Dare I say “Happy New Year”? Given the on-going pandemic, it is difficult to get aligned behind this traditional opening salutation of January. I, like many others perhaps, thought 2021 would bring more hope…so maybe I am a little more cautious 12 months later. However, given its the first blogpost of 2022, and in fact …
Each year on the Post-graduate diploma counselling course, my colleague Dwight and I take the trainee therapists through an exercise of reflection on self-care. Perhaps more than any other profession, self-care for therapists is a vital consideration given how ’self’ is the instrument underpinning the relationship with our clients. If the therapist is responsible for …
This past week has been one of consolidation. Mid-way through the first academic term of the New Year, it has been helpful for me to take a step back from client work and reduce my teaching-related commitments to a minimum. Having worked last weekend facilitating a gestalt training workshop, it was also important to find …
A friend and I were recently talking about our experiences of living through this pandemic, and how it increases the “driving pressure” on what are already challenging situations: I was talking about the nature of my work and the intensity of Ngöndro; she is currently going through the sale of her mother’s house and deciding …
Each year for nearly a decade now, I have used my time over the Christmas and New Year break to turn inward and reflect on the year that has been. This year, that process took on new profundity as I continue to navigate my experience of living in this time of pandemic and its consequences. …
…has happened since I last wrote in mid-June. The sameness of life (which inspired a friend to call each day of the week ‘blursday’) under the heavy blanket of a global pandemic, coupled by the multitude of emotions (same friend calls this ‘corona-coaster’) sets up a strange paradox in daily life for me. I’ve simply …
I’ve shared on this blog a number of times my journey with anxiety: once out of my awareness (covered up with strategies and false appearance of strength), uncovered and fought against (like a foe), and now something of a companion (from whom I get to learn and grow). Many of us will have experienced emotions …
Read more “Fearlessness and courage: a need to distinguish?”
Week 13 of my personal lockdown, and I seem to be moving through a new phase in this consistently morphing experience of COVID-19. Or probably more accurately, COVID-19 is an amplifier to processes going on below the radar of my normal experiencing of being a human being. Constantly in movement. Thoughts, feelings, moods, behaviours – …
As I sat on the garden bench at the front of my house this morning (flanked by my two tree friends), I was able to tune in to a deeper sense of contentment; this has been somewhat out of reach for me recently. I, like many of those I spoke to last week, felt the …
I’ve taken to asking people I meet online – friends, family, students, supervisees – the question “what are you learning about yourself in all of this?” I’m intrigued by the ‘growth’ aspects that the COVID-19 pandemic is revealing. As a relative newbie to the Vajrayana path, I am appreciative of the View – that the …