The Intensive: A Powerful Tool for Change

Change is sometimes difficult - no matter how much we desire it, it remains out of our grasp. Relationships, our jobs, old moods, habits and ways of dealing with things become seemingly unchangeable.

The Intensive at Anamaya is a powerful tool to assist. With its three components of psychotherapy, neuromeditation and bodywork you will find barriers to change suddenly less daunting.

Make the change you want, to your life, to yourself!

In The Intensive, each week over a six week period you will have a 50 minute session of psychotherapy, followed immediately by a hour of guided neuromeditation. Then later in the same week, you will have 90 minutes of intense bodywork. 

These three treatments and their order have been carefully chosen to ensure each enhances the other to ensure you achieve the maximum possible benefit. from the treatments.

Each session is private and personal, so that your Intensive is aimed squarely at you personally: you have six weeks of personalised, focused work. 

The Intensive: Psychotherapy

Your private psychotherapy sessions will be designed to explore why change seems difficult, and to discover which aspects of your personality are calling for attention and understanding. Unconscious beliefs about yourself and old patterns from childhood can play an invisible role in our thoughts and behaviour. You and your therapist will explore where you are in your life, why you're there and what is keeping you there.

These sessions are designed to respond to you as an individual with a unique way of feeling and thinking.

They are deeply supportive and non-judgmental. 

Each weekly Psychotherapy session with one of Anamaya's practitioners Talitha Stevenson is 50 minutes in duration.

The Intensive: Neuromeditation

Neuromeditation is a term for meditation that focuses on the science behind the ancient practice. There is nothing mystical about neuromeditation - it is simply extended intense concentration: it could be called physiotherapy for the brain. In these periods of intense concentration, we effectively ‘shut out the noise’ of everyday life, those things that bother, worry and anger us. It is a serene place, and visiting it is profoundly relaxing.

However, we aim to show you further benefits, based on scientific research by neuroscientists and clinical psychologists at a number of universities (our work is based principally on the work of Prof Jon Kabat Zinn and Dr Dan Seigal’s unit at UCLA): extended concentration will produce measurable changes in brain anatomy, with consequent changes in attitude, behaviour, and mood. It has been demonstrated to be hugely beneficial in cases of stress, anxiety and depression. 

The aim is to introduce you to your own serenity, that place of deep awareness and peace that is reached in meditation, and to provide tools for your ongoing development of your access to that serenity.

And for each moment you visit your serenity, your brain becomes used to it - it becomes trained to repeat the process it. Repeated training - physiotherapy for the brain - will lead to physiological and structural changes in the brain: your neurology will change.

And this will empower you.

Each weekly Meditation session with Graham Doke is an hour in duration.

The Intensive: Bodywork

Our bodies are a biography of our lives. We carry with us in our bodies in a physical, tangible sense, our stress, our anger, our anxiety, our sadness - the imprints of all we have done and felt.

These memories and feelings are carried in knots in muscles, some we recognise (painful lower back) and some we do not (often tightness in the hips).

But unresolved knots in muscles will have a knock-on effect, pulling on tendons, and changing posture: our backs become rigid or we become slumped. Knots also restrict bloodflow, causing shortness of breath or pain - particularly headaches. 

It is a two-way street - in the same way as the knots reflect the tension, so too do the knots alert the mind continuously of their presence, and the reason for their existence, the memory or feeling - the knots are not only imprints, they are reminders. 

For this reason, it is important that we remove the physical symptoms as well. 

In order to move on, to leave these parts of our lives behind us, then, it is important that we remove the imprints of past behaviours.

Bodywork sessions are with Graham and are 90 minutes in duration.

Your Practitioners

Graham Doke is a Director of Anamaya; as the developer of Deep Release Bodywork his main focus is on the mind/body interaction (read more about Graham). Talitha Stevenson is one of our psychotherapy practitioners at Anamaya, specialising in the movement of habituated behaviours and mood patterns (read more about Talitha). 

The Practicalities

Because of the highly personalised and highly focused nature of the Intensive, there are only limited places available at any time.

Psychotherapy sessions will be followed immediately by Neuromeditation - the two sessions are ‘stacked’ - so that you will leave your session with Talitha and spend an hour in meditation with Graham. 

Bodywork sessions will be booked individually throughout the week. It would be best to take the same time and day every week during the Intensive, to establish a proper rhythm.

All sessions will take place at Anamaya. Do add a little time to each of your sessions to sit and relax at Anamaya, have a cup of tea, and allow calmness to wash over you!

The Costs

The Intensive incorporates 20 hours of therapy, for a total cost of £1,750.

This is payable by way of a 10% non-refundable deposit on booking your place, and two payments of £787, the first on commencement, the second on completion. It is not possible to divide the Intensive, taking up only portions of the treatment.

The Intensive has been designed to use a powerful combination of therapies all operating together, with combined force. Psychotherapy will explore and understand, Neuromeditation will work on brain structure and serenity, Bodywork will clear your physical self of old experiences and feelings. A unique and powerful set of therapies in one.