"Do not focus on that... That is spending the wind without raising the sails" - Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Psychotherapy and Counselling
When you are feeling lost, alone, frightened or quite stuck, it can be helpful to hear yourself In the company of a psychotherapist or counsellor, who can empathise and help you to attune to your inner world with clarity and compassion.
Information of the modalities I work from
I work from a Core Process psychotherapy modality, which is a Buddhist mindfulness way of working. This combines eastern philosophies on our relationship with consciousness, with western psychodynamic theories that help us to see our early childhood patterns with greater awareness. This modality also brings in neuroscientific ways of looking at how our biology shifts our stories, moods and ways of self-regulating through our unconscious parasympathetic (curiosity, rest and digest) and sympathetic (mobilized) ervous systems.
I have also integrated a counselling training in existentialist humanistic modality, which creates space for meaning making, choices, being with the complexities of inner parts, and similarly to a Buddhist philosophy, turning towards pain or suffering with curiosity, and a willingness to process what we might unconsciously and consciously avoid within ourselves. So much good work can be achieved when we metabolise what is in our shadowlands.
Recently I have also undergone training with Babette Rothschild’s trauma training which helps us look at traumas as separate events in our lives, so that we can develop the skill of dual-awareness: helping our emotional bodies differentiate between the past trauma or traumas we have experienced, and the now. This gives us more control of our narratives, and of our traumas or events, so that we are no longer vicious cycling in the future or that our traumas are no longer in control of us.
The kind of tools these modalities offer
I find Buddhism, existentialism, and working with neuroception endlessly fascinating. That’s because our relationship with consciousness is mysterious, beautiful and also endlessly fascinating and complex. And our pain is very real, and is to be met with respect, curiosity and a willingness to appreciate the fullness of Self, rather than try to work out our problems from a persona based level, which I find quite limiting and less interesting. If we can widen the aperture, and look at how we ‘make ourselves’ I think this offers a far more creative space to create transformational change, and connect to parts of us that we may have abandoned or never have accessed in the first place.
These tools I like to think of as compassionate based tools:
Examples of Buddhist mindfulness tools:
- The three ‘poisons’.
Craving, Aversion, Ignorance. We often seek things we want (craving), and push away things we don’t (aversion), and we often don’t know what we don’t know (ignorance). This can all be seen as grist for the mill in therapy, rather than carry shame, judgment or guilt. When we acknowledge that we make mistakes, are often prone to our patterning and conditioning, and can get stuck in our vicious cycling, and this is also the case for the people in our lives, we can offer ourselves and others more grace, compassion and acknowledgment that we are all works in progress, and the three ‘poisons’ are always near at hand.
- Witness Consciousness
When we are 50% in our experience and 50% witnessing our experience from witness or observer stance, we are at the right closeness and right distance to our experience and material. Then we can process and metabolise and integrate what we need in order to move through our difficulties. This can lead us to our own enlightenment path, rather than keep us in endarkenment cycles, whatever those spiritual concepts mean for us in our personal lives.
- The 5 Skandhas: body, feelings, mind formations, perception, consciousness
This is central to deconstructing the self, and how we can work with destabilizing our habitual patterns and the ways that we have consciously and unconsciously lived in the personas of our lives. If we can develop a relationship with these aspects of Self, internally, we can change how we relate to each part of ourselves.
Body: our sensations, connecting to our whole Body not just our thinking mind. What our Body holds, physically, and in terms or internal relationship with our Body.
Feelings: In Buddhism this is seen as three responses: negative, neutral, positive, before they become emotions so we notice them on a subtle level of energy.
- Mind Formations: Our thinking, loops, patterns of mind, affect – emotions which cloud our thinking (or thinking which clouds our emotions), mood states,
Perceptions: The labels we put on things, our values, our judgments, the beliefs we hold about the world and ourselves in the world – are all constructs of Mind.
Consciousness: Our wide open relationship with psyche, our direct experience with ground, with others, with the cosmos.
Of course, to me the 5 skandhas offers endless exploration into the psyche and the great human experiment in terms of ‘how we make a human’, which can be a very rich and vivid, deeply creative way of approaching our struggles and pain, and in a way is fun and enjoyable.
- The Brahma Viharas
These are qualities that we sit with in our contemplative practice, in order to develop them in our lives, so that we can create inner stability, groundedness and harmony in relationship to ourselves and others. These qualities help us to connect to our ‘inner wise person’ and acknowledge the ‘inner wise person’ in others. I think it’s helpful to become a representative of the divine within ourselves, and to live that place, which includes and acknowledges the difficulties of being human, and of our inevitably painful experiences. The four brahma viharas, or limitless qualities are:
Loving Kindness: We treat ourselves and our inner parts as our friends, our teachers, no matter how uncomfortable our experience we turn to these parts with kindness and we are good to ourselves, and treat ourselves well.
Compassion: We stay in therapeutic relationship with our difficulties, and fully acknowledge how difficult it is, and the complexities that we approach with subtlety and delicacy. We don’t look for black and white solutions or fixes, and we don’t tell ourselves to hurry up, or chastise ourselves in any way – which we see as ‘top dog’ defence mechanisms. But we honour it all, including our defence mechanisms which are only trying to keep us safe, but can also keep us stuck. We create internal spaciousness to be with our pain with a real intention to meet it, see it and stay attuned to parts of us that need to be met fully and integrated, which can only fully happen when we feel safe to show up In our vulnerability. So we turn to ourselves with kind eyes.
Rejoicing in Others’ Merits
We can learn to acknowledge that other people in many ways are similar to us, yet separate, and everyone goes through life with pain, suffering and difficulty. We can learn to be in relationship with others with kindness, despite their flaws and confusions, as we acknowledge that we too have our flaws and confusions. We can wish others well, and notice our own shadowlands, if uncomfortable territory appears within ourselves, because this shows us where our working edge is, and what we want for ourselves, or how we want to show up in life. Of course we respect our boundaries and values, but we acknowledge the universality of pain, and are able to meet the underlying and often unconscious struggles of another, in a way that can make contact with their divine Self, regardless of the life circumstances.
Equanimity
This is a wonderful quality of acceptance, of a kind of Zen approach of ‘it is what it is’. We don’t need to like something in order to accept that it is the reality. Equanimity offers spaciousness, an emotional and spiritual capacity to be with circumstances as they are, with patience, forebearance and a capacity to endure and live through what we might prefer to avoid or fight or run away from. Instead we are always, as contemplative practitioners and in the therapy room, turning towards what we might fear, with a sense of well this is here whether I like it or not. So can I be with it, in a spirit of curiosity and enquiry.
