'You, yourself, as much as anybody on the entire universe, deserve your love and affection'
- The Buddha
Humanistic Existentialist Counselling and Relational Mindfulness Psychotherapy
- Working through emotional pain
- Sadness
- Anxiety, Fear,
- Anger
- Life transitions
- Psychospiritual Emergence / Higher Self connection
- Disassociation, numbness, Defensiveness
- Gender diversity, Sexuality
Psychotherapy and counselling can help us to be with ourselves in more accepting, kind ways.
If we can turn towards our pain, and bring kind attention to what we are experiencing, this helps us to gain clarity and awareness. Our emotional bodies understand this, so when we work on deepening our connection to our felt sense, we become more aligned to our more grounded, balanced Self.
When we emotionally slow down, and notice our inner life, we are engaging with our processes in a way that allows us to work with more spaciousness and to connect to ourselves and others in a way that is more authentic.
"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
In working with self-compassion, acceptance and kindness, and having this witnessed and mirrored by a therapist, we can start to free ourselves from stuck patterns, often unconsciously developed in childhood.
We can grow our container and become a more conscious participant, and not just an observer, of our experience, so that we can create change in our inner and outer lives. Through exploring the way we contain our experience, we can become more contemplative in the way that we live our lives, noticing the way we are thrown into ‘samsara’ or pain of existence, as an ordinary part of our daily life’s conditions. When we reflect on the way we contain, and are the container, of our experience, we can find it in us to become more responsive. This can help us to move through difficulty.
We can also develop an understanding of what is contained within us, and appreciate our distress or emotional difficulty, with kindness and non-judgment. Then we can become more open and curious about allowing different inner parts to integrate, come in, grow and evolve. In honouring our limited mental formation patterns, defence mechanisms, and our protective patterns, we acknowledge, validate and appreciate ourselves as we are.
Rather than favour joy over distress, this approach helps us to contain the whole Self, so that we can develop our capacity to meet our own humanity, including our emotional pain, in our experience, without becoming defeated or collapsed by it.
A relational mindfulness approach can help us to include experiences that we may have avoided, such as anger, boredom, sadness, despair and shame. Instead of pushing them away, we can integrate them, and be with them more consciously, so that they don’t stay split within us. If we don’t include them in our ‘mandala’ of life, we have a tendency to act them out in the way we live our lives. Much of the work can be in discovering our resistances, and honouring this as our experience, so that uncomfortable insight or awareness can be welcomed.
"Acknowledge the wave, but stay with the ocean" - Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
Working with openness helps us to try out different choices for ourselves and to experiment with our neural plasticity, so that we can continue to explore possibilities without judgment, or shaming ourselves. In so doing, we work in a compassionate way in the relative truth, rather than absolutes, so that we see the work as incremental. Working with our emotional wounds is painful, but if we can meet that pain with kind honesty, and an intention to process that pain, inner resolutions can come through.
Links
Karuna Institute
karunainstitute.co.uk/
karunadartmoor.co.uk/
