Yoga in the Therapy Room: Tips for integrating trauma informed yoga

Are you interested in bringing sound healing into your therapy practice? How can sound healing and singing bowls create an effective ritual for commencing and completing the therapeutic process? How does sound affect you?

Jade is a Shaman, Doula, and Homeschooling Mama of 2 Beautiful Souls. She's studied and been certified in a variety of Holistic Practices such as Sound Healing, Massage Therapy, Shamanic Healing(Energetic Work), and Aromatherapy.

Visit her website. Connect on Instagram and Clubhouse (natureheals)

• What is sound healing?
• Physical benefits of sound healing
• Using sound healing alongside other modalities
• Be mindful of how sound impacts you

Sound healing works through the fact that sound creates its own vibration, and that vibration infuses into your energy, bringing about change, and this change can look like:

• Relaxation,
• A greater sense of calm,
• Clarity,
• Greater awareness,

Overall, sound healing creates an encompassing and soothing presence, allowing you to align with that type of clear and peaceful energy.

Going for a sound bath, being surrounded by singing bowls that are played either on or around your body, can have similar effects on your body and mind as going for an in-depth massage.

If you place and play singing bowls directly onto the body, the vibrations that are created travel directed into the physical body instead of going around the room, leading to a more immediate calming effect.

Using singing bowls at the end of a session can help a client to take the new energy in and allows them to end their therapy session with you in a higher vibration, both mentally and physically.

In this way, using singing bowls makes the therapeutic process smoother and more centered.

You can use sound healing and singing bowls as a ritual to either begin or end the session. Having a ritual such as this signifies the start and the end of the sacred healing space that the therapist and the client enter when the session commences and closes.

Sound impacts you in different ways. Notice how sounds make you feel, such as listening to the news versus listening to your favorite song. You can use this new knowledge to find a deeper equilibrium in life when you are feeling overwhelmed.

Try chanting, singing bowls, singing with your voice, listening to nature, and so forth. You can learn about sound, how it impacts you and how it makes you feel to learn more about yourself.

Download the Free guide: How to build confidence and competence bringing yoga into the therapy room

The Yoga in Therapy Collective —where therapists learn, grow, and get support with yoga-informed practices

Explore the Yoga Basics for Therapists course—designed to help you confidently and ethically integrate yoga into therapy

Yoga Basics: The Therapist's Guide to Integrating Trauma-Informed Yoga into Sessions

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Self-Care for the Counselor: A Companion Workbook: An Easy to Use Workbook to Support you on Your Holistic Healing and Counselor Self-Care Journey ... A Holistic Guide for Helping Professionals)

How do you connect to your emotions as a therapist? Are there therapeutic aids that you can use in-session to increase the depth of therapy for your client? Can you use similar therapeutic aids for your self-care?

Natasha is a B.A.C.P Accredited counselor and Psychotherapist based in Nottingham England.

Visit her website. Connect on Instagram and Facebook.

Purchase My Little Therapy Box Mood Cards and visit the website.

• Benefits of My Little Therapy Box
• Limitations of My Little Therapy Box
• My Little Therapy Box as self-care for therapists

The resource My Little Therapy Box is a tool that everyone, therapists and day-to-day people alike, can benefit from because it allows people to identify their emotions while simultaneously giving them constructive advice or feedback that may encourage them to make meaningful changes to their situation.

My Little Therapy Box, while validating emotions, looks at more practical things that you can look at or do that can help you to process the emotion, and what in your life might be linking you to that felt emotion.

If you are in session and using the My Little Therapy Box and a client picks out a card that they may not be ready to speak about but are indicating to you, that helps you to know that those things are on their mind and perhaps in the future you can revisit that topic with them.

Even though there are powerful benefits, it is also necessary to be aware of the potential limitations.

The My Little Therapy Box is not a replacement for actual therapy. It is a tool that is meant to aid the therapeutic resource.

People need to know that if they are experiencing suicidal thoughts then on the cards it recommends to them that they should consider seeking out a therapist or medical professional who can assist them.

It is not recommended to use the cards with a child that is younger than 11 years old. This resource has the strongest positive outcomes with older children, teenagers, and adults.

Since therapists are the point of call for many people, they must make space and time to care for themselves when it is needed.

