In development
An article for Somatic Psychotherapy Today is currently in development.
Clinical framework in development
SPIRALAYA
Working with experience that becomes charged, including eros when it appears, while presence, boundaries and choice remain available.
Many people arrive in therapy already able to regulate. They can name what is happening, recognise activation, and recover from it. Often they have worked hard for years to get there. That is not a small achievement.
And still, something can stay out of reach.
Desire flattens before it becomes clear. Pleasure is noticed and immediately explained. Anger is understood but never quite felt. A boundary announces itself once it has already been crossed from the inside.
SPIRALAYA is a clinical framework being developed around that territory. What becomes accessible in a person's experience. What it might mean. And how much presence, boundary and choice remain while staying near it.
The framework's Hebrew name is הספירלה החיה, the living spiral. It is being written in Hebrew first.
The Framework
Regulation, and what comes after it
The therapeutic field has become good at helping people settle. Tracking activation, widening the window of tolerance, recovering from overwhelm. This work is real and it is necessary.
But a quieter nervous system tells us less than it first appears to. More becomes reachable. Which part arrives, what it turns out to mean, and how long someone can stay near it are separate questions, and the quiet answers none of them.
SPIRALAYA begins at that point.
Vitality as the wider field
I use vitality to describe the felt movement of life in a person. It is not a mood and it is not wellbeing. It can appear as anger, grief, longing, pleasure, fear or desire.
Charged vitality is vitality that has gathered enough intensity to matter. It carries information, and it also carries risk, because it can appear faster than a person's ability to stay in contact with it.
Eros as one movement within it
Eros is one of the movements possible within it. A movement of life toward contact, toward creation, toward what is not yet known. Sometimes it moves toward another person, sometimes toward work, sometimes toward nothing that can be named yet.
Eros is not reducible to sexuality. It may carry sexual meaning and it may not. Its appearance is not in itself evidence of sexual desire, and its absence is not evidence that something is missing.
The distinction cuts both ways. Without it, vividness gets read as sexual before anyone knows whether it is. With it, sexual or erotic meaning can be met as material rather than as a sign that something has gone wrong, even, and especially, when the person is the one who brought it.
Appearance is not the same as capacity
Experience can arrive ahead of the ability to stay near it.
This overlaps with titration and the window of tolerance, and the question is slightly different. Tolerance asks how much activation can be held without flooding or shutdown. Here there is a second question underneath it. Even when an experience is physiologically bearable, we may not yet know what it is, or where the work should go with it.
Capacity here is not defined by how much intensity a person can tolerate, but by how much presence, access to boundary, and choice remain available in relation to what is emerging.
More capacity does not necessarily mean more intensity. It means more freedom of response.
Protection as organisation, not failure
A return to thinking, a joke, a change of subject, a request to stop. These are easy to read as avoidance, and sometimes that reading is correct.
They may also be the best available way a system has found to put distance between itself and something that arrived faster than it could be read. This does not mean every movement away is simply followed. It means it is understood before it is interpreted.
Presence, boundaries, choice
These three are the working conditions of the framework rather than its goals.
Presence, enough contact with what is actually happening. Boundaries, a structure that lets experience be recognised rather than acted on. Choice, the ongoing possibility of going toward something, away from it, or nowhere at all.
When one of the three begins to thin out, that is the clinical signal, whatever the content of the experience.
Together, they are read moment to moment. Changes in any of the three help determine whether the work should stay, slow, create distance, change direction, or stop.
High activation does not necessarily mean low capacity, and calm does not necessarily mean high capacity. A person may be intensely activated and still retain presence, boundary and choice; another may appear calm while frozen, compliant, or unable to access a boundary.
The guiding question is not how much more experience can be tolerated, but what is the smallest intervention that allows experience to remain present without narrowing choice.
The spiral is not a ladder
There is no correct sequence and no top. Safety does not produce eros. Eros does not produce vitality. This is not a formula and there is no chain to complete.
