Adela Gorodzinsky.
Adela, you’re a bioenergetic therapist. Can you give us a little bit of information about yourself as a practitioner?
I am indeed a certified bioenergetic therapist. I have also become a local trainer and I have a private practice. I have been practising bioenergetics for over 22 years and I find it quite satisfying, engaging, intriguing, and I'm quite passionate about.
Why is it so important to your life and how do you think it can help others?
I came into bioenergetics because I was a Trager practitioner which is also a kind of body work. I’ve always been interested and engaged in the body since I was a little girl: my mom introduced me to exercise classes and I used to love being outdoors and do things with my body.
And bioenergetics gave me the understanding of why I was doing the things that I was doing. Because it puts together our behaviour, our body language, our energy with the emotional, mental and spiritual content of our beings. It's like having a roadmap and understanding why we're travelling in the way that we're traveling.
Who do you think would benefit from this kind of therapy?
I'd say people who want to feel better if they're suffering from depression, anxiety, or if they're feeling anger but they don't know how to express it properly and it’s destroying their relationships.
Bioenergetics can help people who want to mend and enhance their relationships and people who are interested in having a better life for themselves and feeling pleasure and joy in a much fuller way.
What’s the significance and the function of the body and bioenergetic therapy?
Our bodies hold our histories and they’re a product of past generations. We inherit genetic material from our parents and our grandparents. But we also shape our bodies according to our own histories.
And we have a body language. We have a posture and a poise that expresses either our abilities or our limitations. We can express fear with our bodies, sadness, anger, joy, excitement. And so as a therapist, we are trained to be able to help people read their own bodies and, through doing certain movements and exercises, enhance the breathing, express the any kind of impulses that we want to have that have been stalled by some reason, allowing those blocks to be unblocked.
You’re attending the Massachusetts Society for Bioenergetic Analysis’ conference to give a keynote speech. Tell us about that.
This society is a very active society, and the conference they organize is held in Boston for people who live in North America, New Zealand or Australia. It has also had people coming from Israel and Colombia.
I love attending because it's a small conference, so we get a chance to interact with each other and to see the progress of the work.
This year’s conference runs from April 21 to the 24th and I was approached by Laurie Ure, one of the organizers, to be one of the two keynote speakers. I’m going to be talking about the language to be used for all the different sexual orientations and gender identities. People who have different gender identities or sexual orientations have always existed, but we as a North American society have not really acknowledged them. And now there is a whole language that we can use to honour and recognize people the way they’d like to be.
I feel very honoured to be invited to give this talk. And especially now, as the pandemic subsides a little in North America, it's going to be quite amazing to get together in person.
Can you tell us about the award you received from the Jewish Community Centre in London, Ont.?
I still feel a bit humble about having received the award. It’s called the David Rubin award. David Rubin was a philanthropist and his legacy lives on in the Jewish community.
When the pandemic began, the Jewish Community Centre approached me to see if I could lead relaxation and movement classes, because they I had previously given a workshop on that. So I immediately said yes, and I started teaching on Zoom. At that time, it was really weird teaching into a computer, and it took about three or four classes to get more proficient. But eventually, it became a wonderful group, and I continued to do it even up until this day.
The centre gave awards to people who were frontline workers during the pandemic, and because I continued my therapy practice as well – safely of course – I was recognized.
What would you say to someone who's thinking about bioenergetic therapy but has yet to take the plunge?
I would say set up a 10 to 15 minute free consultation and talk to the therapist. See if you get a feel for them. Maybe set up an appointment come to one session. The therapist will guide you into some movement, and you’ll have the chance to acknowledge your body and see how the body is so connected to the mind. And the body doesn't lie!