LORELLA RICCI
A long-term Somatic Meditator and Somatic Psychotherapist (Certified Hakomi Therapist) I run immersions to help highly sensitive feelers change their relationship to the feeling body and the underworld. These immersions combine guided practices with the nuanced maps of Buddhism (taught somatically), to help people navigate with much more subtlety. In doing so, people gain direct insight into the nature of existence, fundamentally changing their relationship with feelings, their relationships to themselves, others and their world.
Having spent the majority of my adult life immersed in meditation retreats, somatic psychotherapy and pretty much anything that would facilitate healing, I hit despair in my early forties to discover that it didn’t matter what I did, or how much I did it, some part of me, at the core, felt the same … broken, unworthy and beyond repair. The intensity of my inner world seemed to confirm that belief.
I lost faith that healing was possible. I lost faith in meditation, Buddhism, psychotherapy and everything that had given my life meaning. I let go of doing what I thought I should do, and started to follow the nearly inaudible impulses of my own being.
I explored psychedelic medicines, which brought to life dimensions of spiritual teachings that, previous to this, I’d understood only in theory.
I took a deep dive into sexuality, unravelling the collective shame and taboo invisibly suffocating my whole, embodied experience. I did countless workshops, retreats, studied Sexological Bodywork and Somatic Sex Education and ended up teaching Intimacy and relational practices as a way of accessing unconscious beliefs that would take years to see in therapy and meditation. Undoubtedly a fast track.
And at the same time, I stumbled across Somatic Tibetan Tantric Meditation, a completely different approach to the traditional meditation of the Buddhist forest traditions I’d been immersed in for 18 years. However, these practices and teachings pointed to what I’d been yearning to find: a way of welcoming all that is denied and hidden.
It trained me to relax, to open, to notice unconscious tension and trained my awareness to meet these sensations and vibrations in a fundamentally different way. This revealed how all my previous trainings had taught me to literally pierce awareness into my feelings, which for me as a hyper feeler, increased the volume and made them more intense.
As I learned to meet my feeling body with kindness, tenderness and without demanding clarity, it could start to breathe. In the quiet depths of darkness, where my whole being was steeped in peace, these sensations began to reveal themselves in a way that I was previously unable to see. It was a paradoxical journey: an unravelling on so many levels.
Overtime I became uncomfortable with my title of Psychotherapist: I no longer related to experience as a result of trauma or even conditioning in our childhood. Yes, it’s on the thread, but this human experience is so much deeper. All I could see was all the feelings that people didn’t want to feel. How our mind, so fearful of sensation, is trying to control and get rid of them.
This is pervasive. It is found in all our spiritual and therapeutic traditions. A reflection of how we are tilted in the masculine aspect of our consciousness. We’re all in it. Pathologising and demonising the feelings that are the sacred vibrations of existence.
My work is to support you deeper into you. When you meet your experience directly, without mediation, beneath the mind, insight illuminates itself, imbued with compassion and love.