We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Rita Tojal a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Rita, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

I work in the mental health industry, which can be a very closed minded field, with very strict notions of health and treatment. What I do differently is I bring my own particular interests into it in ways that help my clients go through their healing process in creative, holistic and soulful ways. Traditionally, there has been a severe separation between psychology and spirituality. As I started doing my own inner work, and my work as a therapist, I always felt the need to bring in the spiritual view of life, and to help expand my clients’ awareness of their experiences. I also noticed how nature was an essential part of healing for me, and so I developed ways to reconnect people to nature, which directly affects the nervous system, and has benefits for the overall health of humans.

Rita, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I was born in Portugal, and when I was 15 I was having big life questions – Where did we really come from? What is life? Why are we on this planet? What is society? Who am I?… I turned 16 and knew I wanted to become a psychologist. I started university for it when I was 17. I had my first clients when I was 22 years old, and I always knew I would create my own way of working with clients. Even if I had studied Systemic Psychology, which was my preferred field of Psychology then, I felt unsatisfied with the options available for the therapeutic process. I also knew I needed to go out into the world and explore much more of life. So I started traveling and living abroad, working in over 20 countries, and traveling to 100! This has been a crucial piece of my education, and makes me a much better therapist. As I faced the issues of nomadic life, and immersed myself in many different cultures, I developed multiple life-perspectives, which allow me to expand what I see. It’s been essential for me to have experience in many other areas too – arts, eco-village living, sociocracy, conscious sexuality, dance, somatic movement awareness, nature connection, eco-psychology, Tibetan Buddhism, non-duality, and others. What I’m the most proud of is how I could mix the things that worked for me, and create a model of psychotherapy that goes deeper than most methods I know. I blend spirituality, nature, somatic work, a multicultural perspective, Tibetan Buddhism, astrology, and radical presence, and this expands the process of healing trauma, integrating past experience, giving it meaning, using it as compost to build a healthy new ground, and ultimately gain a new life. I love that some people who never liked “therapy” end up enjoying working with me a lot, and find their healing process rich and transformational in a very expansive way. Then I created yet another bridge. As I lived 23 years of my life nomadically, I also wanted to bring traveling to the self knowledge work I do with clients. So I started offering trips and retreats where we do a lot of inner work, nature connection, and spiritual exploration.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

My favourite way to reach new clients is through word of mouth. I know it’s kind of traditional, but there’s something about a client telling a friend about me, or telling a cousin, their work colleague, or their daughter, that really works for me. I love being part of networks of people out there in the world that connect with me through the relational bond they have. It already implies some level of trust, which I really appreciate in my work as a psychotherapist.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

When the pandemic started in early 2020, I had, as most people, my world turned upside down. Before it all started, I had been living as a nomad for 23 years, I was focusing a lot of my work on taking people traveling to Tibet, and suddenly that option was totally unavailable, without any sense of when they would be possible again. At that time, living in circumstances that were so unknown to me, it was difficult to keep the focus. I could have easily fallen back to offering more traditional ways of doing my psychotherapy work, I could have given up on my passion to take people traveling, and could have forgotten how important traveling and inner exploration is to me. However, all the important things kept very alive in me, and I decided early on to use the time of the lockdowns to do things that I had never found the time to do for my business – such as reviewing my mission and vision, saying no to projects that kept me away from my priorities, rebranding, creating a new website, establishing important logistical structures, hiring a new accountant, and envisioning new dreams. It’s been very empowering to keep the focus on my professional goals, and to even use the time with those unique external conditions to get creative with my business. Honestly, it made me feel even more strongly that I can do anything, and brought an extra sense of joy in the psychotherapy services I offer and in the trips I’m preparing.

Contact Info:

• Website: ritatojal.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rita.tojal/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ritatojal/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rita-tojal-11565492/

Image Credits
There’s no need