The number of sessions required is entirely unique and determined by your goals, your life schedule, your capacity, your motivation and the value you feel you’re receiving from participating in this process. In other words, it’s your choice. We do, however, strongly encourage a minimum commitment of between 5 - 10 sessions. Between the 5th and 10th sessions is where we often see the most significant changes beginning to occur. This likely comes down to the relational safety that is established, the increasing familiarity with the practices, the capacity being built, and the beginning of that capacity transferring to real-life contexts (the set of skills and capacities we refer to as Embodied Presence). With this said, it’s common for clients to work with Esther on an ongoing basis. Some clients will book a session every week, every other week, or every month.

As with somatic therapy, there is no fixed number of sessions. Sometimes Nate will work with people on and off, a session here and there, perhaps driven by significant life challenges or decisions that the client is approaching (this is particularly relevant for people looking for philosophical guidance on something like a big work decision such as a promotion or new employment opportunity). We encourage this if it’s what feels most right to you. However, for those looking to benefit the most from philosophical counselling, we do recommend committing to the 8 structured sessions of the SMILE-PH Method; an introductory session, a session on the bodily sense, sense of sense, sense of belonging, sense of the possible, sense of purpose, philosophical sense and finally, a concluding session to bring together all the work you have done and prepare you for what’s next.

Philosophical counselling is special kind of conversation where two (or more) parties engage in a healthy, respectful and deliberately challenging back and forth. The counsellor invites you to explore the biggest and perhaps most powerful ideas in your life; what is reality? How does the world really work? What is knowledge? What do I value? How should I act? What really makes me me? Through this process, a more critical, reflective and coherent picture can emerge that supports your everyday; is this the right job for me? Should I really move countries? How do I actually want to spend my free time? Should I go back and study? How can I best support my kids in navigating the unique difficulties of modern life? This deliberately challenging back and forth process often occurs through something called the Socratic Method. Here the counsellor inquires into different ideas or perspectives that shape your life. It’s a little like the five why’s; you ask why enough times and you eventually arrive at a core. This core could be complete obliterating uncertainty. Or it could be a well articulated, throughly thought through opinion. Either way it helps clarify (uncertainty is not bad. Understanding the limits of your knowledge has long been thought of as a foundation of wisdom). From this basis, these ideas can be further explored and tested against the world. This is one approach we take at ioēs, but it isn’t the only approach. Nate is trained in the SMILE_PH method of philosophical counselling (Miranda). This approach draws from extensive literature and has been tested in diverse settings, from major corporations through to university’s through to people who have suffered significant spinal injuries. This is a semi-structured approach to philosophical counselling that leads you through a distinctive process; from body, to self, to belonging, to what’s possible, to your purpose and ultimately to the philosophy that binds it all; a meaning-making process that enhances the coherence of your thoughts and actions. A process inspiring and empowering you to live with greater authoricity; a healthy, dynamic combination of authenticity, authorship and authority. Nate, like many philosophers, believes that much of today’s societal dynamics result in philosophical foreclosure. This means a lot of people never get the opportunity to really explore this dimension of their life. This foreclosure is problematic because existential health, like physical or psychological health (not that they are distinctly separable), massively impacts the quality of our life in ways that are both obvious and subtle.

Psychotherapy is an evidence-based approach to therapy, often called ’talk therapy’. There are many different kinds of psychotherapy, including cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), interpersonal therapy (IPT), dialectical behaviour therapy, psychodynamic therapy, psychoanalysis and supportive therapy. Psychiatrists and psychologists both rely on these techniques when supporting patients in diverse clinical contexts. The main difference between the various forms of psychotherapy and somatic therapy is that psychotherapy is a top down approach, whereas somatic therapy is a bottom up approach. This means that psychotherapy works predominantly with the mind; verbally expressing and processing to better understand and evolve past, present and future psychological dynamics. Somatic therapy works predominately with the body; creating safe conditions for a person to go towards difficult sensations, emotions, or memories. Through effective, evidence-based techniques, professional guidance and co-regulation, the necessary conditions for the body are created. Through this, suppressed emotions can be released, traumatic events can be processed, and fragmented or abandoned ‘parts’ of the psyche can be integrated. This bottom up approach has a neurophysiological basis in the structure of the vagus nerve. 80% of signals are sensory ones that travel from the inner organs ‘up’ to the brain, supporting parasympathetic activation (the system that is responsible for calming the body), while 20% of the signals travel from the brain ‘down’ to the rest of the body.

