Anna D'Alessandro

My approach

..has grown out of an intersection of personal experience, movement research, academic inquiry and contemplative practice.

Some of the questions that shape my work began early. Growing up with a parent on the autism spectrum gave me an intimate experience of the complexity of communication: what can be felt but not expressed, what can be understood intellectually but not necessarily experienced relationally, and how much of human connection takes place beyond words.
 

Later, living alongside a family member navigating complex trauma, substance abuse and addiction brought these questions into a very different territory. Engagement with the Twelve Steps introduced me to the possibility that lasting change may involve more than changing behaviour or managing symptoms. Meaning, relationship, surrender, identity and connection to a higher power seemed to be part of the process.

My own experience of loss deepened this enquiry. The loss of our child and the devastating journey through IVF confronted me with the limits of control in a profoundly embodied way. The body became simultaneously the site of hope, medical intervention, grief and loss. Finding a way through that experience,  and eventually rekindling love, desire and a sense of aliveness,  profoundly changed my understanding of what embodied transformation can involve.
 

Alongside these experiences, my professional and creative life developed through movement. With a foundation in classical dance and choreography, I became increasingly interested in movement not simply as physical expression, but as a way of perceiving and knowing.

The work of Pina Bausch profoundly influenced my understanding of the body as a site of memory, relationship and human experience. Janet Adler's development of Authentic Movement opened another dimension: movement as an enquiry into consciousness, perception and the relationship between mover and witness. Through Butoh and somatic practice, I became increasingly interested in states of attention, subtle sensation, impulse and transformation that often precede conscious interpretation.

My engagement with the emerging field of somatic psychology brought another set of questions. The work of Peter Levine and Gabor Maté, among others, challenged purely cognitive accounts of trauma, stress and addiction and strengthened my interest in the relationship between lived bodily experience, adaptation and psychological patterns.
 

At the same time, my academic background in linguistics and translation studies kept bringing me back to a different question: what happens to experience when it becomes language?

Here, my interests intersect with phenomenological and experiential approaches such as Eugène Gendlin's work on the felt sense: the recognition that bodily knowing can be more nuanced than what we are initially able to articulate.

I am also interested in contemporary questions about consciousness and perception. Donald Hoffman's work on the relationship between perception and objective reality, and research in cognitive science and neuroscience such as that of Andrew R. Gallimore, have contributed to my broader curiosity about how consciousness constructs, filters and experiences reality.

These thinkers do not form a single theoretical school, and I do not treat them as one. Rather, they represent different points of enquiry around questions that have become central to my own practice: How does the body know? How does experience become conscious? What happens before we have words? How does perception shape reality? And what allows profound change to become possible?

My engagement with Buddhist, Tantric and Sufi traditions took these questions further. I came to question whether healing can ever be fully understood without a spiritual dimension — not spirituality as doctrine or belief, but as an enquiry into consciousness, meaning, connection, surrender and our relationship to something larger than the individual self.
 

These strands gradually converged into the approach I practise today.

My work sits at the meeting point of somatic movement, psychological inquiry, language and contemplative practice.

I see the body neither as a collection of symptoms to decode nor as something separate from the mind. It is one of the ways we perceive, remember, relate and make sense of ourselves.

This is why my therapeutic approach brings somatic exploration and verbal integration together. The body gives us access to aspects of experience that may not yet be fully conscious or verbal; language allows us to reflect, contextualise and integrate what emerges.

The movement is in both directions: from experience towards language, and from understanding back into experience.
 

Ultimately, I am interested in more than symptom reduction. I am interested in developing our capacity to feel, perceive, understand, discern and choose.

To become more at home in the body. More precise about what we experience. More discerning about what is genuinely ours. More able to remain present through difficulty — and more available to love, pleasure, connection, creativity and the possibilities of being alive.

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