Meet Celia

Celia Bray is psychologist and founder of Somatic Psychology Australia. Celia is experienced in working with embodied psychological therapy practices. She has over 20 years professional experience working in private practice, organisational wellbeing consulting, and community development in Australia and internationally, she uses somatic therapy and experiential processes as the base of her work. Experiencing the reality of ‘life’ as our bodies feel it gives us wisdom that ideas alone cannot provide. This philosophy took her to live and work in different cultures to experience how other people live in community and to learn what supports us to thrive.

She offers a range of somatic psychotherapy and systems therapy processes to work alongside you, assisting you as you develop your confidence, the freedom to be fully yourself, and to feel good about yourself and your life. As a movement therapist and a Family Constellation facilitator, she offers you cutting edge therapies that are bringing people back to their power, freedom and joy in life.

Welcome to becoming friends with your body, and what you feel, in ways that strengthen you. Our bodies don’t know how to lie and remember experiences vividly. That is why we have an emotional experience the moment we see someone we haven’t seen in years - our body remembers how we felt and takes us back there instantly. We can get trapped by this, and often just talking about a difficult situation is not enough for the body to let go of the emotion.

Not only that, we’re born with a pre-existing sense of how safe we are in the world and how we are going to respond to what life throws at us.

We come into the world with an emotional radar and a set of responses to what we experience based on the lives of our ancestors and what our mothers experienced as we were developing in the womb. This stacks the deck for how safe we feel in the world, and means we bring the strengths from our family system, but also potentially carry the unresolved traumas. You can resolve and heal many of the difficulties playing out in your life that you did not create personally, but may feel trap you.

Polyvagal theory and the research of Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine, Pat Ogden and many other great therapists / researchers tells us that our body is essential in healing emotional pain. The most effective ways to treat trauma and help people build resilience is through somatic (body based) psychotherapy processes, such as mindfulness and movement.