Therapy with Lana

16/09/2025

You can imagine endlessly, but without your body, it stays a dream.

I’ve always lived in imagination. I could spend hours, even days, exploring worlds inside my mind - creating, dreaming, envisioning. And imagination is real. It’s a living force, a place where insight, curiosity, and possibility arise. But here’s the catch: if you never bring it into the body, it can also trap you. You stay floating in potential, never really arriving in the moment where life happens.

The body is what makes imagination tangible, alive, and integrated. Every movement, every breath, every sensation grounds ideas into reality. When we feel our visions in our bodies, when we allow the heart, the breath, the posture, the senses to participate, imagination lands. It becomes something we can move with, act on, and inhabit fully.

There’s a profound dialogue between body and mind: imagination sparks the journey, embodiment anchors it in life. One without the other is incomplete. Together, they allow us to live our visions, not just think them.

Your imagination is sacred. Your body is its home. Give both space, and you’ll discover a life that is both richly imagined and fully lived.

13/09/2025

The spark in you is symbolically like the unicorn of medieval myth, not the cute, child-friendly cartoonish unicorn version we think of today.

In those old stories, the unicorn symbolized Christ: purity, love, divine, essence, something almost untouchable. Everyone tried to capture it. Everyone longed for it. But it couldn’t be tamed. Its impossibility left people in that strange space between longing and devotion, where you see the divine, but it also reflects your own human incompleteness.

Your spark is the same. It is sacred, untouchable, wild. It retreats when you run, hides when you avoid yourself, and waits in the corners of your being. That place of longing isn’t punishment, it’s a mirror showing you what you’re made of.

But longing can also keep you stuck if you never turn inward. Longing needs to find its way into the body. Into the here and now.

The way to embody it is to enter the cave: the silence, the stillness, the dark places inside yourself. Sit with the parts you hide, the parts that protect your spark. Because that’s what they do. Face what you’ve avoided. This is where your spark waits to be recognised, and lived through you.

Your spark is never lost. It’s sacred, wild and untamed. And it is essentially you.

19/08/2025

When did you start believing you had to earn your right to rest?

Maybe it was at 7 years old, when someone told you to try harder.
Maybe you were praised for being strong while hurting.
Maybe somewhere along the way, you decided love had to be earned.

You’ve been carrying that weight ever since.

Everything we don’t like about ourselves often gets pushed into the shadow. But the part that holds that shadow, the part that has been silently carrying your pain, is also the part that loves you deeply.

There is nothing inherently wrong with you. No matter what you’ve done, you always have the right to start over, to receive love, and to belong to yourself. You truly deserve that.

You are allowed to stop trying to be perfect now. You are allowed to be yourself. There is already a part of you that loves and cares for you unconditionally. It might feel dormant, but it is always available. It’s time to awaken to that love.

This is what we explore in Mastering the Art of Self-Compassion: a space to reconnect with yourself, embody self-care, and bring compassion into your everyday life. It’s not just about wordsy. We work with the energy of compassion itself, through practices that help you feel it, embody it, and bring it fully into your life.

Sign up:
https://www.therapywithlana.com/mastering-the-art-of-self-compassion

29/07/2025

Before you judge yourself… read this.

Inside every defense there’s a younger part of you that survived.

It shows up as a critic, overachiever, the one who avoids or shuts down.

None of these started as flaws.They started as protection.

In therapy I see this again and again:
our bodies and our psyches don’t forget.
They hide what they can’t bear, and they wait, sometimes for decades, for enough love and safety to help carry it.

If this resonates, here are a few ways you can start meeting those parts differently:

➡️Pause before judging yourself. Instead of “what’s wrong with me?”, ask “what is this part trying to protect?”

➡️Bring it to the body. Notice where that tension, avoidance or harshness lives in you. A breath or gentle touch on that part tells the nervous system it’s safe to soften.

➡️Share it with someone safe. Defenses relax when we don’t have to hold them alone.

In therapy, we don’t tear down our defenses.
We focus on building a relationship with them so they no longer have to work so hard.

What’s one small way you can meet yourself with tenderness today?

08/07/2025

🍀Countertransference: When Presence Becomes the Practice

There’s a moment in every therapist’s journey where you realise you can’t rely on the methods anymore.

