Compassionate Inquiry
I’m happy to announce that after a year-long intense journey of study, practice and integration I’m now a certified Compassionate Inquiry practitioner, a psychotherapeutic approach developed by renowned trauma and addiction specialist Gabor Maté.
When I began teaching 1-to-1 yoga almost 8 years ago, I quickly realized that my clients were often looking for support beyond learning how to develop their own practice. As I discovered in my own life, when we begin practicing yoga with more intention and consistency, it tends to bring everything up to the surface.
This can be a confusing and sometimes frightening experience, so it can be helpful to have support in navigating all the unconscious material that rises to the surface as we unlock tension in the body and bring clarity to the mind.
When my clients would bring this material to our yoga sessions I didn’t always feel adequately equipped to help them process it, so I started looking for psychotherapeutic methods that were in alignment with my approach to yoga.
What I’ve experienced on own healing journey has given me unshakeable faith in the wisdom of the body, heart and soul. I wanted to explore therapies that helped draw out this wisdom from the client — taking an “inside-out” rather than the “outside-in” approach of many coaching and talk therapy methods.
My quest lead me to study various modalities including Hakomi, Somatic Experiencing and Sensorimotor psychotherapy which all offered valuable techniques and guiding principles that were in alignment with my approach, yet I found that they weren’t so effective in dealing with many of the day-to-day difficulties that my clients were bringing to our sessions.
My study of yoga philosophy and work with psychedelics has taught me that much of the suffering that we experience in our daily interactions with others and the world is of our own making. When our perception of the world is tinted by our conditioned thoughts and beliefs, we tend to make assumptions and repeat unconscious reactive patterns that inevitably lead to emotional upset and wreak havoc on our relationships.
I wanted to find a way to help my clients to see where they’re responsible for their suffering, uncover the source of their limiting beliefs, and ultimately find more freedom, ease and enjoyment in their life and relationships.
When I found out that Gabor Maté, the renowned trauma and addiction specialist, had developed his own approach called Compassionate Inquiry, I knew I had to explore it. His writing and lectures always resonated with me and I appreciated his no nonsense approach and respected his years of work on the front lines of addiction in downtown Vancouver’s East Side. Plus, he was one of the only public figures that spoke openly about the benefits of plant medicines like ayahuasca.
In 2017 after I returned from a 3-month stint teaching yoga at an ayahuasca healing centre in Peru, I attended a weekend workshop with Gabor and saw immediately how effective his approach was in facilitating breakthroughs with the people he worked with onstage. Through a process of guided self-inquiry, Gabor was helping people arrive at the same deep insights that participants at the ayahuasca centre reported, only without the need to decode the often confusing visionary experience.
When I learned that he would be offering a practitioner training in 2019 I felt strongly that this was an approach I wanted to invest my time and money into. I was accepted into the first cohort of trainees and, with the support of Gabor and his team of talented and caring facilitators, spent all of last year engaged in a deep and challenging process of inquiry, learning, growth and integration.
It wasn’t an easy process, and I had moments where I contemplated dropping out or not pursuing certification, but when I began to see the radical shifts happening in my clients, I knew it was worth it.
Here’s a description of Compassionate Inquiry from Gabor himself:
“The purpose of Compassionate Inquiry is to drill down to the core stories people tell themselves – to get them to see what story they are telling themselves unconsciously; what those beliefs are, where they came from; and guide them to the possibility of letting go of those stories, or letting go of the hold those stories have on them. That’s what Compassionate Inquiry is.”
Interested in Compassionate Inquiry? You can book a free consultation with me or book a session using this link.
In order to make this work accessible to a wide range of people, I offer a reduced rate for those experiencing financial difficulties. Please choose a fee that is in alignment with your ability to pay.