• Have time to exercise,
• Make space to have hobbies outside of work,
• Consider using the My Little Therapy Box cards.

• Always ensure that you are checking in on yourself because day-to-day therapy work can become a heavy burden on you if you are not caring for yourself or making space to find external support.
• Keep an open mind to getting your therapy if you think it may help you, because you are a person too, and it can help you as much as it helps your clients to talk to someone who can listen.

Download the Free guide: How to build confidence and competence bringing yoga into the therapy room

The Yoga in Therapy Collective —where therapists learn, grow, and get support with yoga-informed practices

Explore the Yoga Basics for Therapists course—designed to help you confidently and ethically integrate yoga into therapy

Yoga Basics: The Therapist's Guide to Integrating Trauma-Informed Yoga into Sessions

Instagram: @chris_mcdonald58

Join the Free Bringing Yoga Into the Therapy Room Facebook group

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Self-Care for the Counselor: A Companion Workbook: An Easy to Use Workbook to Support you on Your Holistic Healing and Counselor Self-Care Journey ... A Holistic Guide for Helping Professionals)

Can you utilize physical touch in therapy? How does physical touch help an anxious patient to remain in the present moment? What are the ethics behind using physical touch in session?

At the end of a day-long workshop with Ilana Rubenfeld in 1997, Joan knew that not only would this be the work she'd do for the rest of her life, she also knew in my bones that she would one day teach this work to others.

As a lifeline learner, Joan has continued to hone and deepen her skills as both Synergist and teacher.

I have devoted my life to helping others heal from the wounds and trauma of life.

Today, in her private practice, Joan primarily helps women who have experienced sexual trauma heal so they can step into their full power and take their rightful place in the world.

Visit the training program website. Connect on Facebook.

Activate Your Clients' Inner Healing Wisdom! Click here for your free gift.

• Can you introduce physical touch into counseling sessions?
• How to introduce physical touch
• Ethics of touch

The first thing to do is to educate your client about what touch is. You can do this via virtual therapy as well because you can describe and show your clients what it is that you want them to do.

Help your clients be aware of their bodies. Ask them:

• Is there a message your heart wants to give you?
• Is there a message you want to give your heart?

This opens a dialogue up to the client interacting with their body. They can then learn to see their body as an entity that can store emotion and experiences.

It helps the client to practice empathy, awareness, and kindness towards their body instead of seeing it only as a mechanism for living.

Ask your clients:

• Where they feel their anxiety or their emotion in their body,
• What physical sensations are they feeling?
• How is their emotion manifesting in their body?

Have your client visualize that they have their awareness, love, and attention in their hand, and they are then placing that hand softly on the spot on their body that is currently enduring the anxiety.

You want your client to focus on the physical sensation because when they concentrate on the physical sensation, then they are in the present moment, in the here and now.

• Touch builds, enhances, and maintains the therapeutic alliance because it is a method of communicating the therapist's intention and presence through touch.
• It enhances the client outcomes.
• The client is a full participant in the session because touch calls on the body to be a part of the client's healing.

The most effective way to contact innate healing is through touch, although touch needs to be done with training and consciousness.

With proper training, touch can be a huge benefit for therapy, but it needs to be spoken about and taken seriously and openly.

Download the Free guide: How to build confidence and competence bringing yoga into the therapy room

The Yoga in Therapy Collective —where therapists learn, grow, and get support with yoga-informed practices

Explore the Yoga Basics for Therapists course—designed to help you confidently and ethically integrate yoga into therapy

Yoga Basics: The Therapist's Guide to Integrating Trauma-Informed Yoga into Sessions

Instagram: @chris_mcdonald58

Join the Free Bringing Yoga Into the Therapy Room Facebook group

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Self-Care for the Counselor: A Companion Workbook: An Easy to Use Workbook to Support you on Your Holistic Healing and Counselor Self-Care Journey ... A Holistic Guide for Helping Professionals)

What does holistic wellness look like? How can different types of exercise positively aid the body and mind in different ways? Why should you pause?

Gen is the owner of North Boulder Counseling, a thriving group therapy practice in Boulder, CO which specializes in anxiety at all ages. She is a Licensed Practicing Counselor and has spent her life outside and is curious about the human experience. Gen's goal in life is to promote freedom from anxiety and fear for as many people as possible. Gen is wildly and lovingly, disarming. With Gen, you will laugh, think and play every time. She is also a triathlete and a very low runner.

