Services
Acupuncture
Acupuncture is a traditional Chinese medicine treatment that uses very thin steel needles inserted into the skin to stimulate specific points in the body. The goal is to relieve a health condition or symptom, such as pain.
Chinese medicine practitioners believe qi disruptions create imbalances in the body’s energy that lead to illness.
Acupuncture aims to rebalance qi with needles that touch acupuncture points (acupoints) throughout the body.
The needles stimulate the body’s existing systems to:
- React to an illness or symptom.
- Rebalance the body.
- Release natural chemicals, such as endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers, and neurotransmitters, chemicals that control nerve impulses.
Talking therapy
Talking therapies are treatments which involve talking to a trained professional about your thoughts, feelings and behaviour. There are many different types of talking therapies, but they all aim to:
- give you a safe time and place to talk to someone who won't judge you
- help you make sense of things and understand yourself better
- help you resolve complicated feelings, or find ways to live with them
- help you recognise unhelpful patterns in the way you think or act, and find ways to change them (if you want to).
As part of my Psychology career, I have completed training in Mindfulness, CBT, Addiction, Motivational Interviewing, amongst many others. Further to this I have completed a Level 4 Professional Diploma in Therapeutic Counselling. I am a registered therapist with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.
Mindfulness Yoga
Mindfulness is the active process of being in total awareness from moment to moment. It involves tuning in to your body and your senses in order to process as much information as possible while maintaining a sense of non-judgmental acceptance. That may sound like a lot to do all at once but you’d be surprised how adept people become at it with a little practice.
So how does this relate to Yoga? Well, by maintaining focus on our bodies and our breathing during our Yoga practice we are already better able to start an internal dialogue with ourselves. While going through the motions of a yoga sequence we start to notice how our breathing changes accordingly, how our bodies are able to move (or not in other cases), thoughts pop into our heads that may spur us on, or cause us to question moving our bodies in such a way. By paying attention to all these aspects we learn more about ourselves, our capabilities (and limitations), as well as our thought patterns. Outside of our Yoga practice we are able to put this new knowledge into context by being better able to recognize when we are under stress, and so how we make adaptations to minimize the stress and maximize our potential.
Yoga for Autism with meditation
The primary aim of Y4A is to achieve Mindfulness in Autistic (and special needs) adults and children, the essence of yoga, through artistic, storytelling education, that easily guides individuals into Pranayama, Mudras and Asanas.
This physical and spiritual education will be very sensory, relying on BICS – breathing techniques, imagination, colour and sound, to cool down the individual’s nervous system and hopefully create coping strategies and mechanisms to fall back on and use in everyday life, away from the Y4A Sensory Studio.
This Special Yoga can benefit individuals with Sensory Integration Disorder, Pervasive Developmental Disorder, High Functioning Autism and Classic Autism as well as others with special needs.