We do. That’s the reason we setup ioēs in the first place. We saw the impact the two approaches were having on our lives and the lives of the people we were supporting. However, neither approach individually was capable of engaging with the whole-of-organism, process-relational view we had established and were so inspired to practice. For example, somatic therapy helps people heal emotional wounds, build the capacity to meet life’s difficulties, and exercise greater freedom. Whereas philosophical counselling helps clarify values, clearly articulate a life purpose, and develop strategies for living a truly meaningful existence. Philosophical counselling cannot support the re-organisation of the nervous system. Somatic therapy can. Somatic therapy doesn’t clarify meaning, purpose and values that can be acted up. Philosophical counselling does. Together, we believe these approaches can serve you in navigating life’s beauty and difficulty with patience, kindness, courage, resilience and coherence.

It quite possibly wasn’t. You may have had rather loving and reasonably attuned or capable parents. But there is no way that you haven’t been, like all of us, deeply affected by life. This could have been early in life, a decade ago or last week. We each carry the wounds and conditioning from our past in different ways. This is not a process that fetishises trauma, it’s an invitation to explore the ways you have been shaped, the habits you have developed, the beliefs that hide under the surface. It’s an opportunity to become aware and begin evolving the being that is you on your terms.

For individuals, somatic therapy starts at $240 (inc GST) for 90 minutes. This includes an individualised sequence of therapeutic modalities. We offer packages of 5 or 10 sessions with a discount. Please contact us to discuss.

Philosophical counselling for individuals starts at $170 (inc GST) for 50 minutes. For the SMILE_PH package that includes 8 counselling sessions and structured work activities in between each session, the cost is $1,200 (inc GST).

For organisations, we tailor workshops, training packages and corporate retreats. Please contact us for an individualised quote.

Truthfully, when we began this work we were a little sceptical. We felt that in-person, co-located was likely to far better for relational safety, embodiment and even strategic thinking. But our experience has proven this to be a false assumption. Most of our work, given its entirely global relevance, occurs online. In fact, in certain contexts, especially somatic therapy, clients have told us that engaging from the safety of their bedroom or home is something that makes it easier to soften, slow down, connect with the present moment and then go towards whatever it is they are experiencing.

None of this is to suggest that co-location isn’t incredibly powerful. We run workshops, events, corporate retreats, philosophical pilgrimages (a fancy way of saying we navigate the beauty and difficulty of nature whilst engaging in shared philosophical reflection), movement based group therapy and so much more. We are not negating IRL in any way. We are, however, grateful that working with clients online has proven to be so powerful. This possibility massively extends the reach and impact ioēs can have.

We knew this one would come up. It’s not exactly everyday language. So let’s break it down. Spoiler!!! This will get a little nerdy.

