'Like a snake, my heart has shed its skin. I hold it here in my hand, full of honey and wounds.' - Garcia Lora
'May we transform what hinders us, so it becomes a support' - Buddhist Prayer
Core Process Mindfulness Based Psychotherapy and Humanistic Existentialist Counselling
I'm Gwyn and am an experienced counsellor (BACP) and psychotherapist (UKCP), and I feel that a relational mindfulnesss approach can help you to contact and work through pain, emotional distress and difficulty. If we turn towards our emotional pain, instead of avoid it, without becoming overwhelmed, we can process and move through our difficulties. A safe therapeutic relationship can be a powerful mirror to help us to work with our inner worlds with deep compassion and openness, and clarity can come through. We can learn to accept what is happening and develop a sense of equanimity for how things are, and this in itself can bring insight and deeper levels of contact with our inner wisdom and awareness.
Areas I work in:
- Working through Emotional Pain
- Trauma Informed
- Sadness
- Anxiety and Fear
- Anger
- Life Transitions
- Emergent Self
- Disassociation, Numbness, Defensiveness
- Gender Diversity, Sexuality
This approach combines Eastern Buddhist philosophies with western psychodynamic ways of understanding patterning and neuroscientific ways of understanding nervous system regulation.
Clients often ask me:
What tools do you work with that could help me with my difficulties?
Here are some 'tools' or approaches that I think are helpful for clients to work with, develop and access for themselves to support their wellbeing, and to grow and develop:
1: Resourcing
This is a ‘common-sense’ tool that helps us to feel centred, and stabilized in our inner and outer life so that we feel resilient, robust and effective in order to deepen into our emotional difficulties. It is really important that we feel ‘good enough’ in the world. A contemplative therapeutic enquiry aims to empower a client to feel safe and stabilized in themselves and in the world, so that inner changes to structures of self and external changes can take place incrementally and in ways that feel developmental and growthful. It may feel important to work on how we participate in the world from a ‘good enough’ place in us, alongside the inevitable challenges and difficulties that come with opening ourselves to our inner emotional pain.
As we consider our resources, we might look at what sustains us, which may include people in our lives, our work, our relationship with our bodies, our intersectionalities (such as race, sexuality, working background, personal and family history, interests). It is helpful to challenge ourselves by being open to any deficits in our resources, and finding pragmatic ways of meeting those needs, such as joining groups, connecting to our work effectively, and reviewing our life structures.
2: Witness Consciousness
This is at the heart of a contemplative practice and way of working. If I can connect to my thoughts, feelings and emotions and also observe them, then I am able to work reflectively. But if I contract around my thoughts, feelings and emotions, then I lose my capacity to reflect. And if I disassociate from my thoughts, feelings and emotions and only talk about them, then I lose my capacity to embody. As a rule of thumb, 50% in and 50% besides helps us to stay grounded, aware, and at our reflective working edge. In this way, we can learn to hold our ‘middle ground’ without numbing out to or becoming overly entangled in our experiences. A contemplative phrase that I think is helpful here is ‘the seeing is the doing’.
Being both ‘in’ and ‘out of’ our experience, allows us to work in a responsive way to our experience. If we become more aware of how we may have a tendency to contract around certain areas in our life, this can give us more clarity and awareness so that we can start to meet our situations differently. In witnessing our experience from a wider perspective, by bringing awareness to how we see ourselves, we can start to make different connections from pre-meditated scripts. We start to feel less limited by the frameworks of our previous perceptions.
3: Nervous System Regulation
This is a powerful somatic, or embodied, tool that helps us to work in a neuroscientific way with our sense of self. It helps us to gain stabilization, safety and nervous system balance. Without reflective tools, we can find ourselves ‘stuck’ in survival modes, such as fight, flight or freeze. Our thoughts and feelings of threat or danger can ‘flood’ our systems when we are in survival, which can lead to burnout and overwhelm. While the mobilized energy of ‘survival’ is very healthy, and we need this in order to live full lives, if we get ‘stuck’ in this energy, it can deplete us over time.
