“It’s like a love affair: when we meet someone and fall in love with them, we want to know everything there is to know about them… Imagine if we could be like that with ourselves – just listening to our own bodies and allowing ourselves to acknowledge all the things we feel. It would be connection of a different level.”
These are the words of Sarita Ford, a spirited hypnotherapist and counselor from Byron Bay, Australia, who excitedly describes the world each of us could inhabit if we took a chance on ourselves. Sarita is one of Calliope’s wellness educators, and has over 20 years of experience as a licensed hypnotherapist. During that time, she’s been on a journey exploring therapy, mindfulness, and body work – and became captivated by the field of hypnotherapy when she moved to India decades ago. It helped transform her life, as she emerged from an unhappy place in the corporate world, to a life studying the relationship between our minds and bodies, and being able to help others live more peacefully along the way.
Hypnotherapy
If you’ve been curious about hypnotherapy as a healing modality, Sarita beautifully articulates how it helps us heal and grow. “That’s the passion,” she says about the science that goes into the way our brains are (re)wired to communicate. “As a tool, hypnosis is working with our brains the way they naturally repetitively learn. When it’s a one-on-one situation, it’s just like a guided meditation, actually, because your brain doesn’t know the difference between what it’s visualizing internally and what the reality is outside. So we can harness that mechanism to change our internal reality, which then has a flow and effect to changing our external reality. That’s where the healing comes from and that’s how we bring the world to be a better place.”
In Calliope courses, Sarita takes participants through this process of guided visualization. Class participants are led through exercises that create space to pay attention to what their bodies feel in real time. She asks questions that take you back to your root sensations: What can you hear right now? What can you feel? What sensations are moving through you body? Do you feel safe right now?
The intimate group settings that Calliope fosters blend self-reflection with interpersonal discussion. Sarita encourages participants to focus on the sensations and thoughts that appear throughout the class, and then weaves in neurological research to integrate what is shared by all.
2-Part Healing Philosophy
Sarita’s healing philosophy can be distilled into two parts: the first, that we are great learners. From childhood, we learn what we need to do to survive in society, and that can oftentimes include putting emotions on the back burner to make ourselves compatible with the world around us. As we age, though, we need to develop skills to rewire our brains to recognize emotion not as something to be pushed down, but as something authentic to embrace. Emotions, when repressed, can lead to stress, anxiety, depression and physical illness. By simply visualizing ourselves walking through a field of grass or dipping our toes into a lake, we are putting importance back into acknowledging our most basic senses, and operating from a place of mindfulness.
That brings us to the second part of Sarita’s healing philosophy: the genuine belief that people want to learn. In describing her experiences leading private sessions and group classes, what Sarita came back to time and time again was how people’s devotion to self-expression and self-connection persisted. “If we experience a closeness with ourselves and even with each other, we can’t ever un-know that experience, and we will be drawn to them more in the future as they stay and grow within us. That’s why I think a class like Calliope works for people. They begin to see what’s possible in the company of others who are going through something similar. They want to say yes to themselves, and doing it in an environment where they can practice in front of others shows them it’s achievable.” She continued, explaining how authentic action that she witnessed in herself and others was always tied to the aspiration to connect with each other.
“The most rewarding thing I get from teaching a class like Calliope is in the sharing, because I know that I’m still learning alongside the others. And that’s where the magic comes from: every single person has something to offer. It’s easy for anyone to feel discouraged from time to time, and I would want people to know that joining a community for the journey is what keeps me open. I know it is for others, too.”
Sarita Ford
Sarita Ford is a qualified counselor, psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, and meditation teacher. For the last 20 years, she has been helping individuals and groups overcome emotional obstacles standing in the way of healing.
Taking a solution focused approach, Sarita guides her clients with a combination of talk therapy, creative visualization, emotional release, hypnosis, and relaxation techniques. Sarita’s approach helps bring awareness to the present and create a new future for the body and mind.
For more information about Sarita’s practice, or to book a one-on-one session through her clinic, you can visit https://www.thebiomeclinic.com/.