Visit her website. Connect on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Find candid and relatable videos on mindfulness, meditation, and holistic lifestyles changes that are accessible here.

• What is holistic?
• Exercise advice
• Mindfulness

Having a holistic outlook on your therapy, habits, and overall life practices means simply look at the entire picture.

Being holistic and working holistically means observing how everything impacts everything else.

This is why holistic counseling will not only look at which emotional issues someone is dealing with, but will also look at what a person's eating, exercise, and daily habits are because they too have an overall impact on someone's health.

Recent findings suggest that people who are anxious prefer to do weight training and people who are depressed may prefer to do cardio.

Lifting heavy weights forces you to go slow and focus on controlled, deeper breathing. In turn, this can greatly benefit someone who may be struggling with anxiety and who is always running on a fast-paced cycle.

If you are hyper-aroused or stimulated, doing a hypo-activity like weight training and deep breathing can be soothing to the nervous system.

Conversely, if someone is in a depression, doing cardio and running, swimming, or even going for a brisk walk can ramp up the body's functions and release happy hormones.

A pragmatic way of looking at holistic wellness and mindfulness is to practice becoming aware of when you are not doing okay, and on the other hand, when you are doing okay.

When you are on your healing journey, the first step is noticing when you are not doing so well and pausing the story in your head that your ego might try to tell you as to why you are not doing good. Simply notice pause, and take a little moment to be with yourself.

The pause can be merciful.

Even after a difficult event, you can still pause and retroactively care for yourself. All of this work relates to building your neuroplasticity skills and helps you to change your mindset and approach to yourself so that you can be kinder, more empathetic, and reach the highest version of yourself.

Download the Free guide: How to build confidence and competence bringing yoga into the therapy room

The Yoga in Therapy Collective —where therapists learn, grow, and get support with yoga-informed practices

Explore the Yoga Basics for Therapists course—designed to help you confidently and ethically integrate yoga into therapy

Yoga Basics: The Therapist's Guide to Integrating Trauma-Informed Yoga into Sessions

Instagram: @chris_mcdonald58

Join the Free Bringing Yoga Into the Therapy Room Facebook group

Leave a review and subscribe to this podcast

Self-Care for the Counselor: A Companion Workbook: An Easy to Use Workbook to Support you on Your Holistic Healing and Counselor Self-Care Journey ... A Holistic Guide for Helping Professionals)

How can yoga practice aid therapy? Can you combine restorative yoga and reiki? What benefits can you experience when you practice restorative yoga?

Amy Sawyer has been practicing yoga on and off for most of her adult life. She fully embraced yoga after a personally challenging year in 2015 and enrolled in yoga teacher training with the intention of invoking self-care and deepening her own practice. After experiencing the profound personal and spiritual growth that a regular practice had in her life, she felt called to teach and share yoga with others. Amy considers herself a lifetime student and is a strong believer in "we teach what we need to learn." She leads a soulful, heart-opening practice that inspires students to bring awareness to their lives on and off the mat and to honor the teacher within.

Mandy Bernard has worked with yogis of all ages. She has trained in trauma-based yoga with David Emerson, Ayurveda with Hilary Gilvaltis of Kirpalu, and Thai Massage with Deon DeWitt. Her classes combine a blend of movement, mindfulness, reflection, and alignment often with the theme of self-love woven throughout. She co-leads international and national women's yoga and wellness retreats and is the owner of Salty Dog Yoga & Surf. When she isn't teaching yoga you will most likely find her wearing overalls hanging in nature, doing an art project, or hanging with her family.

Find out more on Salty Dog website. Connect on Instagram and Facebook.

Visit Amy's website. Connect on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook

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• Benefits of yoga and therapy
• Combining restorative yoga and reiki
• Advice to holistic counselors

In Western society many people come to practice yoga for the physical benefits, there are multitudes of emotional and mental benefits as well.

Yoga can benefit you whether you are using it to overcome trauma, move through a difficult transition in life, or simply to strengthen your body. Its benefits can adapt to what you need it to do for you at that moment.

It is also through the practice of yoga that you can learn to come back to the present moment, which is also a pillar in therapy: noticing where you are now and being present in the moment instead of living in your memories or in a reality that is not real.

