Another year of twists and turns, ups and downs…and yet an incredibly rewarding year. My annual “Year in review” process lies ahead in the festive break to come; and I imagine I will share some of my reflections with you in due course. And so on a lighter note, this – my last post of …
A self-confessed enneatype Six, those of you familiar with the teachings of enneagram will appreciate how at the forefront of my lived-experience this couplet will be! Writing this draft a few weeks back – as I kicked off the third term of my enneagram professional development group – I was increasingly appreciative for what the …
When I first moved to Eastbourne as a student, I made the visit (like thousands of sightseers do) to the beauty spot of Beachy Head. I remember walking the clifftop and experiencing something I can only describe as vertigo: well, what it actually felt like was a pull over to the edge. Morbid curiosity? (After …
Perhaps the use of George Michael’s guitar as the featured image for this blog post points to my somewhat buoyant mood…I have just finished penning the final couplet of this 14 piece series! Today, I release the fifth – a short and sweet…. Bad Faith and congruence I might equally have titled this couplet “inauthenticity …
This week, I return to my pre-retreat project of running through the 14 couplets I see lie at the heart of the humanistic psychotherapy tradition. Last time around, we looked at our situated freedom. Now, we see how freedom to choose comes with responsibility…. We are constantly making choices AND we arguably have more choice (and …
I am writing from the Dieppe – Newhaven ferry, returning from a week of solitary retreat in my beloved Normandy. My hope was to immerse myself in 10 to 12 hours of practice each day – the practice at hand being Guru Yoga, the fourth practice of the Vajrayana preliminaries, or Ngondro¹. Practicing for that …
This is week three of our journey down the pinball alley of dialectics that, for me, make up the existential-phenomenological tradition of counselling and psychotherapy (also known as the humanistic tradition – since the philosophy aims to describe the experience of what it is to be human). As I explained a few weeks ago, it …
Last week we began “tripping the dialectic fantastic” with a consideration of existence and essence; a couplet made explicit through Sartre’s famous expression “existence precedes essence”. This weeks couplet is also inspired by Sartre, as we will see in the following text from a first drafting of my second book*: for Sartre, the lack of …
Finding a little more freefall after a period of stuckness, I am engaging with my writing with much enjoyment. I am getting in a pattern of “Monday-for-Friday”: reflection and research on Mondays, bringing my ideas onto the page on Friday. Already I feel I am introducing the theme of this post – as the creative …
A couple of weeks ago I shared that it had been a good summer: one that ticked all the boxes across body, mind, and spirit. I also mentioned that it was not without its challenges. One of the ‘good’ things about being an existential psychotherapist – a Buddhist one at that – is the reality …