About Me
I am deeply passionate about helping you reconnect to your own innate facility to heal yourself and your relationships in the world. To support you to create the conditions for a felt sense of ease, purposefulness and embodied sense of belonging that can foster a way of living deeply on the Earth.
Who Am I?
My name is Alex Ioannou. I am a somatic arts psychotherapist, a ritualist and guide supporting people to access a deeper sense of connection with themselves and the world around them. My work focuses on encouraging conversations between body awareness and imaginative/intuitive sensing, helping you develop your capacity for personal and cultural healing.
My approach is rooted in an Earth-honoring animist framework which understands our world in terms of relationality. This acknowledges that our disconnection from the more-than-human world (animals, plants, micro-organisms) forms an essential source of our suffering, which is further mirrored in our disconnection from each other.
My Story
I was born and spent my early formative years in Thessaloniki, Greece. Growing up in a place loaded with archetypal ancestral imagery and history which stands on the crossroads between “East” and “West” informed my questioning as a young person and helped me approach life and my own self in an integrative way. Having had the privilege to travel and live in different places around the world, has further helped me move in a direction that seeks to move beyond pathologizing and othering, and deepen my appreciation for cultural and personal differences. My recent ancestors come from the lands that are today known as Greece, but also from different territories across the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean region such as modern day North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Egypt, Turkey and Italy.
My formal studies and further training reflect the range of my inquiries over the years and have taken me to meet various edges, personal and collective. Biology and River Ecology, Theatre Practice and Anthropology, Eastern-European Ensemble Theatre and Embodied Voice, Dramatherapy, Animism and Ancestral Healing.
All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song.
Pablo Neruda
My experience so far
For 12 years I’ve offered group immersions internationally on grief and Earth-honoring spirituality, embodied and creative psychotherapy, and embodied voice and song both to the general public and in organisations.
Over the past 7 years I have worked individually alongside people in various situations and settings as a registered therapist and guide: dying people and their families, refugees, people with disabilities and mental health difficulties, people in extreme states and spiritual emergencies and neurotypical people from all walks of life seeking a greater sense of wholeness.
I hold as true and have experienced again and again, that with the intentional deep listening to the wisdom of your body, whilst allowing your sensing and intuition to dream and imagine what’s possible, you can create meaning out of difficult life situations, access deep nourishment and find long lasting healing and effect powerful change in your lives.
Inspiration & Acknowledgements
My therapeutic work is primarily informed by a body based and cultural understanding of trauma. My main theoretical grounding and practical underpinning comes from the work of C.G. Jung and James Hillman, the work of Laurence Heller and the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM), the existential psychotherapy of Irvin Yalom, Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems, and the Ritual Theatre Model of Dramatherapy.
In the field of ritual and animism, I have studied in the Orphan Wisdom school with spiritual activist and practitioner Stephen Jenkinson and with Dr. Daniel Foor and Ancestral Medicine. My original background in embodiment, relationality and ritual comes from having trained and worked for years in the lineage of theatre practitioner Jerzy Grotowski. This has also been supported by more than 15 years of Tai Chi and Qigong practice as well as a regular dance/movement meditation practice.
All of these practices inform the way we could work together and I bring in different tools to meet you where you are and help you create the conditions for healing. I look forward to hearing from you.