"Reliance on moving factors (an education, a house, a career, a relationship....) as a means of having security
is not a good idea. Moving factors will give you movement, which is pretty good as it makes our lives interesting. But if you want stability you have to attend to the nature of mind itself” - James Low
Counselling and Psychotherapy
I am a humanistic counsellor (BACP Accredited) and a mindfulness based psychotherapist (UKCP Accredited).
I integrate Buddhist wisdom with western personality formation theory to help clients enquire into the nature of mind.
This includes thoughts, feelings, emotions and beliefs that have come into existence based on both external intersectionalities or factors and internal intrapsychic patterns.
I believe that the closer you turn to your inner pain, distress and difficulty, the more you are able to live a full and congruent life. I feel that if we can turn inwards to fully experience our emotional pain, then we can move through difficulty.
I see a compassionate holding space as being essential to a therapeutic relationship, where a client can feel safe to explore their emotional pain at depth.
"Awareness is our true self; it's what we are. We don’t have to try to develop awareness; we simply need to notice how we block awareness, with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our judgments." - Charlotte Joko Beck
This modality asks a client to find some inner spaciousness, at a deeper level than the personality or persona that may be feeling desperate for a solution or 'fix'.
It invites a client to return to their Higher Self or Source, in order to reconnect to their fullness. This is something that has been understood in religions and spiritual modalities since the start of time. But you don’t need to follow any religions or spiritual beliefs to come back into alignment with a Self that feels more settled, deeper, more connected to the fullness of what it means to be human.
When we start to let go of what gets in the way of a wider perspective of who we are, more of us can come through. We can become a living bridge, through our embodied Self, to meet ourselves again.
This journey can include acknowledging and feeling our darkest, most lonely, desperate, or saddest places. It can involve processing shame, terror, rage, despair, rejection, and our other ‘worst’ feelings that we have suppressed through dissociation or numbing out over time.
This enquiry invites a client to respect or honour these parts of ourselves instead of avoiding them, and deepen into a dynamic, creative relationship with them, in order to connect again to our true nature.
Through deep contact, our self-awareness can grow and this, in itself, creates change as the layers fall away and we are able to move through our lives with less emotional charge and a greater sense of presence.
As a gay man, I also have experience and training in gender diversity and living a life that feels right for you.