ABOUT BELINDA O'DEA.
Welcome. I’m Belinda O’Dea, a Gestalt Therapy Practitioner and Senior Yoga Teacher specialising in yoga-informed therapy and contemplative approaches to women’s mental health, emotional wellbeing, and spiritual care.
In person in Perth, Western Australia. Telehealth across Australia.
WHY WORK WITH ME.
I created Sacred Women's Journeys to honour the complexity of all that it means to be a woman.
The name is not incidental. A journey is not a destination. It is a continuous unfolding, a returning, a deepening. The sacred journey I am pointing toward is not to India or Japan or anywhere outside yourself, though those outer journeys have their own medicine. It is the inner one. The journey of coming to know yourself. Of meeting the self you have been avoiding, abandoning or simply too busy to sit with. Of finding that what you were seeking was always already present.
I guide women through the deaths of self, the dark nights, the unravellings, the necessary endings, back to the ground of who they are. I know this territory because I have crossed it many times. The gifts I share are the ones that restore me again and again.
What makes this work distinctive is not just the qualifications. It is the ground they stand on. 800 hours of Yoga Teacher Training. 400 hours of Gestalt Therapy Training, 70 percent of which was experiential rather than academic. More than 60 hours of sitting in the client chair myself, receiving the very work I now offer. Hundreds of hours of personal therapy across multiple modalities. Thirty years of contemplative practice. Lifetimes of walking the sacred path.
Most therapists study therapy. Gestalt Therapy requires you to live it from both sides. To be the client as well as the practitioner. To know the territory from the inside. That embodied understanding is irreplaceable and it is the foundation of everything I bring into the room.
I am warm, direct and present. Yoga is my way of life, not just something I practice. Calm and kindness are my way of being. I am interested in living a sincere and grounded life, not bypassing what is real.
YOGA IS MEDICINE.
Ancient wisdom meets the present moment.
Yoga in its truest sense has never been just a physical practice. It is the integration of body, mind and heart. Of sensation, thought and feeling. Of how we move, how we breathe, how we understand ourselves and relate to the world around us.
Yoga means union.
We spend so much of our lives in our heads. Thinking, analysing, planning, worrying. The body carries everything we have experienced, every emotion we have suppressed, every need we have abandoned. It holds what the mind cannot yet name.
Yoga knows this. It has always known this. The body is not an obstacle to healing. It is the vehicle of it.
This understanding is also at the heart of Gestalt Therapy. Rather than spending sessions only in past narratives or cognitive analysis, we bring awareness to what is happening right now in the body, the breath, the quality of contact between us. That present-moment somatic awareness is not preparation for the real work. It is the real work.
Yoga-informed therapy brings these two traditions together. Not as a technique added onto therapy. The yogic understanding of the whole person as the living ground from which all therapeutic work arises. Therapy also becomes the yoga.
AWARENESS IS KEY.
What is Gestalt Therapy and how does it work?
Gestalt Therapy was originally developed in the early 1950s by a group of avant-garde psychologists, psychiatrists, philosophers and educators as a response to the orthodoxy of psychoanalysis. It values authentic relating, choiceful living and the development of genuine self-awareness.
A Gestalt Therapist does not try to adjust you to a certain way of being, living or behaving. The work is to help you find your own way to live a personally meaningful life.
Rather than analysing the past or teaching skills and tools, Gestalt Therapy works with what is immediately obvious and available to your awareness right now, in the body, in the emotions, in the quality of contact between us. From there we proceed in small steps, using experiments with new ways of being, in order to expand awareness and widen the range of choices available to you.
Gestalt Therapy understands psychotherapy as healing through meeting. The nature and quality of human contact between therapist and client is not a vehicle for treatment. It is the treatment itself. This is why Gestalt Therapy is known as relational therapy.
This is fundamentally different from cognitive or skills-based approaches where the therapist teaches tools, assigns homework or works to modify thinking patterns. Gestalt Therapy is relational, embodied and present-focused. We spend enough of our lives in our heads. This work brings you back into contact with the whole of your experience.
