Clean Language for Bodymind Practitioners with Nick Pole & Sarah McLellan

An in-person course with an online introduction

With Nick Pole

assisted by Sarah Mclellan

at Bristol College of Massage and Bodywork

29th Oct (online), 4th Nov and 10th Dec 2026

This course is for you if you work with body, breath or

movement as a therapist, teacher or coach and want to

integrate Clean Language into your practice.

What is Clean Language?

Clean Language is a set of very simple questions which help your clients

listen to themselves in a different way - questions that take them beyond

everyday language into mindful, embodied inquiry. It’s called ‘Clean’

because the questions are designed to stop us, as practitioners, bringing

our own models, presuppositions or unconscious bias into the process.

This creates a clarity which, for many clients, is like being listened to in a

much deeper way. Actually, they are listening to themselves more deeply,

discovering the meaning of the sensations, gestures, movements and

metaphors that are outside normal awareness.

Instead of theorising or analysing bodily experience, this simple mindful

inquiry process activates the organic healing power of the body-mind, ensuring your clients reap the maximum benefit from their sessions with

you by:

developing their somatic awareness

making insightful connections between symptoms and the life issues

underlying them

devising realistic steps towards building healthier habits.

‘I find clean language such a resource, in my own life process, client work, supervision and teaching. I love its simplicity, clarity and the way it supports direction, creativity, insight and resource in working with others.’ Paul Beaumont RSMT Dip IBMT, Registered Somatic Therapist, Supervisor & Trainer: Integrative Bodywork & Movement Therapist

Course Dates And Content

Online Introduction:

Thursday 29th Oct, 6pm-8.00pm on ZoomIn this introductory session we explore how the skills we have as mind-body practitioners - working with grounding, alignment, and somatic awareness - are just as important when we work with language. With a live demonstration and practical breakout room exercises, we look at how most language distances us from the body and how Clean Questions help us re-connect with our ‘felt sense’ and the embodied intelligence that it has to offer.

Key themes: Somatic Empathy, Creating Collaboration, Communicating with Symptoms

In-Person Days: Both In-person days include practical work in pairs and small groups to help you integrate Clean Language into your own form of mind/body practice.

Wednesday 4th November, BCMB 10am-5.30pm 

Mind, Matter and Metaphor

In this first in-person day we focus on how a few simple questions can help your clients listen to their symptoms and develop a more mindful relationship with their own somatic intelligence through the visual, verbal and embodied metaphors that arise in answer to Clean Questions. Metaphors are at the heart of how we communicate, (‘at the heart’ is a metaphor) and underlie many of our beliefs about health. You’ll learn how to recognise these invaluable signals from the body-mind, how to respectfully bring your clients’ metaphors into awareness and help them discover the inner resources that these metaphors have to offer.

Key themes: Three Characteristics of Metaphor, Verbal and Non-verbal Metaphors, Mapping the Client’s Interior Landscape

Thursday 10th December: BCMB 10am-5.30pm

What Would You Like To Have Happen? 

In this session, we explore how to help clients get a felt sense of what they really want and to take an active role in creating a healthier life for themselves. When clients continue with unhealthy habits and become dependent on us to 'put them right', challenging these habitual patterns without seeming judgmental is a delicate art. In this session we explore how to help your clients get clear about what they really want, and how to use Clean Language in a way that really fits with your own kind of bodywork practice. We also look at how Clean Language can help when working with trauma.

Key themes: How to ask about Outcomes, The Guiding Principles of Clean Language, Integrating Clean Language into your practice.

Nick Pole has 30 years’ experience practicing and teaching Shiatsu and for 15 years has been teaching mind/body practitioners how to integrate Clean Language into their work. He has also studied Seiki, NLP, Clean Language and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. His book ‘Words That Touch - How to Ask Questions Your Body Can Answer’ (Singing Dragon, 2017) is a comprehensive guide to using Clean Language in bodywork therapies. www.nickpole.com

Sarah Mclellan, Assistant teacher

I am a Body Work, Movement, and Massage Therapist, Tutor, and Supervisor.  My approach is rooted in a holistic, compassionate, and trauma-informed perspective. I have also studied Polyvagal Theory with Deb Dana, Conscious Relating with Jan Day, Neuro Affective Touch with Dr Aline La Pierre, and ‘Clean Language’ as offered by Nick Pole in his online course.

Using Clean Language ‘was more powerful than anything I would have dared to suggest in a guided visualisation’ Mona Chopra, M.A., M.S, Licensed Acupuncturist New York City, NCCAOM Board Certificate, Hypnotherapy . EFT Tapping . Meditation . Yoga

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