Relational Mindfulness Psychotherapy (UKCP Accred.)
Existentialist Counselling (BACP Accred.)
Somatic Trauma Training Informed
'If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you'
-Nietzche
After the war, we lived with a closed door.
Look over there: the door which we must never open.
And for 80 years we lacked nothing and lived completely free of care.
There was no longer any memory or sorrow in the world.
But one day someone opened it.
And when we looked, suddenly everything we had ever lost:
Loved ones and companions, and all the bad things that had ever happened to us
Became as clear as if it had been rushing towards us.
And we were finally able to integrate our grief.
- Adapted from the 2nd Branch of the Mabinogi, an ancient set of Welsh stories
This modality combines Eastern mindfulness approaches with Western psychodynamic approaches in a way that offers clients a holistic and integrative way of moving through difficulties. It sees the therapeutic relationship as an important part of a client's way of developing relational insights and understandings of themselves in an inter-personal way.
We need a powerful, healthy ego, in order to enquire into and transcend our identity with self and others. This can be a deeply creative process of letting-be and letting-go of patterns that no longer work for us. Because the self can be seen as a dynamic process, we can experiment with add-ons, emotional upgrades and growing-down as well as growing-out.
A relational mindfulness approach can help us to disidentify from our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and patterns, and give us a wider aperture. We can start to notice where we are stuck, and how we are holding ourselves in abeyance. We can take deeper ownership of our lives and make choices for ourselves that feel in more alignment with our passions, intentionalities and visions in both our internal and external life.
We can come back to asking ourselves some essential questions, and deepen into those enquiries, such as:
- Who am I at this stage of my life?
- What do I want? How am I going to get that?
- What is happening for me now in my internal relationship with myself?
- Can I deepen into that?
Such questions help us to navigate complex inner and outer worlds. They combine Eastern wisdom around self-acceptance, equanimity, loving kindness and curiosity, with Western approaches around individuation and personal growth and development. A holistic approach values all helpful and integrative ways of working with alleviating pain and suffering, and sees life in the middle ground of 'both and' rather than 'either or'.
We can widen our own container of the psyche so that we can include our inner conflicts, different inner parts, different expressions of self, a wide energetic range of thoughts, feelings and moods. We can hold all of these, rather than contract around particular aspects of mind. We are both the container and the contained, and can turn our attention both to our experience as well as the witness to our experience. As we practice this, we can become less emotionally charged and reactive, and can respond more wisely to the inevitable ebbs and flows of life.
We can also make wiser choices in terms of how we want to change and put action in place that helps us to grow and change. As we do that, we can also notice the ways we might sabotage our own efforts, and notice and anticipate blocks and defence mechanisms. Part of alchemy is giving this process time, and staying at our working edge, so that these inhibitors start to soften, so that we can participate fully in our movement forwards. It can be helpful during these painful 'cocoon' periods to remind ourselves with kindness that if we want to change, then it is important not to keep everything the same.
I think the poem 'Autobiography in 5 Chapters' by Portia Nelson conveys this:
I
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost … I am hopeless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.
II
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I'm in the same place.
But it isn't my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.
III
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in … it’s a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.
IV
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
V
I walk down another street.
Regulating the nervous system in relationship
Becoming more aware of our neuroception can help us to regulate our nervous systems so that we can differentiate our present experience from our memories. By putting on the emotional brakes or energising the system we can 'be' with greater clarity in a place of responsiveness rather than reactivity.
Being Present
If we sit with a sense of loving-kindness for ourselves, a sense of compassion for the pain we experience, a sense of openness in our relationships with others and a sense of acceptance and equanimity for the way things are, we can feel more fully ourselves. When a therapist has a contemplative practice that includes cultivating these qualities, this can help a client to attune to their own relational field of deeper mindfulness and awareness of the influencing qualities of compassion.
'May we transform what hinders us, so it becomes a support' - Buddhist Prayer
Authentic Relating
Becoming more authentic frees us from conditioned patterning that may have emerged as survival strategies in particular relational configurations. We become split from aspects of self as a way of surviving in our families and wider relational environments. As we feel safer in relationship through a therapeutic holding field our bodies start to integrate these split parts as the defences naturally start to melt or dissolve. We tend to experience these shifts as a sense of relief, restored vitality and resolution as we psychologically mature or individuate in the inter-personal space.
This helps us to feel more grounded and whole. Rather than judging ourselves or others or situations as 'good' or 'bad' or be at the mercy of other polarities, we can learn to hold the polarities and allow more inner and outer complexity. As we practice non-dual realities we learn to live more congruently in the middle ground of experience, without contracting around the inevitable ebbs and flows of relationships in life.
This approach helps us to turn towards our emotional pain rather than avoid it, and integrate its message as a natural part of our inherent health. We can practice meeting our shadow, the parts of the self we have internalised as shameful and integrate our deeper humanity so that we have more conscious choice over how we relate to ourselves and others in the relational field. Until we do that we tend to move further away from our natural presence as a natural way of defending a false self. This might feel like a kind of emptiness or flatness as we are bi-passing our inner processes, and feels very different to the radiant luminosity of 'big sky mind' or our true nature connection.
Processing our emotional wounds
As we are traumatised and emotionally wounded in relationship, which can be seen as an inevitable part of being in relationship, we can also heal through relationship. A therapeutic relationship aims to offer a reparative relational holding field where healing can come in and affect both client and therapist in the inter-personal. This is seen as a co-creative space where openness and being with not-knowing can help a deeply organic and creative process in.
I think Thich Nhat Hanh clarifies our aligned connection really well, when he says that a wave is a wave and is, at the same time, water. We don't need to attain a self, or 'do' anything in order to progress, or develop, or individuate. We are already free, whole, and connected to ourselves and others. 'The wave does not have to look for water. It already is water.' When we are present, and connected to ourselves as we are, in this moment, our fear can dissipate.
"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
