A Psychophonetics session has two parts: conversational and embodied/’action phase’. In the initial part of a session, I listen to my client as they share their presenting issue; their challenge, present struggle, and deeper need. They begin to give me a picture of what it is they are wanting or looking for in their life. Empathy is the key which allows a deepening of awareness and understanding in the conversation. Beneath our conscious awareness of our struggle, there is a deeper will towards growth and through the conversational phase of this process, through empathy, this deeper will begins to emerge. As my client becomes aware of this will emerging, they begin to know what it is they are truly wanting and at this point, I ask them to name this deeper will - I ask them to make a wish about it.

The embodied/’action phase’ of the session only begins once the inner direction of my client has been activated. The ‘wish’ of my client is now the ‘guiding star’ of the process. This is soulful work and we enter the soul/psyche through the gateway of the body, through sensing/somatic awareness, visualisation, gesture and sound. To really know ourselves we need to be willing to step into ourselves, to touch our deeper emotional realities. Empathy includes and is made more, through self-empathy. In this part of the psychophonetics process, we are able to come to empathise with ourselves deeply, to become aware of and to know the gap between our present reality, the person we are and the reality we want to birth, the person we are longing to be. Awareness of this gap is potential growth. When we are able to go into the heart of the sense of what is missing (the gap) and feel it, own it and name it we are a step closer to bringing the solution into being.

Psychophonetics is creative. Psychophonetics reminds us that we are the creative energy within our lives and that we can take creative responsibility for our next step. Our next step in life can come from our inner sense of what is right for us. A psychophonetics session is a practice space for life.

I have worked with many different presenting issues - anxiety, low self-esteem, grief, loss of life direction, disordered eating, recovery from sexual abuse, recovery from physical abuse, recovery from emotional abuse, recovery from reality abuse, recovery from childhood trauma, fear of intimacy, recovery from divorce, relationship struggles, emotional exhaustion, blocked creativity, disassociation.

Beneath any of these issues is the person who is suffering them. This person has within them the key to their own healing, to their own overcoming of their present reality. It is our task, together to find/activate this key.

— Louise Waterfall