Counselling and Healing Modalities: what they are and how they help

As an integrative counsellor, I combine diverse counselling and healing modalities because it effectively supports my clients exactly where they are in their lives. The modalities I combine depend on my client’s ever-changing needs. Everyone is so unique, and it’s that distinctive difference that makes us who we are. My purpose is to uncover my clients’ soul-essence and bring it to the light of their conscious awareness.

The Foundation: Transpersonal Psychology

My work is based in Transpersonal Psychology, an approach that integrates the spiritual, transcendent aspects of the human experience within the context of everyday life. The transpersonal is defined as altered states of consciousness and spiritual experiences that encompass a wider perspective of life, the psyche and the universe. By tapping into the interpersonal, you move beyond familiar perceptions of reality into greater levels of awareness and soulful epiphanies, which enriches your spiritual life as well as your personal well-being.

I have a deep respect for the magic that occurs in the healing session. The modalities shared below are tools for deep transformational healing and personal breakthrough that never cease to amaze me.

Core Healing Modalities

Person-Centered and Trust-Oriented Therapies

Person-centered counselling, developed by Carl Rogers, recognizes each person as intrinsically whole and resourceful, engendering self-acceptance and inner confidence through empathic understanding and unconditional regard.

Trust-oriented Therapy, designed by my mentor Mahmud Nestman, creates a climate of safety where symptoms and concerns are not seen as dysfunction to be eliminated, but as incomplete or symbolic expressions of human needs. As my mentor Nestman explains, “Something important is trying to emerge and release or express itself and the therapist’s role is to provide a container for the emergence to take place.” … “The task of the TOT therapist is to discover how to support the uniqueness of each client in ways that are in accord with the personality, values and behaviours of the client. Some clients will be able to meet their therapeutic needs primarily through cognitive means. Others will need a combination of cognitive and somatic felt-sense experience to find their way through their difficulties. Others will need to access a more spiritual or soulful realm of experience. Through a collaborative experiential process, the client and therapist discover the way that is most congruent with the needs of the client.”

Body-Centered Therapy

This somatic approach incorporates the mind, body, spirit and emotions in the healing process. It addresses how thoughts, attitudes, feelings and beliefs impact physical and emotional functioning, particularly effective for relieving post-traumatic stress.

This somatic approach recognizes that our experiences, emotions, and traumas are stored not just in our minds, but in our physical bodies. By working with both the body’s wisdom and the mind’s understanding, this therapy helps release deeply held patterns and create lasting transformation. Through gentle attention to physical sensations, breathing, and movement, clients discover how their body holds their story and learn to access their natural capacity for healing. This approach is particularly effective for processing trauma, reducing anxiety, and developing a deeper sense of embodied presence.

Ericksonian Hypnotherapy

Ericksonian Hypnotherapy uses indirect suggestions with metaphor, story-telling, suggestive phrases and tones of voice, to help you become aware of your thought patterns. You remain conscious during the hypnosis and able to connect with your own personal experience.

Hypnotherapy is a safe tool for exploring unconscious beliefs and patterns that may be the cause of current issues and concerns, as well as it helps you enter into an altered state of consciousness that supports a meditative state of rest and tranquillity. Hypnotherapy is profoundly rejuvenating as it helps release the minds habitual tendencies and create the changes you long for in your life.

“When you enter hypnosis you become more receptive to life-changing, positive suggestions,” explains Karen Laskey. “This natural state allows access to the unconscious part of your mind; the part that has very likely been uncooperative in allowing you to make the changes you wish to make. The trained therapist’s suggestions are aimed at the unconscious part of your mind – the part of your mind where habit patterns (both good and bad) have formed.” … “Through hypnosis, the unconscious can be accessed and the messages, which we already desire consciously, can get to the deeper level of your mind and the change can start to take place.”

Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy

Focusing-oriented Psychotherapy, also known as Focusing, is a process developed by psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin. It involves non-judging attention to a somatic sensation—a bodily feeling. This somatic experience is sensed inwardly in the chest or throat, and the abdomen, and is the connection point for one’s intuition and inner knowing. It brings one’s boundaries, needs and desires into focus.

Through this gentle process of inner attention, you discover clarity about your deepest feelings and desires, gain fresh insights about your life situation, and open doorways for natural healing and transformation to unfold.