In the beginning, it’s all theory. You want to get it right. You study, you read, you learn the “how.” You practice the interventions, the right questions, the timing.

But eventually, you’re in the room, sitting across from a real human being and something happens in you.

Something contracts in your body, you have an inner reaction. Perhaps something opens, or you feel discomfort.

That’s countertransference.

And no matter how much we talk about it in training, nothing prepares you for the depth of it until you’re in it.

Donald Kalsched talks about how trauma creates a kind of inner ecosystem, a symbolic, protective, often sacred field that we unconsciously step into as therapists.
We enter the system. And the system enters us.

Our own inner protectors show up. Parts of us get activated, sometimes subtly, sometimes not.

And the beauty and difficulty of this work is:
we can’t always separate what’s “ours” and what’s “theirs” in the moment.
Because it’s happening through resonance.
Through our nervous systems. Through what’s unspoken but felt.

Peter Levine’s work reminds us how essential regulation is, not just for the client, but for us.
But “regulation” doesn’t mean staying calm or composed or getting it right.
It means staying in contact. With our own bodies, breath, and impulses.

Supervision should be a space to digest. To feel. To make sense. To be human and therapist at the same time.

I remember when my teacher said to me: “We’re not here to rescue anyone.
There’s no one technique that will ever be “the answer.”
What matters is your presence.”

It’s presence not just with our clients, but with ourselves. With everything that’s moving inside. With what we don’t understand yet.
Because all of that is what our client’s nervous system is already sensing. Not consciously.

And when we are willing to be with ourselves, something shifts in the field. Something organizes.

That’s where healing happens.

Not because we “do” it. But because our presence awakes theirs.

And that is what heals/brings back into wholeness.

10/06/2025

Here’s something I wish more people knew about grief:
It’s sacred.
It lives in the body.
And it deserves to be felt.

Swipe through for the open conversation about grief. Let us honour our grief together.👇

13/05/2025

Watch full video here:

https://youtu.be/UEbVicEr-fI?si=S7uXf7yjZaeaLoS4

19/04/2025

10/04/2025

It was such a wonderful experience having a conversation with lovely Mannah on her podcast.

I have to be honest, I really enjoyed talking about my journey and work. I’m not usually the one doing the talking (we filmed in the clinic where we both work), so it was a bit outside my comfort zone. But it also brought more integration, helping me understand why this work is so important and precious to me.

I hope you enjoy it!

Today you’ll meet Lana Kunštek, a body-oriented and mindfulness-centered psychotherapist from Croatia, now living in Copenhagen, where I meet her in this epi...

19/03/2025

How do we allow ourselves to feel without getting tangled in our narratives? The answer is presence. When we are presence, we allow. We can rewrite our story, see it with clarity, or better yet—recognize that there is no story, only the embodiment of our journey.

How do you experience presence in your body?

13/03/2025

If you’re struggling through deep pain, confusion, or loss, you are not alone. The Dark Night of the Soul—sometimes called Shamanic Illness—is not just suffering; it is an initiation. A sacred transformation. Even when it feels like everything is falling apart, your Divine Essence is guiding you through.

Like the Phoenix, we are meant to rise—not despite our darkness, but because of it.

✨ In this video, I share:
• The deeper meaning of the Dark Night of the Soul as a spiritual awakening
• How to face your inner demons with self-compassion and courage
• The wisdom of the Phoenix: why breakdowns lead to breakthroughs
• How your Divine Self is always guiding you, even in the shadows

This is a message of hope. You are not broken—you are becoming.

If you’re in the midst of this journey, take a deep breath. You are not lost. You are transforming.

🌿 Let’s walk this path together.

✅Work with me:➡️Book a free intro session:https://calendly.com/lana-kunstek/20min✨The Spark of Life - Online Course:https://www.therapywithlana.com/the-spark...

12/06/2024

Often, when we feel a deep void inside of us, we tend to look for something to attach ourselves to. It’s a normal reaction that creates and solidifies a false sense of duality and stability.

There is nothing outside of us that can save us from ourselves.

Many people live their lives without ever feeling the internal need, awakening, or crisis to detach and go within.

If you feel like your fixations are crumbling, maybe you are ready to claim your sovereignty.