Kristie Ives

Hello, I’m Kristie

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been curious about the inner life — about healing, consciousness, creativity, and the deeper mysteries of human experience.

That curiosity has taken me along many paths over the years. I first became interested in healing practices as a teenager, and later explored bodywork, natural therapies, meditation and other approaches to understanding the relationship between body, mind and our inner world.

After my youngest son started kindy, I began formal training in kinesiology. It brought many of these earlier threads together and eventually led me into private practice, where for more than a decade I worked alongside people navigating the many challenges, transitions and openings that life can bring.

Over time, however, the way I understood healing began to deepen.

My own experiences taught me that some of the deepest shifts came not from being given an answer, but through embodied experiences and encounters with something within myself — insights, images, feelings and inner knowing that arose in their own way and carried a meaning I could recognise for myself.

This gradually changed the way I worked with others. My approach became increasingly person-centred, and I came to understand my role less as someone who needed to have the answers and more as someone who could offer attunement, empathy, compassion and a carefully held space for another person’s own process to unfold.

This eventually led me to transpersonal therapy.

From the outset, it felt less like discovering something new and more like finding language for what I had long sensed to be true: that healing and self-discovery involve more than the conscious mind, that there are dimensions of human experience that extend beyond the individual self, and that psyche speaks to us in many ways — through the body, dreams, imagery, symbol, imagination, relationship and the patterns that quietly move through our lives.

My training in transpersonal counselling and art therapy gave me a framework through which to bring these long-held perspectives more fully into my work, while also opening new pathways through creativity, image and the imaginal.

Today, these different strands are no longer separate. They have ripened into the way I now work — relational, exploratory and responsive to the person in front of me, with space for body and psyche, creativity and meaning, the known and the not-yet-known.

My life outside the therapy room has shaped me just as deeply. Marriage, motherhood and raising three sons have continually brought the work back to what is real, embodied and human. They have taught me about relationship, change, uncertainty, letting go, and the impossibility of separating our inner lives from the ordinary lives we are living.

I’m also someone who finds meaning in quiet things — time in nature, dreams, images, making art, meditation, writing and noticing the small patterns and synchronicities that can easily be missed when life moves too quickly.

I am fortunate to live and work in the beautiful Perth Hills of Western Australia, where Heartspace is quietly attuned to this place — its seasons, its slowness, and the living presence of the land on which I meet others.