The principles that guide this work:
Awareness is the goal. When we bring honest attention to what is actually happening right now, in the body, in the emotions, in the relationship between us, something shifts. Awareness supports connection, wisdom, spontaneity and health. We begin with the body because our needs, longings and fears emerge first as sensation.
Presence is at the heart of the work. To be present is to be here with openness and flexibility, able to respond to the fullness of what is happening rather than reacting from habit or history. From presence we are more able to meet others and ourselves with genuine compassion.
Receptivity grows from presence. Tuned into our own experience and more present in the here and now, we become more curious and responsive to our own needs and the needs of others as they emerge in genuine contact. We build interest in deep and satisfying relating.
Choice becomes possible through awareness. Gestalt understands that much of what causes distress is a response to earlier adversity and challenge. With support we can identify unhelpful patterns, let go of self-blame and begin to experiment with new ways of being. We become more compassionate, more curious and more creative.
Context matters. We are shaped by the relational worlds we have grown up in, by family, culture, environment and experience. Gestalt Therapy seeks to understand all experience in context, breaking down ideas of individual pathology, shame and blame. We ask not what is wrong with you but how does this make sense given everything you have lived.
Engagement is the true goal. The aim of this work is not just symptom relief. It is a more engaged, connected and meaningful life. In the world, in relationship, in community. Therapy builds capacity not just for the individual who attends but for everyone they are in relationship with.
Want to understand the difference between a psychologist, psychiatrist, counsellor and psychotherapist in Australia? Download our plain language guide here.
HOW GESTALT THERAPY IS LEARNED.
Gestalt Therapy cannot be learned from a textbook. It is transmitted through direct experience and personal encounter.
I chose GTIWA's four year programme specifically because of its non-academic, experiential approach. This is the longest running continually offered Gestalt Therapy training programme in Australia. Its emphasis is not on theory absorbed in a classroom but on direct personal encounter, in group, in supervision, in the body, in the living relationship between trainees and faculty with decades of practice.
My training comprises of 400 hours of intensive experiential group work over four years, currently in my final semester. Alongside this I completed more than 60 hours of individual Gestalt Therapy as a personal client, sitting in the very chair I now invite others into. On top of this I have been under clinical supervision for 20 hours over the past 2 years. The training is 70 percent experiential. I have not just studied this approach. I have lived it from both sides.
I also received direct transmission from the senior faculty of GATLA's European Summer Residential, practitioners with more than four decades of practice in Gestalt Therapy. This international lineage of transmission is a rare and significant aspect of my training that distinguishes it from more academically oriented programmes.
800 hours of Yoga Teacher Training. 400 hours of Gestalt Therapy training. Hundreds of hours as a therapy client. Thirty years of contemplative practice. Ongoing spiritual practice and professional clinical supervision.
That is not a certificate. It is a life's work.
MY STORY.
There comes a point in many women's lives when what once fit no longer does.
Sacred Women's Journeys was born from a lifelong curiosity about the world, immersion in the sacred cultures of Bali, Fiji and Japan from a young age, a successful career in fashion design, thirty years of yogic and contemplative practice across India, Bali and Japan, a growing recognition of the gap between spiritual opening and genuine therapeutic healing, and the training that finally built the bridge.
The name Sacred Women's Journeys holds everything. The outer journeys to sacred sites and temples and jungles that shaped me. The inner journeys that those places catalysed. And the ongoing journey of becoming — the path that never ends, that asks more of you at every turn, that returns you again and again to the question of who you actually are beneath everything you have been carrying.
In late 2024 a serious health crisis brought everything to a stop. Major surgery with complications. Eighteen months to recover. The long and non-linear process of rebuilding. The necessity of tending to my own needs with the same care I had always offered others.
That experience is now inseparable from this work.
You are not broken. You are in the middle of something. And there is a way through.
I know this territory because I have crossed it many times. What I have built here is the bridge I could not offer the women I used to take on retreat. A safe, trauma-informed and holistic approach to women's self-understanding and genuine healing.
Read my full story and how Sacred Women's Journeys came to be here.