Movement, return and deepening are all part of the same shape. A person can stop, stay, or go back, and the work is not less meaningful for it.
Where it sits, and what it is not
SPIRALAYA has grown at the intersection of trauma-oriented somatic work, relational body psychotherapy, focusing-oriented practice, and psychosexual and relational writing, together with clinical observation over many years.
What it adds is less a new theory of arousal or regulation than a way of deciding, in the moment, where the work should go when experience becomes charged and its meaning is still uncertain.
It is a framework in development, not a validated treatment and not a modality. It is a way of thinking about a particular set of clinical minutes.
In the Room
What the distinction looks like in practice
A constructed illustration, written to show the framework in use. It is not drawn from clinical material and does not describe any person.
Something becomes vivid in the body. The person notices it, and almost at once begins to explain it.
I do not name what it is. I do not know yet, and neither do they.
The older instinct would be to invite them to stay with it. I have become more careful about that, because the invitation is not neutral. It carries a direction.
So I ask what is happening now. Whether there is still room to slow down. Whether stopping is available.
The experience has appeared. The capacity to stay in contact with it has not arrived alongside it.
The direction of the intervention comes from what happens to presence, boundary and choice as the experience becomes more charged.
We do not go further in. We make the space around it wider, until there is somewhere to go.
Ethics and Scope
Stated plainly, not implied
SPIRALAYA works with material that requires an explicit ethical position rather than an implied one. The following is the position.
- The work is not directed toward erosEros is not an aim, not a stage to be reached, and not a sign that the work is going well. It is one possibility among others, and its appearance is treated as information rather than as an instruction about where to go next.
- Consent is continuousNot a form signed once. Direction can change, and work can stop, at any point and without cost to the person. No assessment of capacity overrides a 'no'. Presence, boundary and choice are used to protect agency, not reinterpret it.
- Boundaries are not withdrawalA clear limit is held while the relationship stays present. Holding the boundary by disappearing emotionally is its own clinical problem, and the framework names it as one.
- Responsibility is asymmetricalThe practitioner carries the frame. The practitioner's own reactions belong first to reflection and supervision, never to the room as material for the person to hold. Whenever the person's capacity is being read, the practitioner's is read too, and the check is not symmetrical. Am I still present, holding the professional boundary, and clinically free to choose, or is my own fear, attraction, rescue impulse, avoidance or personal need beginning to organise the work?
- Scope of practice is not assumedThe professional standing and legal status of touch differ between disciplines and jurisdictions. Nothing here claims a general permission for anyone to use it. The framework itself does not require touch.
- The framework is in developmentIt carries no evidence base of its own, and says so wherever it is presented.
About
Gili Cook
Gili Cook is based in Israel and works at the intersection of emotional, somatic and relational practice.
She has 23 years of experience in therapeutic and emotional work, including 12 years of body-based work and touch. She holds a BA in psychology, completed three years of training in couples and family therapy and two years of training in Focusing, and has studied Somatic Experiencing and Nonviolent Communication.
Her background in tantric and embodiment traditions sharpened her attention to vitality, desire, and the ethical complexities of working with charged embodied experience.
She maintains a private clinical practice in Israel. SPIRALAYA grew out of that practice, out of repeated clinical observation, and out of questions she could not answer with the frameworks she had.
She is the developer of SPIRALAYA, a somatic-relational clinical framework still in development, and is currently completing a Hebrew book presenting it. The framework's professional site is available at spiralaya.com.
Contact
Professional correspondence: gili@haspiralahachaya.com
Book and Publications
The book
A Hebrew book presenting SPIRALAYA is in preparation. It is written for qualified practitioners and for advanced professional readers working with the body, trauma and intimacy. It is not a self-help book and not a manual for working on oneself.
Publication details will be posted here.
Articles
Updates
Professional updates
Occasional updates on the book, publications and the development of SPIRALAYA.
No sessions, no offers, and nothing frequent. A few times a year at most.
Updates and sign-up information will be published here.