Focusing differs from the usual attention we give to feelings, because it occurs in the subtle felt-senses between the conscious and the unconscious mind. Through focusing, you attend to the sensitive border between your conditioned beliefs and your longing and find at the edge of physical and subtle sensations a profound sense of relief.

Non-Violent Communication (NVC)

Nonviolent communication is a compassionate and collaborative approach to conflict resolution and heart-felt intimacy—a communication process that was developed by Marshall Rosenberg in the 1960s. NVC recognizes that we are all loving by nature and that violent strategies are learned behaviors. It assumes we share the same basic human needs, with each action being a strategy to meet these needs.

This compassionate approach focuses on three empathic qualities:

• Being a nonjudgmental witness
• Reflective active-listening that truly relates to others
• Authentic and vulnerable self-expression

Spiritual Counselling

Spiritual Counselling is a holistic approach that honours the whole person, working to establish a strong union between body and soul through integration and conscious awakening. This practice focuses on what is naturally wanting to unfold in a client’s life, holding a safe and welcoming space for the emergence of their spiritual essence.

All issues and concerns, emotions and longings are viewed as the stirrings of the soul, and as fodder for healing. “The assumption is that human beings are innately motivated towards achieving their highest potential of awareness and fulfilment; the counsellor’s role is to support this and trust the client’s process,” explains Collette Barnard.

The development of the healthy ego is at the root of Spiritual Counselling, with the purpose of creating a fulfilling life and strengthening the connection between physical and spiritual realms. One’s spiritual essence naturally aims towards new horizons—the unknown, while the ego tends to be threatened by the unfamiliar. An unhealthy ego fragments and adheres to outmoded belief systems that result in emotional crisis. As Barnard shares, “Spiritual development best occurs at the point when the Ego identity is strong enough to take a little disorientation.”

The purpose of a spiritual counsellor then is to help the client heal the ego by developing the nonjudgmental witness—a process of integrating the ego with one’s essence, deepening that vital union between body and soul that allows for true transformation and wholeness.

Channeling and Channeled Healing

Channelling is the profound process of partnering with the Divine, imparting words of wisdom or energy and creativity. This sacred practice manifests in many forms—gifted healers laying hands and allowing healing to flow through them, artists and musicians surrendering to the creative process and tapping into a wellspring of challenging energies, writers experiencing words that seem to emerge on their own, as if the poem wrote itself or the song flowed naturally from an unseen source.

Conscious Channelling or Channelled Healing involves communicating with disincarnate higher-consciousness to gain clarity and support spiritual growth. It’s an active approach that requires quieting the critical mind while remaining alert—allowing one’s subconscious to support the cognitive structure of the spirit-communication. A conscious channeller partners with spirit to raise the vibration of the human experience by surrendering control, yet remaining ever-present and available for transformation to occur.

As Steve Rother writes in Spiritual Psychology, “It is only when we begin to view the human experience as the evolutionary process of a soul that we can begin to understand all the strange forces at work in our lives.”

Vibrational Medicine

Vibrational Medicine is an ancient system of healing based on the principle that our entire being contains trillions of cells working in harmony to form our organ systems. When these systems fall out of balance, they manifest as physical illness and a lack of mental and emotional clarity. Our beliefs, attitudes, thoughts and emotions send energy waves to every cell in our bodies, shaping the level of cellular balance and affecting the health of all operating systems.

This holistic approach looks beyond the physical to address subtle and emotional levels where the cause of discomfort, dis-ease and personal issues originate. Energy healing works with meridians, chakras, and cellular re-patterning, approaching the whole person: body, mind and spirit. When cellular health becomes depleted by outmoded conditioning and programming that limit energy waves, energy-healing helps reprogram these messages with new life-affirming frequencies, supporting physical, emotional, spiritual and mental well-being.

“Energetic healing facilitates the healing process by clearing blocks in the energy fields, repairing and rebalancing the energy so that the body can move to its optimal level of balance.” – Alison Grant

The Sacred Dance of Integration

Each modality offers a unique gateway to healing and transformation. When thoughtfully combined, they create a sacred container where the magic of emergence can unfold. This integration honors the whole person—body, mind, spirit and emotions—allowing each soul’s distinctive journey to reveal its inherent wisdom and purpose.

By sharing these healing pathways, I hope to illuminate the profound possibilities that await when we embrace all aspects of our human experience as opportunities for awakening and growth.