MY APPROACH.
My work integrates:
Awareness-based, relational and Gestalt-informed psychotherapy
Trauma-informed practice
Nervous system support and guided relaxation
Yoga, breathwork and meditation
Embodied and contemplative awareness
This approach supports:
Self-awareness and emotional insight
Emotional regulation and resilience
Self-trust and inner stability
Healthier and more authentic relationships
Rather than focusing on fixing or analysing, this work supports awareness, presence, and a deeper understanding of your experience as it unfolds.
HOW WE WORK TOGETHER.
Sessions are individually tailored, supportive, grounded, and relational.
Our work together prioritises:
Presence over pressure
Being over doing
Exploration over fixing
Understanding over judgement
WOMEN’S WELLBEING WORKSHOPS.
I have been participating in women's circles since 2012 and facilitating since 2014. I have trained more than twenty women as circle facilitators through a structured curriculum I designed and developed.
My work with women's groups has evolved significantly over that time. What began as women's circles has deepened into a more structured therapeutic and psychoeducational format, the Women's Wellbeing Workshop, which brings together education, somatic practice and facilitated group dialogue around specific themes relevant to women's mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.
Workshop themes include grief and loss, anxiety and the nervous system, intimacy and vulnerability, the seasons of a woman's life, rites of passage in womanhood and the reclamation of self after collapse.
These workshops are currently in development. Join the waitlist to be the first to hear here.
PROFESSIONAL QUALIFICATIONS & MEMBERSHIPS.
GTIWA Gestalt Therapy Training currently completing (2023–2026)
Professional Clinical Supervision with Zish Rosenbach-Ziembinski (2025 - 2026)
WAMH Being Trauma Responsive Training (2026)
MHFA Mental Health First Aid Training (Accredited 2026 - 2029)
WAMH Understanding Grief and Loss Training (2026)
GANZ Gestalt Therapy Australia and New Zealand (Current Member)
IICT International Institute for Complementary Therapists (Current Member)
HEART OF SOUND 100 Hour Mantra / Nada Yoga Certification, Rishikesh, India (2017)
TINA NANCE 100 Hour Certification Yin Yoga & Assistant, Bali, Indonesia (2016)
SURINDER SINGH 200 Hour Certification Hatha Yoga, Rishikesh, India (2016)
TARA JUDELLE 200 Hour Certification Hatha Yoga in the Anusara Method, Bali, Indonesia (2013)
VIDYA HEISL 200 Hour Certification Vinyasa Yoga, Bali, Indonesia (2012)
RMIT UNIVERSITY BA Fashion Honours - Marketing Stream (1997 - 2000)
OSAKA WOMEN’S UNIVERSITY - Language & Culture Scholarship (1996)
FUKUOKA DAIICHI HIGH SCHOOL - Language & Culture Scholarship (1994)
TOORAK COLLEGE Tertiary Entrance Ranking 98.65 (1990 - 1993 & 1995)
YOGA TRAINING & MENTORING EXPERIENCE.
With 800 hours of yoga teacher training and tens of thousands of hours of practice, I have experience mentoring and contributing to yoga teacher training environments.
My training and mentoring interests include:
Yoga for mental health
Mantra, meditation and mindfulness
Breathwork and pranayama practices
Yogic philosophy, psychology and ethics
Nervous system regulation and relaxation practices
RETREATS & IMMERSIVE WORK.
I have designed and facilitated more than 25 women’s retreats and immersive experiences through my previous work in yoga, travel, and wellbeing, including:
ART OF FEMININITY Women’s Cultural Sacred Arts Tour Japan (2019)
LIVING IN ALIGNMENT Women’s Wellness Ayurveda Retreat South India (2016 - 2019)
DIVINE MOTHER INDIA Women’s Spiritual Tour North India (2014 - 2019)
These transformational travel experiences continue to inform my current work, bringing depth, cultural awareness, and embodied practice into my offerings.
GET IN TOUCH.
If something here resonates, reach out.
You are welcome to begin or join one of our offerings when you feel ready.