Restorative yoga and reiki are complementary practices. Restorative yoga gives your body the chance to relax and come down from the constant high that most people in Western society are encouraged to chase.

The idea of "no pain no gain" and "hustling" constantly leads to many people going about their lives without presence or awareness because they are too busy doing as many things as they can.

Combining reiki and restorative yoga is a practice where you can ground your body and mind into the present moment.

It is a journey: you might start one day and fall out of your routine, but it is more about getting back up and continuing to practice even when you may miss a day.

It is about being kind and compassionate to yourself and remembering that there is no end destination. One minute can be enough to reset and connect.

Come back to the present moment. Do not live in the past or too far into the future: being in the present reminds you that you have the power, you are alive, and that you are enough

Download the Free guide: How to build confidence and competence bringing yoga into the therapy room

The Yoga in Therapy Collective —where therapists learn, grow, and get support with yoga-informed practices

Explore the Yoga Basics for Therapists course—designed to help you confidently and ethically integrate yoga into therapy

Yoga Basics: The Therapist's Guide to Integrating Trauma-Informed Yoga into Sessions

Instagram: @chris_mcdonald58

Join the Free Bringing Yoga Into the Therapy Room Facebook group

Leave a review and subscribe to this podcast

Self-Care for the Counselor: A Companion Workbook: An Easy to Use Workbook to Support you on Your Holistic Healing and Counselor Self-Care Journey ... A Holistic Guide for Helping Professionals)

Why do some people embark on spiritual journeys? How is the mind like a puppy when it comes to meditation? What can you do to make yourself "lighter"?

Joe Gilbert is a clinical mental health counselor and meditation teacher. His primary office is at the Cedar Walk Wellness Center in Hillsborough, NC. He lives with his wife in Hillsborough, enjoys hiking and backpacking, listening to the birds, and cuddling with his animal companions.

Find out more at his website.

• Why would you want to embark on an inward facing journey?
• Stilling your mind
• Travel lighter

Many people live on autopilot, unaware or dissociating from their current reality, and think that they need to achieve something other than themselves in order to find peace, or presence, in their current lived experience.

Going on an inward-facing journey means meeting your own needs so that you can be present in your reality without running away from it. You meet your needs, put your ego to rest and simply be, without worrying continually.

Surrendering helps you to let go of the structures that you hold onto that remain the perception of what you think your reality is. Surrender, and open yourself up.

Find what works for you, because some people need:

More movement:

People who find stillness in mind and spirit could try a form of yoga, tai chi, or a gentle hike to move the body without becoming over-excited.

To get rid of the script:

Get rid of the idea of what you think meditation and stillness look like because it is different for everyone.

To stop running:

Stop running from something, because yoga works well when you settle into the unknown and say "yes" to what comes up if it resonates with you and your Higher-self.

To trust your intuition:

This may take a little while, but use meditation as a way to get back in touch with your intuition, and you can even use your intuition to get in touch with meditation.

Treat your mind like an excited puppy. It will run off and get distracted and want to play and collide into a million things at once, but you accept it for where it is and you do not yell at it because you understand that it is new to the world, just as your mind is new to meditation.

Through embarking on an inward journey you can travel lighter through life. By completing a spiritual journey and figuring out who you really are, what is really important, and what you really want to focus your energy and attention on, you become lighter.

When you know what is important to you, you can release all the rest that is weighing you down and keeping you stuck in the past and stuck in old habits that no longer serve you.

Download the Free guide: How to build confidence and competence bringing yoga into the therapy room

The Yoga in Therapy Collective —where therapists learn, grow, and get support with yoga-informed practices

Explore the Yoga Basics for Therapists course—designed to help you confidently and ethically integrate yoga into therapy

Yoga Basics: The Therapist's Guide to Integrating Trauma-Informed Yoga into Sessions

Instagram: @chris_mcdonald58

Join the Free Bringing Yoga Into the Therapy Room Facebook group

Leave a review and subscribe to this podcast

Self-Care for the Counselor: A Companion Workbook: An Easy to Use Workbook to Support you on Your Holistic Healing and Counselor Self-Care Journey ... A Holistic Guide for Helping Professionals)

Are you curious about using essential oils in your counseling practice? What are some of the ethical considerations to be aware of when working with essential oils in your sessions? How can you introduce your clients to essential oils?