Modulating our arousal by putting on the emotional brakes (or if we are lethargic, activating our mobilizing energy) is something we can do consciously in order to work in our ‘window of tolerance’. If we are feeling more ‘green’ (calm) or ‘blue’ (active/alert), rather than ‘yellow’ (lethargic), ‘orange’ (flight/fight) or ‘red’ (hyper-aroused or freeze), we can access more perspective and make wiser choices for ourselves.
4: Decompensation
Decompensation means letting go of our previously unconscious compensatory habits, or letting go of the conditioned self. This tool frees us up to our own choice of how to be to ourselves and how to be in the world. Defence mechanisms, protectors, masks and adaptations are vital, necessary tools in order to participate fully in groups, and to live a full life. Like all of our qualities, our defences become problematic if we overly-identify with them or rely on them at a cost to our developmental or individuation needs. Our defence mechanisms may need reviewing, so that we are more in control of both the container of our experience, as well as our contained experience. We are both the container and the contained, and as we grow our capacity to reflect, we can also replace younger defences with defences that work better for us in our current stage of life. Unconscious defence mechanisms have a cost to our authenticity and inner vitality. As we decompensate, over time, we can start to meet our needs more effectively and work with inter-connectedness in life, where we can live without shame, for example, shutting us down.
Becoming less conditioned means revisiting our childhood patterns, and understanding how we learnt to behave in certain ways in order to survive. Through loosening our grip on our childhood patterns, we are freer to nourish our adult awareness of both sometimes meeting our needs, and sometimes meeting others’ needs, in relationship. We can become more open to our own inner and outer complexities and can meet the complexities of an uncertain world.
As we work with decompensating, we meet parts of the self that we may have exiled or disowned. This is ‘shadow’ work, and helps us to reconnect to split parts of ourselves. While this can be a painful process, because we are turning towards something that we have tended to avoid, we develop a more mature psychological relationship with the non-dual truth of existence, rather than living less realistically in the extremities or existential polarities of ‘good’ or ‘bad’. In meeting our ‘shadow’ we can start to let go of such black-and-white thinking which can free something within us to live with less judgment or persecution towards ourselves. We can often be surprised at what we have suppressed, and this can often be a deeply creative process where we start to become more open to what we once abandoned within ourselves.
5: Integration
This can be considered a stage of therapy, and is part of our every-day lives. It helps us to emotionally find our breathing space, and to allow time and spaciousness for our internal and external processes. There is an underlying sense of trust in our processes, and inner guidance, that our bodies are ecosystems and can self-regulate. We don’t need to ‘do’ anything in order to become ‘wiser’, or develop ‘awareness’, because these are inherent qualities. Our therapeutic work is to unblock ourselves from the obscurations to our brilliant sanity, that is like the blue sky behind the clouds. Integration helps us to develop the capacity to widen our container, so that we can become more aware of our thoughts, feelings and emotions, without overly-identifying with them. Our thoughts, feelings and emotions can just ‘be there’ or can ‘rattle in the attic’ without us getting too caught up in them.
We can allow integration through putting on the emotional brakes in our lives, and developing a contemplative practice that includes unstructured time in order to allow our inner processes time to coalesce. While this may feel counter-intuitive, our emotional bodies need time to ‘rest and digest’ and is something that we can consciously explore and experiment with. A daily meditation, or sitting practice, or exercise, or time in nature, for example, are all ways that we can allow holistic integration so that we are not putting ourselves under too much pressure or overly straining for psychological change.
In a sense integration brings us full circle to esource, an acknowledgement of how all of our tools and effective ways of being in the world are inter-woven in our own particular configuration of being human.
"Awareness is our true self; it's what we are. We don’t have to try to develop awareness; we simply need to notice how we block awareness, with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our judgments."
- Charlotte Joko Beck
Links
Karuna Institute
karunainstitute.co.uk/
karunadartmoor.co.uk/
