emily carson

I feel excited to be integrating the work I do with the practice of yoga.  A practice that I feel can offer so much to people moving through the post partum time. 
 
As a mother to a three year old and someone that still considers their body to be ‘post partum’ or bearing the imprint of birth I know that, that imprint will never leave my form.  It is forever a part of who I continue to be.  Who I breathe as, move as and relate to the world as.  Motherhood has been and is a paradigm shift for me.  I see the post partum time as a radical time.  A time that is not only about the bond between two people but a much wider bond that ripples out into community.  It is a time that more than ever requires a collective tending to.  I feel moved to serve as a guide and support to you in your work doing this.
 
So, a bit about my background.
 
I am fascinated by the body.  By our somatic experience, by the body in healing, in expression, in its full, robust and pleasure filled health.  And what it is that enables this.
 
I began studying Chinese Medicine in 2006.  It underpins the way I understand the body.  I listen to pulses, look at tongues, observe the skin, the face, listen to tone of voice, and gauge and listen to the spirit as a way to assess what is presenting alongside signs and symptoms.  This work encourages me to receive people as they are in their embodied form.
 
I am also a Craniosacral Therapist.  I work with gentle hands on contact with the body and track sensory experience with others.  I find Cranial work profound in how it works with the body as a composition of collated experiences that we have gathered through the course of our lives.  The understanding that our bodies ‘remember’ on both psychological and somatic plains.  Craniosacral work is the simplicity of listening to stories that the body is moved to express and have heard.  Craniosacral work took me into a realm of working that brought me to understand the language of the nervous system relationally and in a felt sense way.

Yoga and meditation practice greatly inform and support my work.  In 2006 and 2011 I spent stretches of time studying yoga, philosophy and chanting in India.  Yoga introduced me to the benefits of Pranayama ‘the practice of controlling and  to meditation, to working with the voice and to the benefits of a mindful movement practice for both body and consciousness.

Through the pregnancy and birth of my first child in 2016 and a magnificent physiological, energetic and soulful unfolding there was a natural integration with this experience and my body centered and somatic rooted background. It was then that I began to weave my existing work and this particular life experience into somatic centered education (courses and workshops).  The work centers around preparing others for the Fourth Trimester and arriving into early parenthood in an embodied way informed by Chinese Medicine and Somatic rooted experience.  I feel passionately that this is a time that has the scope to enable people to connect back to their instincts.  To come into connection with their deeper knowing. The post partum time is radical because we are being invited to slow down and listen in and dance with life in a different rhythm – the beat of which we have yet to hear and do not know. If we listen in, our body and sensory experience can guide us into dancing a dance that is our own.

I completed my Birth Story Listening training with Pam England and Danit Tsur Almog and offer Birth Story Listening sessions for those wanting to work through anything left unresolved from a birth experience, pregnancy loss and termination.

I am also a post natal doula. I undertook my postnatal sankofa training with Abuela Doulas – with Mars Lord and Lorna Philip. The word sankofa is a word in the Twi language of Ghana which means to return, to retrieve and to take – one translation of this word is ‘“it is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind.”. Abuela Doulas  ‘emphasise the need to be culturally safe and to move beyond mere competence to true, unbiased support. We will dig deep into cultural support and care’. This was one of the reasons that I went to study post partum care with Mars.

I am trauma informed in the way I work and have been receiving regular ongoing supervision with a trauma specialized psychotherapist since 2012.