- Rumi
Mr Ajay Hawkes
Psychotherapist, Somatic Psychotherapist
Uplift Counselling
Fremantle, Perth WA 6160
In Person + Telehealth
Philosophy & Vision
Ajay works with embodied mindfulness, helping you to safely resolve past experiences. Using simple yet powerful tools you can change your limiting beliefs and open up to new possibilities. Past experiences and traumas are held in our bodies, emotions, and our thoughts and beliefs. In counselling, we can locate your body's intelligence and, using mindfulness, we can unlock your old beliefs and patterns. This leads to a sense of freedom and expansion, to new possibilities in life.
Background
With over twenty years experience and training in mindfulness and mindfulness based therapies, I have spent my life exploring meditation and personal growth work. I have studied with teachers for whom I have the greatest respect and gratitude for their influence.
I am a Certified Hakomi Therapist, following of a four year training in the mindfulness based somatic psychotherapy of Hakomi. I have also been a Senior Counsellor at a drug and alcohol service. I bring the richness of this background to my counselling practice, offering powerful tools for change.
Services
Emotions and events can seem overwhelming or we can feel stuck and unable to see a way forward. In a counselling session, I will show you some simple and powerful tools that you can use in daily life to help with challenging situations and emotions. We will also look at your core beliefs, for instance 'I'm not good enough' or 'I'll never get what I need or want in life' and learn to change them to more supportive beliefs. Using simple mindfulness techniques, we can gain a lot of clarity and the ability to harness our emotional responses in a useful way rather than feeling swamped by them. This allows us to move through life with more ease and joy.
Quality Provision
Regular Supervision & Professional Development.
Accreditation as above.
Re Covid 19 I am offering face to face consultations, with various best practice measures in place to ensure safety. I am also offering video appointments to those who need them due to self-isolation requirements.
Areas of Special Interest
Accreditations
- Master of Social Work - University of Western Australia
- Certified Hakomi Therapist - Hakomi Pacifica
- Accredited Mental Health Social Worker - AASW / Medicare
Modalities
ACT - Hakomi - Meditation - Mindfulness - Person Centred - Psychodynamic - Solution Oriented - Somatic Experiencing® - Somatic Psychotherapy - Transpersonal
Therapy Approach
Tailoring a session to your needs, I use a range of proven techniques to support you in your life. Research shows that we hold trauma and negative past experiences as limiting beliefs and in our bodies (somatically) as tension. Mindfulness and somatic therapy have been shown to be helpful in resolving these experiences.
When we get to know our limiting beliefs in a felt way, as well as intellectually, it goes much deeper. We can see how those beliefs have shaped us. We can find out what past experiences created the belief. Perhaps a lack of safety, of love, or our needs weren't met. Together we can create a felt experience to give you what was missing and to change the belief. To feel ok again. Lasting change begins here.
Professional Associations
- Australian Association of Social Workers
Practice Locations
12 / 17 High St
Fremantle WA 6160
- High St, Fremantle.
- There is a car park by the round house (west end of High St) or surrounding side streets.
- Fremantle train station is a short walk
- There are also buses to many parts of the city.
Appointments
Weekdays, 9 - 6:30
Fees & Insurance
Medicare rebates and concessions are available.
Self referral or GP referral .
Some Health funds, eg BUPA offer rebates.
Payment Options
Cash or bank transfer.
Contact Ajay
Please contact me to make an appointment
A conversation with Ajay Hawkes
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After many years of personal development work and a passion for mindfulness practice, I chose to find a way of making these practices central to my work. To work at something I love. I find this very satisfying, purposeful and fulfilling.
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Acceptance & Mindfulness are keys for me.
I began my personal development journey by working on identifying things I didn't like about myself and working at changing them. Essentially fighting with myself, which creates a lot of tension!
