Sasha Bates

Sasha Bates (MA, MBACP) is an Integrative Psychotherapist, author and tutor. She has a particular interest in trauma and how it manifests interchangeably through our thoughts, behaviours, emotions, as well as somatically. As a qualified Hatha Yoga and Trauma Sensitive Yoga teacher she holds this intersection between the mind and the body as fundamental.

She currently works in private practice, and has previously worked in the NHS, in charities and in the higher education sector. Her ongoing training is in Psychedelic Augmented Psychotherapy with Berlin’s MIND Foundation, and in Group Facilitation with the Gestalt Centre in London. Sasha has a particular interest in grief and loss in all its manifestations. She trains Therapists has written two books on this subject, and is currently running grief circles for members of the public in London and Brighton. Her third book explores the parallels between yoga and psychotherapy and she runs workshops on yoga as therapy. All of Sasha’s theoretical knowledge on these subjects is underpinned by her 35-year yoga practice and by her own encounter with sudden traumatic bereavement. She brings both the cognitive and the lived experience to her work with psychedelic group integration.

Sasha believes that expanded states of consciousness can powerfully affect the ability to work with deep and long-lasting manifestations of grief – our own, and those we carry for our ancestors. Such states can destabilise and unsettle. Yet integration helps us explore and be with these experiences – the enlightening and enlivening ones, as well as the more challenging and upsetting ones. Whatever emerges is valuable, and, if held compassionately and with curiosity, can lead to profound self-knowledge and transformation internally and externally.