Panel 5: Moving Through Polarities – Fear, Integrity & Hot Potatoes
📅Saturday, 5 September📍Cork City Hall 🕒11:45 – 13:15
Description:
Some subjects arrive in the room carrying heat. They disturb the surface, quicken the breath, tighten the jaw, pull us toward silence or speech before we know which is wiser. Fear, integrity, and the “hot potatoes” of our field ask something difficult of us: not only what we think, but what we can bear to feel, hold, question, and name.
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In body psychotherapy, fear is not merely an obstacle. It is a messenger of danger, memory, boundary, conscience, and change. Integrity, too, is not an abstract principle, but something lived through the body: in the spine, the voice, the gut, the capacity to stay present when complexity presses close.
This panel discussion will explore the challenging themes we may avoid in ourselves, our practices, our communities, and our profession. What do we do with the subjects that generate heat, disagreement, shame, defensiveness, or moral urgency? How do we remain embodied, ethical, and relational when the ground becomes unstable?
Together, we will consider how body psychotherapy can help us meet difficult truths without collapse or attack, and how courage may begin with the simple act of staying present.
Meet The Panel
Rae Johnson
A somatic psychotherapist, educator, and activist-scholar integrating body psychotherapy with social justice praxis. The author of Embodied Social Justice (2017) and Embodied Activism (2023) they teach internationally on embodied activism, relational embodiment, and collective nervous system awareness, supporting practitioners to engage sociopolitical realities through grounded, ethically attuned somatic practice. Rae is a professor of somatic psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Luciano Sabella
As a Functional psychologist-psychotherapist, Luciano carries out clinical activities at his studio in Florence, Italy. Member of the SIF since 1997, trainer and supervisor at the School of Functional Psychotherapy since 2003. EABP Board Member, member of AIPC. Speaker and conductor of numerous speeches and workshops at international meetings, including the EABP congress of 2014, 2016, 2018, 2021 and 2023, and the Soma Festival in 2025.
Stella O’Malley
Dr Stella O’Malley is a psychotherapist, author and Executive Director of Genspect. She also founded Beyond Trans, a professionally facilitated support programme for detransitioners, desisters, medically transitioned and trans-identified people, and their families. She holds a PhD from the University of Dundee, where her research examined parents’ perspectives on childhood and adolescent gender dysphoria. Stella is the author of several books and has published peer-reviewed research in journals including the BMJ and Archives of Sexual Behavior.
Alexander Vachev
Prior to becoming a psychotherapist, Alexander had built a successful international career in both education and the performing arts as a professional dancer, choreographer, and stage director. Through more than 15 years living and working across North America and Southeast Asia, he gained a deep understanding of how culture shapes the way we experience the body, relate to difference, and maintain openness to perspectives that challenge our own. He shares a private practice at “Flora Center for Psychotherapy” in Sofia, Bulgaria and as part of a dedicated international team, is the organizer of “Festival SOMA”.
Patrick Sell
An integrative psychotherapist who trained at the Chiron Centre and at the Gerda Boyesen Centre for Biodynamic Psychotherapy in London, Patrick has worked as a psychotherapist and trainer in Britain, Brazil and in Ireland since 1985. He is the owner director of the Trácht Psychotherapy Foundation, IABP Secretary and current Chair for the EABP Congress.
