Maggie Richards

SOMATIC EXPERIENCING TRAUMA THERAPY

Be the first to review

Vegan Trauma Therapist in UK

BIOGRAPHY

Raised a Cymraes in beautiful west Wales, I began my career as a journalist and copywriter, contributing to The Times, The Guardian, Spirit & Destiny and BBC Radio and many more before my life was transformed by meditation.

​Aged 30 I fell in love with my inner silence and, after finding my Spiritual Teacher, went on to teach​ meditation to royalty, celebrities, top magazine editors, and teams – including at Oxford University, eBay, Deloitte, Leon and many more successful businesses. I am also a Somatic Experiencing trauma therapist.

With Cher Chevalier, I am co-author of the 24 (3×8) Meditations and The 7 Steps of Calm that launched Calm, iTunes App of the Year 2017, and Blissful Buddies bedtime meditation stories. I am author of A Guide to Being a Better Being and The Starlit Dancer, a Visiting Lecturer at City University, London, and a tutor on The Economist Business Writing course.

SOMATIC EXPERIENCING® TRAUMA THERAPY

Somatic Experiencing (SE for short) is a pioneering empowerment model.

​It is a natural body-awareness approach to healing life’s big blows. Difficult experiences can either keep us shut down and stuck, or be used to make us stronger, wiser, happier. SE focuses on safely inviting expansion and flow where there is fixation/freeze.​

“Trauma is not a life sentence”

More a training than therapy, SE teaches us to ourselves do the freeing work of overcoming our hurt, anger and pain. Where traditional talking therapy may be said to have scratched the surface of untangling me from the harrowing symptoms of complex trauma, SE met me at my core with an elegant simplicity. “You’ve completely changed,” said my mam.

​How does it work?

Focused on the felt-sense (body) above thoughts and emotions (mind), SE encourages us to listen closely to all of ourselves, without judgement, and starts with helping us feel safe inside. With skilful listening, innate new possibilities for recovery and wholeness are revealed. SE helps gradually shift lanes from living a life governed by the past to leading a rich new life rooted in the now, open to the limitless possibilities ahead

WHAT IS SE?

Somatic Experiencing is the inspired life’s work of American psychotherapist Dr Peter Levine who observed that prey animals, though routinely threatened with death, are not traumatised. Their bodies instinctively discharge the high arousal energy characterised by survival behaviours.

Though born with the same instincts, in humans the regulatory flight or fight response can be overridden by overwhelming fear; we ‘freeze.’ When a powerful surge in life force gets locked in the body-mind it can lead to a constellation of symptoms. This is when we may need to reach out and ask for compassionate assistance to find our feet again.