Then I had a breakthrough moment when I realised that through accepting something that I was uncomfortable with, I was able to see it more clearly and it began to open up and change. Of course, I was not the first person to have this realisation, and there are various schools of therapy which adhere to Carl Rogers' paradox of change:
"The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, and allow myself to have discomfort with it, then I can change, when I can accept you as you are, then you change."
Another way of putting this is that you have to recognise where you are in order to get somewhere else. Imagine trying to find your way using a map if you didn't know where you were!! I only wish someone had pointed this out to me a little sooner. So having learnt this the hard way I hope to be able to support others to find it out for themselves more quickly.
Mindfulness is a tool which I use as a foundation stone for my therapeutic work. Mindfulness is a very effective way of accepting ourselves. It is a powerful ally in processing uncomfortable emotions. I find that a lot of us can be quite overwhelmed by events in our lives and how they trigger us, often emotionally, and then we may behave in ways that create problems for us. Mindfulness gives us a container that allows us to hold our experiences and emotions. Then we can learn from them and act in a way that we are happier with and that is more consistent with our values, with who we really are. -
Learning to meet the challenges of life in a creative and fulfilling way.
Learning to stay centred in our painful experiences, rather than have those experiences knock us over.
Coming to understand the maps we have of the world (often from childhood) that hold us back and to find ways of fully absorbing new information so that those maps can change. This then supports us to live more fulfilling and happier lives.
Beyond that, using meditation and mindfulness practices to realise our full potential as human beings. -
I work with people in an individual way and tailor my approach to the needs of the person, but these approaches inform much of my work:
Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT), Mindfulness based therapy, Hakomi somatic psychotherapy, Solutions focussed therapy.
To get an understanding of what these therapies are like, questions 2 and 3 give a sense of my approach to therapy. -
I would aim to give people something to take away with them from the first session. I find that 5-6 sessions are a realistic time-frame for most people to develop some good good coping skills and to start to understand the underlying issues. 8-10 sessions would be needed to work more thoroughly on underlying issues and will be enough for some people.
Others may want more in depth work and 15 - 20 sessions or more long term therapy can be beneficial to gain a deeper understanding of oneself and will be very rewarding in terms of practical changes to ones' life. Of course, therapy is a very individual process and the time frame depends on the individual, the resources they have already developed, and the issues they are dealing with. -
I have been on a personal development journey for 21 years and it has had countless benefits for me over this time, some subtle and some really momentous changes. Briefly, I find that therapy has made me more grounded. Another way of saying this would be that I find I have more of an embodied sense of myself and that my interactions with others come more from this place.
- On a practical level this has improved my relationships, (at home and work) and made me at once more aware of my feelings, and less emotionally "reactive".
- Therapy has made me more effective in my actions and my work.
- It has also gave me more of a sense of purpose in my life and made life more fulfilling.
- Through my meditation practice I have also developed a certain amount of inner stillness which helps me to be a little less triggered by things that don't go my way..... -
I enjoy the sense of connection and the relationship that builds with the people I work with.
Sometimes there is an "aha" moment where someone really gets something new which I find a real pleasure to witness. I also enjoy seeing the changes which occur in people's lives as they grow and perhaps become more in touch with themselves. -
Nobody is perfect, and we all make mistakes!
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There are many important political issues.... the most significant I think is the environmental crisis. However momentous the other issues are, the planet has a somewhat uncertain but tight deadline that we have to sort things out by. Hopefully that timeframe won't reach crunch point in my life time, but it might. This motivates me to be part of the change.
Many people, from Al Gore to the Dali Lama have said that we need to shift in consciousness in order to resolve the environmental problems we face. Einstein said that "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it."
I believe that if we all become more self aware then we will very naturally start treating the planet with more respect. I hope to play my own small part in this change through my work as a therapist. -
Too many to mention, films from art like Kubrick , Fellini and Coppola's work to more pop culture films with some depth like the Wachowskis Matrix. ( I had another lifetime as a film student and wannabee filmmaker...)
I also love Van Gogh's paintings.