Raja Selvam, PhD, is a senior trainer in Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing (SE) professional trauma training programs and the developer of Integral Somatic Psychology (ISP), an advanced approach for integrating body, energy, and consciousness into any psychological process, a master training for experienced clinicians.
Dr. Selvam’s eclectic approach draws from bodywork systems of Postural Integration, Biodynamic Cranio-Sacral Therapy, and Polarity Therapy, body-psychotherapy systems of Reichian Therapy, Bioenergetics, and Bodynamic Analysis, Jungian and Archetypal psychologies, psychoanalytic schools of Object Relations and Inter-Subjectivity, Somatic Experiencing (SE), Affective Neuroscience, Quantum Physics, and Advaita Vedanta, a spiritual tradition from India.
Dr. Selvam teaches in the United States, England, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Turkey, Russia, Italy, Israel, India, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, China, Brazil, and South Africa.
Of late, there have been several successful attempts in psychology to increase treatment efficiency by incorporating the long-overlooked dimensions of the body, energy, and awareness. Integral Somatic Psychotherapy (ISP) offers an integrated and advanced approach to utilizing all three dimensions simultaneously in any therapeutic work that involves psychological experience.
ISP provides understanding of the role of body (defined here as nervous system as well as non nervous system physiology), energy, and awareness in generating as well as defending against psychological experience; and interventions to work directly with these three dimensions in diverse clinical settings. ISP is presented in terms of general principles derived from a variety of disciplines and validated over time in a number of clinical settings. It offers considerable flexibility in the tools that can be used to work with the body, energy, and awareness; tools such as awareness, movement, breath, sound, inter-personal resonance, self touch, and touch from another, as appropriate to the clinical setting.
ISP offers psychotherapists a sophisticated body of knowledge to increase the embodiment of the body, energy, and awareness dimensions in their practice without having to change their prior clinical orientations or having to adopt interventions that are outside the norms of their professional practice. The role of the body, energy, and awareness in generating as well as disrupting psychological experiences on the one hand and facilitating or hampering self and interactive regulation on the other will be demonstrated live in the introduction in areas of widespread current clinical interest such as affect disregulation, attachment, stress, and trauma.
All professionals (both those who have had prior training in body, energy, or awareness dimensions and clinicians with limited training in these areas) have found ISP to significantly increase their treatment efficiency, and to support embodiment of these dimensions in themselves and their clients. ISP will prove to be of considerable value to you, as a clinician, whether you are trained in a mainstream psychoanalytic or psychotherapy approach, a body-oriented psychotherapy approach (such as Bioenergetics or Somatic Experiencing), or an energy school that also deals with psychological experience.
