both of us to be fully ourselves?

In embodied relational work, love isn’t about fusion.�It’s about contact.�Connection that doesn’t erase our difference.

What would shift if we understood love - all kinds of love - this way?

� �

02/20/2026

02/20/2026

Rupture is inevitable in relationship.
A missed text.�A tone that lands wrong.�A moment of feeling unseen.

Even the most well-intentioned, emotionally intelligent people “miss” each other sometimes.

What matters most isn’t avoiding the rupture in the first place (this is impossible anyway!), it’s learning to trust the repair process.

Repair is where intimacy deepens.�Repair is where trust is rebuilt.�Repair is where we discover we can mess up… and still belong.

In embodied relational Gestalt therapy, rupture and repair aren’t failures. They’re part of the natural dance of connection and reconnection.

If conflict feels threatening, or if mistakes have historically meant disconnection for you, it makes sense that you’d want to avoid rupture.

Therapy can support you in building trust: in yourself, in each other, and in the possibility of repair.

🌿 Full video is up on YouTube (link in bio)
🌿 Read the full piece on my blog (link in bio)