My name is Ashwin, and I’m a trauma-informed, somatic inquiry practitioner, who primarily works online 1-1 with clients, typically over 60-min sessions through Zoom in a respectful, discreet, safe, effective, compassionate, grounded, and judgement-free manner.
I assist my clients in resolving their traumatic imprints and emotional wounding through a body-centred, mindfulness-based approach, so they can access a greater sense of calm, ease, vitality, wholeness, clarity, resourcefulness, resilience, self-regulation, and empowerment within them.
Further, through the space here, I also intend to disseminate more awareness on trauma, ways to tackle it, and its connection to health, general well-being, and in building individual and communal resilience.
At a macro level, I also believe that creating trauma-informed, and eventually trauma-integrating communities can be a positive and vital transformative aid for social, political, economic and cultural change, not to mention the revolutionary impact it can have in actively preventing major physical, mental, and emotional health challenges.
Why Trauma Work?
While in the last several years, as greater consumer awareness around health and wellness has dawned, there’s been a rightful emphasis on getting enough exercise and varied high-quality movement, eating appropriate foods in moderate amounts, and getting our sleep patterns in order to better reclaim and restore our health.
However, what’s often missing in the picture is the role of unresolved chronic stress and trauma which is proven to adversely impact our health at multiple levels.
According to the current understanding from research on trauma and its effect on physical and mental health, it’s thought that almost all of these distressing symptoms are directly linked to a chronically dysregulated nervous system, driven and shaped by unresolved traumatic imprints.
Since the dysregulation is chronic, the person continues to carry a large amount of unresolved stress and thwarted ‘survival energy’ in their systems, which is thought to be a major driver in creating many of the distressful coping mechanisms, symptoms, and diseases listed below (only partial):
anxiety, depression, panic attacks, phobias, PTSD, respiratory issues, body image issues, migraines, compulsions (food, shopping, sex, porn, work, cigarettes, sugar, caffeine, video games, gambling, social media, etc), OCDs, emotional repression, low self-esteem/confidence, chronic self-sabotage in career and/or romantic relationships, control issues, toxic shame & guilt, rage issues, flashbacks, nightmares, certain auto-immune diseases, certain types of chronic pain, metabolic diseases, obesity, cancers, digestive issues, certain skin disorders, sleep problems, unresolved grief, obsessive spiritual seeking, excessive busyness, chronic isolation, disconnection/dissociation, numbness, and a whole lot of other symptoms.
Here’s a silver lining to this, though: many of us are discovering, especially in the field of trauma, that these symptoms do not need to be life sentences that we carry to our graves – instead, as we gradually and diligently build a skillset and design a lifestyle that facilitates tending to our emotional wounding and unresolved trauma material, many of these symptoms can abate and even reverse over a period of time.
As, Dr Peter Levine, a pioneer in the field of trauma, observes: “I have come to the conclusion that human beings are born with an innate capacity to triumph over trauma. I believe not only that trauma is curable, but that the healing process can be a catalyst for profound awakening—a portal opening to emotional and genuine spiritual transformation. I have little doubt that as individuals, families, communities, and even nations, we have the capacity to learn how to heal and prevent much of the damage done by trauma. In so doing, we will significantly increase our ability to achieve both our individual and collective dreams.”
This is precisely the sort of grounded hope I wish to offer to anyone who works or is interested in working with me – that healing is possible, provided we work to create the right set of conditions for it to happen over a period of time, by cultivating stable, effective, and reliable internal and external resources.
What’s on offer here is a supportive, nurturing and a kind environment to help the client’s nervous system to learn how to reset and regulate itself into a calm and safe state, instead of continuing to be chronically stuck in states of overwhelm, numbness, or collapse.
Providing such stabilisation to the client’s nervous system and helping the client learn to soothe it, allows greater access to the present moment awareness for the client. This access then proves to be invaluable source of safety and grounding for the client to reliably depend on either during session work or outside of it.
Further, when they are connected to such a resource, wounded, vulnerable and shunned aspects of the client can be safely accessed, witnessed, met, and eventually transformed without any risk of re-traumatisation.
Trapped, stuck, and repressed emotions including fear, rage, or sadness that were overwhelming or painful to feel during the periods of traumatisation can start to arise and be safely processed and allowed to move through so that they don’t have be held down by chronic muscular bracing/tension patterns in the body.
When our painful and traumatic imprints from the past begin to be digested, integrated and assimilated, we naturally start to embody a greater sense of wholeness, self-connection, resilience, grounding, presence, ease, safety and flow. We start trusting ourselves and our capacities more; we are more inclined to lean into life rather than be disengaged; and, we’re willing to show up just as we are , without needing to sanitize unwholesome aspects within us.
In other words, we back ourselves enough to start to live, love, risk more than ever, and even get bruised, while trusting in our innate capacity to heal, transform and grow in resilience, while cycling through this process, over and over and over.
Indeed, this is the promise I offer to any one willing enough to fully engage in this process.
Embodying Resilience 