Services

THE WAY OF WELL-BEING offers one-on-one counselling, evolutionary coaching, and personal & transpersonal therapy.

Working together can be short term or long term.

PERSONAL PSYCHOTHERAPY

Every individual has lived a complex life that includes difficult and sometimes traumatic experiences. Often, these experiences were difficult to make sense of at the time, and so they live inside us more or less unresolved. The residue of these experiences is often the formation of protected or defended areas in ourselves, little bunkers, areas that are fortified by psychic scar tissue. And rightly so! We have indeed required these protective layers for our survival until now.

And then we begin to notice something. These areas are showing up in our lives through distinct patterns of friction and inflammation in our home life, work life, family life, in our parenting and so on. Addictions are just one example. Perhaps it’s now time, we begin to realise, to more fully acknowledge, feel and integrate what we have experienced. In doing so, we come to more fully know and even outgrow these earlier protective responses. In the safe space of the therapy session, we can see, feel and honour the lived truth of these aspects of our self, even as we can begin to discern new possibilities on the horizon.

Therapy activates and supports a deep, personally transformative process that allows us to live more freely and flowingly as the one we know deep down we are here to be.

EVOLUTIONARY COACHING

Evolutionary coaching recognizes that each individual is living a dynamic process of personal growth and self-discovery, whether they are aware of that or not. Events that arise through a person’s life circumstances provide openings for this personal evolution to take place. An evolutionary coach has a keen eye for noticing and a fine ear for hearing the significant movements in an individual’s unfoldment. This form of coaching supports the client in relaxing into a naturally harmonious and cooperative relationship with the life situations that are evolving them.

TRANSPERSONAL THERAPY

Transpersonal therapy recognises the multidimensional or “whole-being” nature of human beings. Working with the self in its spiritual, embodied and relational dimensions opens the individual towards the possibilities of wholeness and fulfillment. Transpersonal therapy supports the client in the organic movement of their life towards realizing their conscious nature, embodied nature, and heart nature.

IDENTIFYING THE MEANING OF AND RELIEVING CHRONIC LIFE DISTRESS

Human distress comes in many forms. In the present moment of a person’s lived experience, each of these forms of distress has a very precise meaning and function in calling on the individual’s sustained attention. The kinds of distress that we can address in our work together include:

  • Depression and anxiety
  • Making sense of and integrating traumatic experiences
  • Burn out and overwhelm
  • Chronic self-doubt and self-judgment
  • Inertia and stuckness
  • Loss of motivation
  • Dominating “inner critic”
  • Relationship challenges
  • Addictions

In addition, THE WAY OF WELL-BEING offers consultations in the following areas:

  • Couple and relationship therapy
  • Career and vocational consultation
  • Working through crises and life transitions
  • Resolving residual trauma
  • Life satisfaction and fulfillment
  • Family therapy
  • Professional supervision for counsellors and psychotherapists (individual and small group)
  • Advancing stages of human development
  • Practices and approaches supporting mindfulness and embodiment (beginner to advanced)

THE WAY OF WELL-BEING offers services to organisations in the following areas:

  • Group therapy facilitation
  • Therapeutic community management
  • Counsellor and psychotherapist education
  • Counselling and psychotherapy training curriculum development
  • Counselling staff professional development

THE WAY OF WELL-BEING is an “integrative” approach to counselling, coaching and therapy, which means that it incorporates a range of modalities in responding to an individual’s situation:

  • Positive Psychology: (1) identifying your resources and strengths, (2) using appreciative practices to rewire your relationship to life experiences, (3) self-compassion for working with self-criticism, (4) skills and exercises for developing emotional intelligence, (5) practising speaking up for yourself before a situation brings on an angry reaction
  • Humanistic: therapy that is deeply respectful of each human being’s autonomy and their capacity for growth, healing and actualisation
  • Psychodynamic: therapy that (1) recognises a range of deep-rooted internal dynamics and patterns that developed, often when you were young, and that play out through repetition of similar relational experiences in later life, (2) identifies patterns of self-protection called ‘defences’ that were essential for survival in the past and which you come to outgrow, but which are difficult to release without support
  • Creative: expressive forms (like working with colours or clay or figurines) assist in opening your awareness to the deeper layers of your own soul-nature, liberating energy and potential for the next shoots to come forth
  • Transpersonal: acknowledging that we are multi-dimensional beings, with bodies that sense, hearts that feel, and a consciousness that is vast and open; making room for the full range of who we are, in all three dimensions; creating a fertile space in the transformative work for allowing awakenings to spontaneously occur that shift us into evolutionary stages of conscious embodied, nondual interconnection.
  • Somatic (body-oriented): (1) acknowledging how past experiences are often stored in the body’s memory, and (2) requiring attention to the body and its movements and postures to bring more awareness and freedom to places that are habitually contracted, or where frozen fear is stored
  • Trauma-informed: working with neurobiological knowledge and interpersonal sensitivity with the experiences that have impacted you and that, even after years have gone by, you haven’t been able to get over
  • Psycho-education: raising awareness around a range of body-mind processes, drawing on interpersonal neurobiology, cognitive, social and interactive neuroscience
  • Enactment: using techniques and practices drawn from Gestalt therapy, Voice Dialogue and other therapies to support you in exploring challenging situations in an active way, in the safety of the therapeutic container
  • Relational approaches: bringing great care and attention to the key relationships in our lives, past and present; identifying the importance of very early experiences with caregivers, an area that is designated in therapist-talk with the name “attachment theory”
  • Exposure: recognising the benefit of touching on uncomfortable situations and experiences in the safety of the therapeutic setting, in order to grow a capacity for tolerating emotional intensity, which in turn develops resilience for facing life’s challenges
  • Mentalization: an orientation common to many therapies, but here used with a disciplined, focused attention to both discerning, tracking, and making sense of mental and emotional experiences in oneself and in others; this requires building the capacity to step back from immediate reactions to inner or outer experiences, and to witness them with curiosity and interest
  • Mindfulness: noticing the coming and going of thoughts, feelings and sensations in the space of the present moment, and bringing a spirit of interest and openness to the nature of oneself as a moment-by-moment experiencing being