Acupuncture, Craniosacral Therapy and Kampo – Supporting Your Health

Please call or email me to book an appointment in Harrogate or York. You may also use the online booking system to make an appointment in Miller’s Yard, York, on a Thursday, or the Serenity Centre, Harrogate, on a Friday.

What I offer you

I offer you nearly 30 years of experience of working with Traditional Acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine, in which I completed an apprenticeship training in Kampo medicine. This is a form of Chinese herbal medicine based on classical texts and formula and it is widely used and highly regarded in Japan. More recently, in 2011, I trained in biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy – completing my two year training in 2013. These three therapies combine beautifully with each other and can work in synergy to support the natural healing processes of the body, helping you connect to your own inner health and resources, boost health, and recover from illness and dis-ease. I try and help you get back on track, to help you feel stronger, more connected with your true self, and more connected with life and your own path. This is why I call my business Re-Connect to Health. It is not me that does the work. It is you, and the miracle that is your body, which has a wisdom of its own, far greater than that of any physician. The work I do is to help you tap into this inner wisdom and healing energies can be allowed to permeate your being, at a core level, to augment Health. I am not a psychologist but I do have a background in psychology, I have worked as a psychotherapist on the NHS, and my PhD was on depression. Mental emotional health is so fundamental to our well being and sense of connection, so I have explored it from Western and Eastern perspectives, to try and understand better how to help my clients.

• More than 30 years of clinical experience as a therapist
• Qualified research scientist with a PhD in Health Sciences
• Registered with relevant professional bodies and clinical associations: the Association of Traditional Chinese Medicine; the Craniosacral Therapy Association; the Toyohari Association; the Kampo Association

When you are well resourced and your nervous system is calm, you will find that vitality, energy and a sense of feeling connected with yourself and others can replace worry, pain and stress – whatever the constraints imposed by external conditions or illness. True Health is always available to us no matter how ill we are physically or mentally, or what obstacles we face. I will try and help you re-connect with it.

Can these therapies help me?

The therapies I offer can, potentially, help anyone. This is because promoting health and well being is fundamentally different from treating ‘illness’ per se. Health promotion requires slightly different research methods to the sort of narrowly focused clinical trials, that are usually used to suggest a pharmaceutical intervention is effective – to treat a specific type of illness or disease, over a short restricted time period, for a specific target population. But this is not the place for debates about how the therapies I offer should be researched. When you are ill, you want to be well, and to be able to trust the person who you seek help from.  There is very strong evidence the therapies I offer help a person deal with stress, improve energy, feel more vital, support heart rate variability to achieve better heart coherence, and regulate the nervous system and endocrine system – the HPA axis. All of this is extremely beneficial to health.

How does the approach you use work? How long will it take before I see benefits?

My approach and choice of therapeutic modality depends on what my client would like to receive. Sometimes we choose just one therapy, acupuncture, craniosacral therapy or herbs – but more often than not we use them together. 

When I begin working with a client (my approach for babies and children is different), I like to look for their ‘constitutional factor’. I was trained in Five Element acupuncture at the College of Traditional Acupuncture in Leamington Spa, where JR Worsley, one of the great pioneers of acupuncture, brought knowledge back to the West, before China opened up, and he developed a system that I believe has great relevance to one’s health and well-being. Identifying a person’s constitutional factor and supporting it can be truly transformational. It can help a person to connect with the very best part of themselves, who they would like to be, who they were meant to be and it  feels very good to be connected with this aspect of our selves.

Each person brings a unique energetic resonance into the world, when they come into it, and they will each have a particular element which is both their greatest virtue and strength, and, when out of balance, their greatest weakness. Please watch my film the Gifts of the Five Elements to understand more about the Five Elements. The best way to think of the elements is to think of the seasons of the year -except there is an extra season of course, which is Late Summer, and corresponds to the Earth element. Each year we cycle through the elements, repeating the cycles of life, learning more hopefully, and deepening our connection with the world and with ourselves.

I am also able to draw on TCM style acupuncture – I trained in Beijing – and on Japanese methods, which are particularly gentle and subtly powerful. I was one of the first in Europe to train in Toyohari, with Stephen Birch and Junko Ida. TCM, and other styles I have learned, can be of great value for working with pain conditions and with stroke prevention and recovery. In China the reason people use acupuncture is first and foremost to help after a stroke, yet it is barely used for this purpose in the West. I love the gentle approaches of Japanese acupuncture, and with these methods, I get the most sense of what is going on in the meridians and channels, as they are very direct and hands on – acupuncture was a profession for the blind in Japan, who have so much to teach us about sensing with our hands. These approaches have great affinity with craniosacral therapy, which is perhaps why I was drawn to study this therapy.

Craniosacral therapy is about listening – but listening with all our senses, especially with our hands. The work is relational and it is done in states of stillness and calm. Mindfulness techniques and practices are used to help a person to feel calm, resourced and peaceful. The energy in the room feels different in a session when one has reached a ‘healing space’ – and the body begins to re-organise itself and make tiny shifts, of its own accord – for there is no manipulation involved in this treatment. One has a palpable sense of harmony, balance, radiance, emanating from a clients body, when there is a good connection made with them, and the body’s ‘Potency’ feels to increase. Potency helps the body to heal, to organise itself and it provides protection. The Chinese called Potency Qi, and also Essence, giving the different types and functions of Qi different names.

Kampo, which I use mainly as an adjunct to the body approaches, can be a therapy of choice, for me as a practitioner, when there are skin conditions, chronic debilitating illness, and hormonal imbalances. Illnesses that are at the ‘Blood-level’ in the body can, in my experience, respond very well to Chinese herbs/Kampo medicines.

In terms of how long does it take to recover – it is very important to allow the treatments time to work and heal, but I would hope and expect some benefits to be apparent within the first few sessions. This is why I offer five sessions at a reduced rate. Remember it is your body that is doing the healing work. I am just helping remove blocks and assisting the natural healing processes. So a problem that has been there for many years is not likely to change quickly – but it can. It can be hard to predict how someone will respond, and it is not unusual to be positively surprised. After five sessions you will have a sense of whether it is worthwhile to continue.

Do these therapies work with other treatments?

Yes! Indeed they do. These therapies combine well with other complementary therapies – osteopathy, chiropractic, homeopathy, nutritional approaches, massage and other energy healing approaches. They also combine well with conventional medicine. I would always encourage a person to seek medical advice from a conventional medical doctor – a GP or disease specialist.

Whether you are having conventional or complementary healthcare for a physical or psychological issue, the healing therapies I offer can potentially be of great assistance to promote health.

Please call me on 07779799110 or email me at info@re-connecttohealth.co.uk to reconnect to the health within!