By whole-of-organism we refer to the entire evolutionary being of you. We see you as complex, self-organising, self-making whole, not a bunch of parts that simply connect and execute sequences of operations. One way to think about this a bit more formally is through the lens of autopoiesis. Autopoiesis describes a system that ‘produces itself’. These types of systems are comprised of processes organised in ways that maintain their own existence as a coherent whole. This is very different to an allopoietic system. These are systems that produce something other than themselves. They function by taking an input and turning it into an output. This process is determined by an agent outside of the system. That is one of the very, very significant differences between you and a Large Language Model (so if anyone tries to tell you we’re just like AI, drop this little truth bomb!). An important note here is that the biomedical model—the underlying philosophy that gives rise to much of modern medical science—treats humans more like allopoietic systems than autopoietic systems at times. It is largely a reductive approach to understanding, meaning it attempts to break things down into smaller and smaller constituent parts in order to udnerstand causality. This has been really useful in various ways. And it’s certainly helpful in many important contexts (necessary surgery is a classic example but there are so so many others). But, as many scholars have called out, it may be inherently self-limiting in other ways or other contexts. We believe it is somewhat self-limiting in the context of really understanding the nature and function of organismic adaptation (which are really the processes that somatic therapy works most directly with). This is especially true when you consider that the biomedical model largely treats mind and body as seperate entities, even if it doesn’t explicitly support what is known as substance dualism. As a result, this position we take is also important in the context of mindbody relation. By taking this approach, we can understand mindbody as two seemingly different expressions of the same thing. If this is true, then it may effectively dissolve the ‘hard problem of consciousness’.

Okay, onto process-relational. 

Process-relational refers to process-relational ontology. What this attempts to express is a claim about the nature of the universe. Here’s how Prof. Ikahiv introduces it: “This is a theoretical paradigm and an ontology that takes the basic nature of the world to be that of relational process: that is, it understands the basic constituents of the world to be events of encounter, acts or moments of experience that are woven together to constitute the processes by which all things occur, unfold, and evolve. Understanding ourselves and our relations with the world around us in this way, it is argued, can help us unwind ourselves from out of a set of dualisms that have ensnared modern thought over the last few centuries. In contrast to materialist, idealist, dualist, and other perspectives that have dominated modern western philosophy, a process-relational perspective more explicitly recognises the dynamic, complex, systemic, and evolving nature of reality.”

In our studies over the years, this has become one of the most resonant philosophical frameworks. Not just because of our exploration of different theories relative to one another but because of our direct experience. It feels meaningful at ‘every level of organisation’, from subatomic phenomena through to the unnerving complexity of social organisms like us. 

In some way, process-relational already speaks to whole-of-organism. But we add the clarification as a reminder, a way of keeping us grounded in the first-person experience so many of our (humanity’s) theories attempt to explain. 

We will say plenty more about the philosophical underpinning of our work in the future.

P.S. We are not alone in bringing this process-relational framing to work like this. See Dr. Garcia’s paper here: “This chapter examines mental disorders from an enactive perspective. It explores two key ontological claims—the processual and relational nature of cognition—and their implications for our understanding of mental disorders. Rather than viewing them as isolated brain disorders, mental disorders are presented as developmental sensorimotor trajectories that are shaped by embodied interactions and social contexts. It highlights the dynamic interplay between an individual’s autonomy and their social environment in the emergence of mental disorders.”

No. You definitely don’t need to. Although, you may find it interesting and beneficial. What is far more important is the stance that you take. To describe what we mean here, let’s go back about 2,500 years. Philosophy (from philosophía) basically means ‘love of wisdom’. It combines two words; philía (φιλία) and sophía (σοφία). The Ancient Greek’s were a tad more nuanced in how they described love. Philía is basically a ‘friendship love’. But what is wisdom? That’s more challenging to describe. Many have tried. Many have suggested that any attempt to define wisdom is something of a fool’s pursuit. Here’s how psychologist’s tend to define and characterise it. And here’s how philosophers have thought about it over the years. We think of wisdom as a living process, an attempt to know, deeply care for and live in close relation to what truly matters. In this way, it’s your stance that will enable you to most benefit from philosophical counselling. Are you willing to explore life’s big questions? Do you care deeply about the relationship between your thoughts, speech and actions? Do you believe that your conscious mind has the power to affect your life and the lives of those around you (hint: it does!)? If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, it’s likely you will both enjoy and value from the counselling process.