My practice
My name is Rob Engels. I’m a PACFA-certified somatic psychotherapist, ecotherapist and somatic focusing teacher based in Leura, in the beautiful Blue Mountains. I specialise in trauma-informed awareness practices that dissolve the root causes of suffering in the body to liberate the freedom, authenticity and wholeness that is rightfully yours.
As a somatic therapist, my work runs deep. It goes beyond the surface layer of stories, inviting you into an experiential, embodied understanding of your core patterns so that you can tend and safely heal them. Using powerful somatic tools, I help you retrieve and resolve unconscious programming that traditional talk therapy can struggle to address.
With post-graduate qualifications in holistic psychotherapy, I meet you exactly where you are. All parts of you are welcome and all energies are given safe space for exploration. From depression, anxiety, grief, addiction, trauma, and shame, to feelings of not belonging, not being enough or being unlovable, the medicine you long for can be found right there within you. This is the alchemy of somatic work: a new frontier in therapy, which moves us far beyond deficiency stories and shame-based identities into a living, dynamic understanding of ourselves, our relationships, and our world.
As an eco therapist and deep ecologist, I also support people to slow down and heal in nature and to cultivate a deep, embodied sense of belonging to the earth. This work frame-shifts us out of the illusion of separation into an ecological identity where we remember ourselves as part of nature, embedded in the web of life. At the dawn of the sixth mass extinction, this represents a form of radical activism, rekindling a profound love of - and desire to protect - this one wild and precious earth.
And as a certified meditation teacher and Somatic Focusing facilitator, I help you cultivate relationship to states of deep inner rest, clarity, and creativity. From building a beginner mindfulness practise to fostering relationship with inner transpersonal dimensions of your being, the body is the doorway into the depths of you.
My deepest passion is to equip people with life-long tools to do their own deep healing work. Tools that give them agency to turn towards, tend and heal even the deepest and most challenging issues that are invariably rooted in the body. To this end, I founded the School of Awareness, a non-secular space that combines nature therapy, mindfulness and deep somatic work for healing, insight and growth.