The Practice of Embodying Emotions

Presenter Information

Raja Selvam, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist, and the developer of Integral Somatic Psychology (ISP), a therapeutic approach based on emerging scientific paradigms of embodied cognition, emotion, and behavior in cognitive psychology and affective neuroscience as well as on multiple Western and Eastern psychological, somatic, energetic, and spiritual approaches. Dr. Selvam is also a senior trainer in Dr. Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing (SE) Professional Trauma Training Program. He has taught for twenty-five years in over twenty countries in North and South Americas, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the Far East. His work is informed by the older body psychotherapy systems of Reichian Therapy and Bioenergetic Analysis, the newer body psychotherapy systems of Bodynamic Analysis and Somatic Experiencing, and the bodywork systems of Postural Integration and Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy. His work is also inspired by Jungian and archetypal psychologies, the Kleinian and intersubjective schools of psychoanalysis, affective neuroscience, quantum physics, yoga, Polarity Therapy, and Advaita Vedanta (a spiritual psychology from India).

Dr. Selvam’s work also draws upon his clinical psychology PhD dissertation work on Advaita Vedanta and Jungian psychology. He has published an article based on his dissertation titled “Jung and Consciousness” in the international analytical psychology journal Spring in 2013. He did outreach work in India in 2005–2006 with survivors of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and an outcome study from this project titled “Somatic Therapy Treatment Effects with Tsunami Survivors” was published in the journal Traumatology in 2008. Dr. Selvam’s current work is also inspired by the work he did in Sri Lanka in 2011–2013 with survivors of war, violence, loss, and displacement, and the mental health professionals serving them, after that country’s thirty-year civil war ended in 2009.