DeeAnna Nagel, LMHC is a former psychotherapist turned aromatherapist and intuitive. She integrates energy healing and intuition as well as chakra balancing and essential oils into her work with others. Her greatest passion is guiding people toward their soul's purpose. She holds several credentials in the healing arts.

Find out more at her website and connect on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Ethically Speaking: The Use of Essential Oils in Therapy

• Guidelines for using essential oils safely and ethically
• Safety with essential oils
• Essential oils and informed consent

• Get certified and take a course. There are many aromatherapy schools that teach short courses and introductions.

You can use essential oils as a kind of prompt, or journal prompt. Wave the bottle under someone's nose and ask them to write down or discuss what it brings up for them. It can be that simple.

• Know your client's experience: ask your client if they have had any experience with essential oils before bringing it into practice.

What it is that they do or do not know will inform you and give you clues as to where you need to teach them more, or what else you can introduce them to.

Ask your clients if they have any experience with essential oils. If they do, and they have used the essential oils "straight" (without carrier oil) then you will give them different advice or guidance as opposed to another client who has never worked with essential oils before.

Avoid discussing medical practices of essential oils with your clients.

• Avoid going in the sun for extended periods of time right after having applied essential oils, especially citrus kinds such as lemon or bergamot.
• Do not purchase essential oils from huge companies where they can be mass-produced, such as Amazon. If you want to purchase essential oils, look for local outlets that make them in smaller batches because then you will be more likely to purchase essential oil that is natural and free of additives and scents.
• Avoid placing oils in membrane areas of your body such as your eyes. If you do get the essential oil in your eye, do not flush it out with water: flush it out with a carrier oil.
• Test an essential oil on the inside of your wrist to test your skin's reaction to it.

If you are supplied with essential oils from a company and you are distributing those oils to your clients through sales, you are not allowed to sell them to your clients because that is considered a dual relationship.

If you sell oils to your clients and they sell oils to other people, you become their employer, and that breaches ethical considerations.

Recommend to your clients that if they would like to purchase an essential oil that they get a high-quality one. Do not push for a certain brand or company, as that could land you in ethical trouble.

DeeAnna Nagel - Essential Soul Care: Your Guide to Designing an Expansive Life [in progress]

Download the Free guide: How to build confidence and competence bringing yoga into the therapy room

The Yoga in Therapy Collective —where therapists learn, grow, and get support with yoga-informed practices

Explore the Yoga Basics for Therapists course—designed to help you confidently and ethically integrate yoga into therapy

Yoga Basics: The Therapist's Guide to Integrating Trauma-Informed Yoga into Sessions

Instagram: @chris_mcdonald58

Join the Free Bringing Yoga Into the Therapy Room Facebook group

Leave a review and subscribe to this podcast

Self-Care for the Counselor: A Companion Workbook: An Easy to Use Workbook to Support you on Your Holistic Healing and Counselor Self-Care Journey ... A Holistic Guide for Helping Professionals)

Have you heard of Ayurveda? How can the principles behind Ayurveda help you to get to know yourself and your clients better? Can opposites help you to find balance?

Sonia grew up in India, the home of Ayurveda and Yoga. Ayurveda was woven into the fabric of our lives, though she did not fully recognize its significance at the time. She has a traditional career as a CPA, with a long stint in the corporate world, and all along, Sonia nurtured an abiding interest in holistic health and wellness.

In 2015, this led her to study Ayurveda at the Yoga on High School of Ayurveda / California College of Ayurveda. It began as a personal exploration and has turned into a passion. Sonia has completed the Level 1 Ayurveda Health Educator (AHE), Level 2 Ayurveda Health Practitioner (AHP) studies, the AHE Internship program, and currently the Clinical Ayurvedic Specialist internship. She has also completed training to be a future Ayurveda teacher for the program and mentored students.

Find out more at her website and connect on Facebook and Instagram.

• What is Ayurveda?
• Body types in Ayurveda
• Healing in Ayurveda
• The start of your day sets the pace

Ayurveda is a combination of two words: auyr and veda. 'Veda' means science or knowledge and 'ayur' means life or lifespan. So, Ayurveda is the science or knowledge of life or lifespan.

