Twenty Years.
Five Continents.
One Consistent Question.
CELIA BRAY
Based - Currently in the UK.
Working globally online.
Registration - Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA)
Modalities - Somatic therapy
Family Constellations
Gestalt Therapy in Motion Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Open Floor Movement
What has kept me interested in this work for two decades is not the theory — it’s the moment when a person discovers that their body has been faithful to them all along. That the anxiety, the heaviness, the holding — none of it is pathology. It’s communication.
I trained as a psychologist in Australia, where I founded Somatic Psychology Australia and developed community programmes that have since won leadership awards. That work took me to Kenya, where I built programmes that crossed communities most people assumed couldn’t be bridged. Both experiences reinforced the same thing: the body as a site of knowing is not culture-specific. It is human.
I have spent significant time working across India, learning from how differently people inhabit their bodies when shaped by different cosmologies, different relationships to stillness and movement. This cross-cultural dimension is not incidental to my practice — it is central to it.
My private practice is entirely online. This is not a compromise — it means I can work with people anywhere, and it means the work travels with them. I have clients in Australia, the UK, Kenya, India, the US, and Europe.
‘I became a psychologist because I wanted to understand what it means to be fully human. Somatic work is the closest I have come to an answer.’
I am the author of Inscribed — Your Body’s Hidden Script, which brings together twenty years of clinical thinking into a framework for understanding how the body stores and communicates the story of a life.
When I’m not working, I can be found dancing, in conversation with people I love, or somewhere in nature — preferably all three.
Conventional therapy — even good conventional therapy — tends to work top-down. You understand your patterns, reframe your thinking, build insight. The assumption is that changed thinking leads to changed feeling.
Somatic work moves in the other direction. It begins with sensation, with posture, with breath, with the subtle language of a body that has been tracking experience long before the mind had words for it. Change that starts in the body tends to be more durable — because it doesn’t have to convince the mind first.
My practice integrates Family Constellations — a method for revealing and resolving inherited patterns within family systems — alongside movement-based approaches that help people access states of ease that purely verbal work can’t always reach.
The result, in practice, is that sessions feel different from other therapy. There is more space. More attention to what is happening in the body right now, in this conversation. People often describe feeling both deeply seen and productively unsettled.