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 …
I will soon be facilitating another “Through the lens of the enneagram” group for therapists. Now in its third term, the group meet weekly to deepen a personal and professional understanding of the system. Its less ‘course’, and more an ever evolving interaction – we share some of the enneagram concepts; our own experiences of …
August makes way for September; and I find myself – like millions of others – making my way back into the familiar routines. It has been a good, long break for me this year: 8 weeks away from teaching commitments, 5 weeks away from therapist and supervisor roles. Next week, it all gets going again …
Last week, after a day with clients I closed the door of the Wilbury Clinic for the final time; tomorrow, I will walk through the door of the Wilbury Clinic for my scheduled client sessions for the first time. After many years of the clinic being in Wilbury Road, it (and all of us practitioner-client …