Zjamal has worked internationally for over 30 years in professional, academic and community settings, as a group facilitator, somatic educator, creative process lecturer and community arts leader. In her faculty positions in Amsterdam and the USA and on teaching tours throughout several continents, she presented her integration of personal development and holistic psychosomatic education.
Zjamal is in private practice as a Gestalt Psychotherapist and has been working with individuals, couples, and families for the last twenty years. As a counselling clinician her work is client centred, relational, and creatively constructive.
She is a Clinical Member of the Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia, and of Gestalt Australia & New Zealand, and is regularly invited to facilitate professional level counsellor training. She is currently on the faculty of Gestalt Therapy Brisbane, a post-graduate training offering a Masters in Gestalt Therapy.
For the last twelve years she has provided Clinical Supervision for practitioners in the field and those in social work and counselling organisations as well as assessing final year graduate’s clinical work.
She has held Senior Therapist positions for two private A.O.D rehabilitation residential facilities and facilitated an innovative community outreach day rehabilitation program. In 2014, she undertook a consultancy role in regional Queensland, developing an intensive support service for PTSD treatment, workplace critical incident responses, post-suicide family bereavement and community emergency programs. Her Masters research was on Somatic Intelligence, contemporary neurobiology influences, and embodiment in applied practice.
She is also certified in Level 1 of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy training in the treatment of trauma. She has aided communities through the arts for those living with mental health issues, disabilities, and for specific target groups including indigenous populations, sex workers and adolescents.
She is passionate about the intimate theatre of the one-on-one setting, the creative potency of the group setting, and the movement of growth and change in all life. She lives in a small eco-village called Koala Beach, on the eastern reaches of the Mt Wollumbin volcanic caldera.
“The strands of my work life as a psychotherapist, facilitator, teacher, supervisor and artist are intrinsically interwoven with each other. In all the settings and modalities in which I engage, and with the many populations with whom I interact, I draw upon my experience in creative process, personal development, education, healing through relating, and the sacredness of the earth. All my work is held by the matrix of those in-depth explorations and their synergy is found in anything I do. When I practice psychotherapy, it is influenced by phenomenology, somatics, theatre research and the art of improvisation. When I teach improvisation, it is informed by ecology, therapeutic process, and my embodied earth spiritual practice. When I make performances, they are sourced in the investigations and themes that emerged from my teaching and personal process and my fascination with nature, including human nature”.
