Rainforest Mind: Shhh, listen. Being, doing and love.

I’m standing with my eyes closed in the middle of a busy street and listening. Why? And what can I learn from that experience? I talk about the false opposites of being and doing, and why I prefer lovable to perfect. I mention the Bang And Olafson podcast Sound of the Cities, and an early […]

New Year, New You? How to Make Real Change

It’s that time of year again. We’re just in to the second week of January and many of us will have broken our New Year’s resolutions already. What’s going on, and how can we really change? The New Year is often a time for reflection and contemplation. We look at the past year, celebrate some […]

Grief and Climate Change

In our Buddhist community, at the invitation of our local XR group, we dedicate one practice session each month to the living earth. In our most recent session I talked about and made a space for grief, and I’ll share some of those same thoughts here. Grief I remember a childhood holiday to Cornwall. We […]

We have to go slow to go fast

We come to therapy when we want to change. Sometimes we are desperate to change, and that urgency makes complete sense; we feel awful and we want to feel better, or we can see the downsides of our moods and habits and are worried about getting into more trouble. If our whole system was ready […]

Why therapists should be clients

I’ve just returned to personal therapy. I’m confident this is a good thing for my clients, as well as for me personally. Being a client reminds me how it is for my own clients to be in therapy. How strange it is to come to a first session, and the nerves that come with imagining […]

What is Wild Mind?

I’m half-way through my training in Wild Therapy. You may have seen me writing about the power of working outside before (here and here). We work outside a lot on the Wild Therapy training, but it isn’t the whole story. As well as appreciating and coming into relationship with the wild out there, Wild Therapy […]

Is love a dirty word?

Read my article about therapists love for their clients at the Counselling Directory: is Love a Dirty Word?

Healing with Internal Family Systems

Read my new article on the Counselling Directory website, about healing with IFS – a research backed form of therapy: Healing with Internal Family Systems. Why is there a picture of Inside Out accompanying this link? Because IFS is all about working with the different parts that make us human.

One thing you can do to improve your mental health

This is a piece about songlines, and about maps, and about one thing you can do to improve your mental health. A couple of weeks ago I was walking through a valley on the edge of the Forest of Bowland. I crossed over the river Roeburn at the bottom of the valley, and the woodland […]

The magic ingredient of therapy

There are lots of wonderful techniques that we learnt in therapy training: different ways of reflecting what you have said, different ways of asking you questions and teasing out the issues that you bring to therapy, using feelings in the body, or using the natural world as a resource. These are all great. And there […]