Ayurveda is a holistic modality from India concerned with preventing disease.

Ayurveda essentially helps people to avoid sickness although it does have ways of helping people who do have an illness.

The idea behind it:

• Space: A container that surrounds you as well as pertaining to space in your body.
• Air: The idea of movement. There is movement both around you and within your body.
• Fire: Metabolism, when you eat anything it becomes digested to form new tissues in your body. There is metabolic fire and a mental fire, pertaining to how you perceive the world and how your brain digests information around you.
• Water: This is more literal in the sense that the body is 70% water.
• Earth: Structure, all solid parts of the body are earth and in a more philosophical sense the body comes from the earth at birth and is returned back to the earth with death.

In Ayurveda, all these elements and their properties were combined to form three main body types. Everyone has all the elements in their body, but there is one type that is predominant:

1 – Air type or Vata::

• Very lightly and narrowly built,
• Everything is small: hair, lips, skin are all small
• They are quick: they talk, move, and think fast

2 – Fire-type or Pitta:

• Medium built people with well-defined muscle definition
• They may have a reddish or yellowish tone to their skin
• A direct person: they have a direct way of speaking to you or expressing themselves
• Tend to become or assume the role of leader

3 – Water and earth type or Kapha:

• Water and earth are heavy, slow and they have flow, so people with water or earth type have strong emotions
• They have qualities such as sweetness, stability, and strong emotions with the flow
• They have structure and stability in their body as well, so they are usually broader and bigger
• These people are your dependable people

Each type, when stressed, acts out in a certain way.

• Someone who is an air type that is moving faster and faster may elevate their anxiety and what helps them is to slow down.
• Someone who is a fire type that tends to be hotheaded when under pressure, may need to cool down to bring their balance.
• Someone who is a water type may need to bring vigor into their slow stability in order to curb nostalgia or feeling stuck in their emotions.

All types can learn to push and pull from each other in order to remain whole and stable in themselves.

Bring awareness to what you are doing and decide whether you are ready to, or want to, change a small piece of what you want to change today or not.

Your daily routines make up your weeks, and your weeks add on to your months. Every day may seem like it is not important, and you may leave all the things to tomorrow if you are too busy or disorganized or overwhelmed, but today really is all that you have.

Take each morning as an opportunity and interact with it with kindness. Do not force yourself or punish yourself, but do encourage yourself to set the tone each morning and try to do a little bit of what you want to do every day.

Semezdin Mehmedinović – My Heart

Download the Free guide: How to build confidence and competence bringing yoga into the therapy room

The Yoga in Therapy Collective —where therapists learn, grow, and get support with yoga-informed practices

Explore the Yoga Basics for Therapists course—designed to help you confidently and ethically integrate yoga into therapy

Yoga Basics: The Therapist's Guide to Integrating Trauma-Informed Yoga into Sessions

Instagram: @chris_mcdonald58

Join the Free Bringing Yoga Into the Therapy Room Facebook group

Leave a review and subscribe to this podcast

Self-Care for the Counselor: A Companion Workbook: An Easy to Use Workbook to Support you on Your Holistic Healing and Counselor Self-Care Journey ... A Holistic Guide for Helping Professionals)

Do you sometimes struggle with self-doubt? How can you interact with these parts of yourself and still do the thing you were anxious about? How can you harness the power of growing pains?

Often referred to as the Queen of Abundance or the Shadow Mama by her clients, Keri's superpower is illuminating your gifts by helping you upgrade your energy & weave your soul with aligned structure.

After over a decade of growing a prosperous practice as a Licensed Holistic Psychotherapist, she retired and expanded her work into the realms of Best Selling Author, Podcaster, and Founder of the Sacred Soul Circle for Healing Entrepreneurs. Today she has a global practice mentoring healers as they transmute the energies of fear and doubt into confidence, clarity, and skills to joyfully and abundantly serve.

Find out more at her website and connect on Instagram.

Click here for the Free Abundance Activation challenge.

• Feeling self-doubt
• How do we meet the parts of ourselves that are doubting
• Growing pains

Welcome to humaning! It is so normal to move through periods of feeling unsure and vulnerable.

When we place ourselves in a box we limit our capacity to help, heal, and to serve others in the way we are able to.

