Juliana Brown & Richard Mowbray

Primal Integration & Bodywork

Primal Integration involves an exploration of our deeper levels of experience with a view to being more alive and living more authentically. The ‘growth forces’ fostered thereby can also help splits in our being to heal and blocks to our ‘doing’ to resolve.

Traumatic and other experiences in early life may interrupt the wholeness of our development. Such experiences may have occurred during childhood, birth or before. Integrating these experiences into consciousness – acknowledging them as memories – reduces the confusion between what was then and what is now and releases more of our energy and qualities for life in the present. Primal Integration is concerned with both the recovery of the self one has apparently ‘lost’ and the discovery of the self one has yet to become.

In our groups and individual sessions we endeavour to create an environment conducive to this process of connection, expression and integration and one which allows both the freedom to ‘stretch one’s wings’ and the security to explore one’s most vulnerable and fearful states of being.

We also facilitate the process in a variety of ways including ‘Primal Bodywork’, and work with feelings, dreams, fantasies, thoughts, and words. Self-direction and self-responsibility are particularly emphasized.

The work we currently offer is a synthesis that we have evolved over the last thirty three years of practise since our training with Bill Swartley, the original developer of Primal Integration. Other major influences include work and further training with Frank Lake, a pioneering explorer of pre- and peri-natal experiences and the configurational psychology of Francis Mott. Richard has also trained in bodywork with Jack Painter (Postural Integration) and Curtis Turchin (Pulsing and Postural Integration).

Our comprehensive programme of Primal Integration – monthly weekend groups, weekly ongoing groups, periodic residential group intensives and regular individual sessions – has been running at the Open Centre and elsewhere since 1979.

We are co-authors of a chapter on Primal Integration which appeared in "Innovative Therapy – A Handbook" (Jones (ed.), OUP, 1994) and of 'Visionary Deep Personal Growth' for the book "What's the Good of Counselling & Psychotherapy?" (Feltham (ed.), Sage, 2002). Richard is also author of "The Case Against Psychotherapy Registration – A Conservation Issue for the Human Potential Movement" (Trans Marginal Press, 1995), plus various other publications.in that area including a chapter on the same subject for "Controversies in Psychotherapy and Counselling" (Feltham (ed.), Sage, 1999).