About the Author

Raja Selvam, PhD, a licensed clinical psychologist, is the developer of Integral Somatic Psychology, a therapeutic approach based on emerging scientific paradigms of embodied cognition, emotion, and behavior in cognitive psychology and affective neuroscience as well as on multiple Western and Eastern psychological, somatic, energetic, and spiritual approaches. Dr. Selvam is also a senior trainer in Dr. Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing Trauma Professional Training Program. He has taught for twenty-five years in twenty-one countries in North and South America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the Far East. His work is informed by the older body psychotherapy systems of Reichian Therapy and Bioenergetic Analysis, the newer body psychotherapy systems of Bodynamic Analysis and Somatic Experiencing®, and the bodywork systems of Postural Integration and Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy. His work is also inspired by Jungian and archetypal psychologies, the Kleinian and intersubjective schools of psychoanalysis, affective neuroscience, quantum physics, yoga, Polarity Therapy, and Advaita Vedanta (a spiritual psychology from India).

In addition, his work draws upon his clinical psychology PhD dissertation work on Advaita Vedanta and Jungian psychology. Dr. Selvam wrote an article based on his dissertation, titled “Jung and Consciousness,” which was published in the international analytical psychology journal Spring in 2013. He did outreach work in India in 2005–2006 with survivors of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and an article detailing an outcome study based on this work, titled “Somatic Therapy Treatment Effects with Tsunami Survivors,” was published in the journal Traumatology in 2008. Dr. Selvam’s current work is also inspired by work he did in Sri Lanka in 2012-2014 with survivors of war, violence, loss, and displacement, and the work he did with mental health professionals working with these survivors, after that country’s thirty-year civil war ended in 2009.