Walking into work yesterday ahead of teaching on a two day block with the Masters students I felt a deep sense of gratitude. The University campus was just coming alive; looking through the windows of various teaching spaces, people crouched over their laptops or engrossed in books sipping a coffee. Imagining the day to come, …
I can’t quite believe it is two months since I blogged. It’s not the first time there has been a lag between posts; but this time it was very much a conscious decision. What writing time I have had needed to go towards book writing and edging my way through the 60 or so essays …
Writing for the book draft has slowed. What started pre-retreat as a sense of edginess transmuted post-retreat into a conscious decision to step back from the keyboard. The edginess was a tectonic plate-like meeting of my drive to finish and my need to break this summer. Speaking with Rinpoche on retreat brought the “high lung” …
Back from retreat, and spending my days settling back into “reality”. I haven’t found the transition as steep this time around. Maybe a testament to practice pervading more deeply into life and less “this” (normality) versus “that” (the container of retreat)? I certainly feel a little more practiced in the shift between worlds: a developing …
I’ve just returned home from a two-day, walking adventure: hiking over to Alfriston, and making the return to Lewes the next day. It’s a replication of a trip my wife and I did two months ago. As a comparison of the blog header image reveals, we are transitioning into another phase of summer: and I …
This week I have been queuing up ideas around how my approach to therapy might fit with a description of bio-psycho-social-spiritual; building on the ideas of Engel (1977) who first proposed the “biological, psychological, and social, must be taken into account in every health care task”. A philosophy of clinical care (a way of understanding …
I’m a little under halfway with the project of short essays that will form Part 3 of my book on humanistic psychotherapy. The next collection is entitled “with a little help from our friends”, and will consider how the humanistic practitioner might benefit from engaging with ideas from other therapeutic modalities. As a tutor on …
One of the stickiest traps (and frustrations) for the early career therapist is to find themselves in the realm of a client’s aboutism. What starts as the intention to “really hear and witness a client’s story” becomes a week after week reoccurrence, and soon lands us in impasse…going nowhere; if anything, solidifying what is an …
Another enjoyable week devoting much of my time to writing. I am progressing well with the essays that will form part 3 of my book Humanistic psychotherapy: experiencing second order change. This week I want to share an essay focusing on the dialectic of empathy and challenge; one we might summarise through the sentiment of not …
Back in 2023 I had a brief back and forth exchange with Gestaltist, Ruella Frank. I had approached her with a question that had come up in a peer supervision / study session with a colleague: a curiosity about Frank’s use of the word transubjective to describe the relational quality between therapist and client. Along …