Hello and welcome to the blog section of my website! Here I will be sharing my thoughts, perspectives and musings on a range of wellbeing and therapy related subjects which I hope will be of value in different ways to different people. So why am I writing these posts? Well I guess there are several reasons…
Firstly, I just really enjoy the creative aspect of writing them. I had a shared blog previously with a friend and I loved the sense of inspiration that accompanied ideas of how I could relate the approaches I’ve trained in to every day life in ways that could be relevant to a broad range of people.
Additionally, my spiritual framework holds generosity as an important principle and I like the idea of offering information and perspectives freely that might be useful to people. Tied in with this motivation is the fact that I’ve now spent so many years of my life studying psychology, counselling and various psychotherapy approaches that it seems a bit of a waste not to share what I’ve learnt as widely as possible.
I also hope that if people are interested in attending my day retreats, courses or one-to-one sessions and want to know a bit more about me first, by reading a few of my posts they will be able to get an insight into who I am and my way of working.
So now I’ve explained a little about why I’m writing these posts, I’d like to say a bit about what I’ll be writing about. Having trained in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and attended many meditation retreats, mindfulness significantly influences my way of thinking. I will say more about how I would personally define mindfulness in a future post as it is a complex concept and worthy of a more in-depth exploration.
Closely aligned to MBCT is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which is also a Third Wave Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. This approach uses principles of mindfulness to help people overcome obstacles in moving towards what they value most in life.
I am also passionate about Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT), a further Third Wave Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. This approach focuses on helping people to lessen their self-criticism, become kinder to themselves and develop their self-soothing abilities through compassion-focused meditation exercises.
These three therapies will be my main focus in my early stages of writing, however I plan to also diversify later as I move more towards an integrative counselling framework as the year progresses.