Panel 1: Story, Myth and Legend
📅Friday, 4 September📍Cork City Hall 🕒11:45 – 13:15
Description:
Stories live not only in words, but in bodies. Across cultures and generations, myths and legends have carried human experiences of belonging, exile, transformation, loss, courage, shame, love, and renewal. In body psychotherapy, these themes offer a powerful lens through which we can explore how personal, familial, cultural, and ancestral narratives become embodied.
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This panel discussion invites reflection on the role of story, myth, and legend in shaping the body’s inner life. What stories do we inherit? Which myths organise our sense of self, relationship, and possibility? How do collective legends and cultural narratives appear in posture, gesture, breath, sensation, movement, and silence?
Rather than viewing myth as something distant or symbolic only, this discussion will consider how mythic material can emerge directly in the therapeutic field: in images, dreams, somatic patterns, enactments, and moments of deep transformation. The panel will explore how body psychotherapy can help clients recognise, question, rework, and sometimes reclaim the stories held within them.
At a time when many are seeking new ways to understand identity, trauma, belonging, and change, this conversation offers an invitation to listen more deeply to the living stories of the body.
Meet The Panel
Margaret Brady
Margaret is a psychotherapist, spiritual companion and supervisor-in-training based in Dublin, Ireland. She trained in spiritual companionship through the International Anam Cara Apprenticeship, for which she co-teaches a track on Living Celtic Myth. Interests include dreamwork, myth, spiritual development and ecopsychology.
David Trotzig
David is a Swedish body psychotherapist based in Barcelona with more than 25 years of clinical experience working with complex trauma, dissociation, attachment difficulties, and personality disorders. Trained in Reichian Body Psychotherapy at the Spanish School of Reichian Therapy (ES.TE.R.), he integrates body psychotherapy, EMDR, Ego State Therapy, and Mentalization-Based Therapy (MBT) in his clinical work.
Sofia Petridou
Body Psychotherapist-Counselor and Supervisor. Trained in Reichian Vegerotherapy and Character Analysis in E.I.N.A. (Athens). Also trained in Gestalt and EMDR. Sofia has been working with individuals and groups in her own practice place in Athens, for the last 27 years. Chair of the Greek Association for Body Psychotherapy (PESOPS) from 2010-2016. Chair of the EABP Congress in Athens (2016). Current member of the EABP Board and Committees.
Cathy Ryan
Working in embodied movement practice for over 30 years, Cathy qualified as an actor at the Samuel Beckett Centre, TCD and completed an MA in Creative Writing at UCC (Hons). She trained with Gabrielle Roth in the 5R® dynamic movement meditation practice, teaching the map extensively for many years. Cathy is a member of Northern Drum Shamanic Center and a founding member of Open Floor International. She is a co-founder of BISO – Body in Soul – a conscious movement map and training program for conscious movement facilitators. She is currently deeply engaged in the Diamond Approach, a blend of old wisdom and modern psychology. Based in beautiful East Cork, she works extensively in Europe, the UK and further afield.
Madlen Algafari (Moderator)
Psychologist, psychotherapist, writer, theater director. MA in psychology – University of Sofia ‘St. Clement Ohridski’ -1991. Postgraduate specialisation in Neo-Reichian Analytic Psychotherapy – Lugano, Switzerland – in 1998. Member of EABP, Bulgarian Neo-Reichian Association, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Board of Directors – Bulgarian Institute for Neo-Reichian Analytical Body Psychotherapy, Bulgarian Association of Psychotherapy and honorary member of USABP. Editor in Chief from 2018 to 2022 of “International Body Psychotherapy Journal” – published by EABP and USABP and Somatic Psychology. Congress Chair of the 18th EABP Congress.