If we do not have a relationship with our self-doubt, we continue to buy into collective ideas, becoming further estranged from ourselves, and make choices that are detrimental to our practice and to ourselves as people and as healers.

Self-care principles have been squashed under the weight of western medicine even though these acts and principles have existed for many hundreds of years throughout different cultures.

The parts of us that doubt might be keeping us from literally doing the thing we may need to be doing such as marketing or branching out.

We can supervise these parts of us. We can supervise the doubts, give them attention and love, and still do the thing that we are nervous about.

It is possible to still take risks when you are afraid, that is what being brave is about.

Ask yourself:

• What does this part that is doubting need from you?
• How can you connect with yourself and say "I see you, I'm here for you"
• How can you hold and love on that part that doubts while you still take the brave step and do the thing

Follow your bliss but also follow your growing pains.

A lot of the discomfort you experience when you try new things and overcome self-doubt is due to the fact that you are stretching your comfort zone and surpassing your own limits.

That is how you grow and develop both as a practitioner and as a human being.

44 Holistic Tips For Peaceful Sleep by Keri Nola

Download the Free guide: How to build confidence and competence bringing yoga into the therapy room

The Yoga in Therapy Collective —where therapists learn, grow, and get support with yoga-informed practices

Explore the Yoga Basics for Therapists course—designed to help you confidently and ethically integrate yoga into therapy

Yoga Basics: The Therapist's Guide to Integrating Trauma-Informed Yoga into Sessions

Instagram: @chris_mcdonald58

Join the Free Bringing Yoga Into the Therapy Room Facebook group

Leave a review and subscribe to this podcast

Self-Care for the Counselor: A Companion Workbook: An Easy to Use Workbook to Support you on Your Holistic Healing and Counselor Self-Care Journey ... A Holistic Guide for Helping Professionals)

As a therapist do you find yourself putting up a front of who you should be to your clients? Does being authentic as the therapist to who you are, increase the success of the counseling that you provide? Why is self-care important to being authentic?

Samantha Mahon is a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor (LCMHC)) in North Carolina. She has an associate's degree in human services, a bachelor's degree in social work, and a master's degree in mental health counseling with a specialization in crisis and trauma, phew, that was a lot.

She is a certified life & business coach, is trained in Rapid Resolution Therapy®, and is a Certified Holy Fire® Level II Reiki practitioner. Rest assured, Sam is not a stuffy collegiate who brags about all of her educational experiences, in fact, she is quite the opposite. If you met her on the side of the road, you would have no idea that she was a therapist.

Her tattoos speak to the painful and miraculous experiences that she has embraced throughout her life. Her words- both written and spoken are words of authenticity, sometimes crude and lewd but always true to who she is as an authentic person.

Find out more at www.mypeakpractice.com

• Getting past personas
• Does your authenticity aid counseling?
• Self-care and authenticity

There will be times where you might modify or slightly change how you portray who you are, but the essence is that you are true to being yourself, in whichever way, shape, or form that takes.

You are able to be authentic in your role as a therapist because being a therapist should not mean that you change yourself. Instead, you bring the best aspects of yourself forward and utilize that in order to make your therapy stronger.

Definitely! As a therapist, you are a person first and it is from your personality that you can authentically connect with your clients through the lens of the therapy that you offer them.

People respond positively to sincerity and to authenticity, and when your clients can see that you are offering them your full attention as you are, with your therapist hat on and your full presence as who you are, you show them that they are valued, that you care and that you are not pretending.

If you want to bring authenticity to the table in your counseling, you need to be taking care of yourself in order to bring your best self.

Therapists are experiencing the same stressors and anxieties due to the pandemic as their clients are, and so it is important for you to also be taking care of yourself as well as teaching them to care for themselves.

Download the Free guide: How to build confidence and competence bringing yoga into the therapy room

The Yoga in Therapy Collective —where therapists learn, grow, and get support with yoga-informed practices

Explore the Yoga Basics for Therapists course—designed to help you confidently and ethically integrate yoga into therapy

Yoga Basics: The Therapist's Guide to Integrating Trauma-Informed Yoga into Sessions

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Self-Care for the Counselor: A Companion Workbook: An Easy to Use Workbook to Support you on Your Holistic Healing and Counselor Self-Care Journey ... A Holistic Guide for Helping Professionals)