Core Process Psychotherapy
Core Process Psychotherapy is a contemplative approach to psychotherapy, integrating mindful awareness and Western psychological theories. Mindfulness enhances our ability to pay attention to how we are in this present moment. It aims to increase awareness of the way we think, feel, respond to others and the events in ones lives. It helps bring awareness to the unconscious aspects of our being.
What is Core Process Psychotherapy?
Our core is an unconditioned state of open awareness, compassion and wisdom. It is our inner health and clarity. It is inherent in all of us, and potentially present in every moment.
As we grow up and move through life, character strategies develop, conditioning takes hold, and obscuring issues start to limit our aliveness. Unconsciously we tend to hold on to how we have always been. We repeat patterns, tendencies, attitudes and ways of relating. It becomes increasingly hard to sense our potential to make fresh responses in each unfolding moment.
Core Process psychotherapy is an exploration of our relationship to our present experience, and how this is influenced by our past conditioning. It offers us the space to slow down and deepen in attention to arising thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, parts of ourselves that may feel painful, numb, lost, addicted, fragmented, disconnected, traumatised.
Core Process psychotherapy invites us to hold the possibility, that underneath the obscuring issues that limit us, we each have access to a more expansive state of wellbeing. Greater awareness, increased equanimity and compassion can be more fully realized in our lives. It invites the possibility of resting in this present moment, to bring awareness to see, not through the lens of conditioning, but how things actually are.
Contact with the deepest parts of ourselves affords us perhaps our greatest opportunities for creativity, learning and growing – and facilitates more conscious choice in our everyday lives.
What to expect
Within an environment of warmth and respect, I aim to support and honour the uniqueness of each individual’s process: to work with one’s issues and moment-by-moment experience, to encourage the movement towards increasing one’s resources, self-understanding, and awareness.
The work varies with every client. I aim to respect you as an individual: to meet your uniqueness without judgement or a prescribed agenda, and support you in finding your own way of working. As therapist it is my role to be a reflector and facilitator of awareness, a companion and guide.
Psychotherapy helps one to go about deepening one’s attention and awareness. Awareness is a powerful resource for working with life’s challenges. Awareness includes both the capacity to penetrate situations by zeroing in on their subtleties, and the ability to move back from states of mind or emotion (so we can gain a clearer perception of what is happening). A depth awareness – encompassing our body, our feelings and our states of mind – is used to explore process.
No matter how much our thoughts or story lines carry us away at any given moment, we can return to being present and simply notice what is happening, now.
Life is unfolding, moment by moment. What happens now, in this moment, influences what happens next. My aim is to help you work with what is arising, encouraging you to truly listen to your moment-by-moment experience: to be as present to your experience as is.
Whatever can be brought into awareness enables a movement towards integration and greater wholeness. To begin to look into oneself with the intention of contemplative enquiry is to take a step towards inherent wellbeing, of feeling more fully alive.