About me and my approach

My approach

I came to psychotherapy both as a client and as a therapist from many years experience as a student of Tibetan Buddhism. The practice of bringing awareness to ourselves – what happens to us moment to moment – is at the core of how I offer therapy. What does that mean?

Therapy – as you know – is fundamentally a talking therapy. There are so many different ways of talking and it makes a big difference if we can talk from a place of embodied presence. This is what I invite and support clients to do in their sessions. Although that sounds simple, it can bring us into contact with difficult and unspoken feelings and sensations. I support clients to slowly develop and expand their capacity to be with themselves. In the process, there is often time spent on recalling past events that continue to show up in mind and body, and there is often a kind of spiral experience of revisiting events many times, but each time from a slightly different place.

I describe myself as trauma-informed, and what that means for me is that I pay a great deal of attention to when a client becomes activated. The fastest way to work with trauma is slowly. Each client can only work within the limits of the resources that they are able to access – both internal and external. It can take time to develop the internal resources to even be able to touch the edge of traumatic experience. Working beyond the limits of a client’s resources leads to a re-traumatizaton, and that is very unhelpful. I work with clients to bring awareness to where a sense of relative safety begins and ends, and work to pay close attention to what happens at those edges. In this way, it is possible to begin to find the space for gentle and challenging work of touching into the original traumatic experience.

About me

My first degree was in History of Art and after a series of administrative and then managerial jobs in the non profit sector, I decided to train first as a craniosacral therapist, and then as a psychotherapist.

I have been studying and practising Buddhism for over 30 years and the Buddhist View informs my therapy practice. I have seen for myself the power of unconditional positive regard (as written about by Carl Rogers) and which aligns with the Buddhist view that we all have Buddha nature, and I have also witnessed, many times, both for myself and for clients, the power of bringing awareness to our experience. Bringing awareness to experience is an important part of Buddhist meditation practice.

I have a special interest in pre and peri-natal experience. This is not relevant for every client but I have found, over the years, that many inexplicable patterns that we don’t seem to be able to change have their origins in our very early experience. This can be our experience in the womb, during birth or immediately afterwards – long before we had any language to express our sensations or feelings, and at a time when we were highly sensitive to what was happening in the environment around us. An interesting book that introduces this territory and brings together fairly recent research in this area is Sue Gerhardt’s “Why Love Matters”.

I am deeply committed to my own path of personal development, through Buddhist practice but also through ongoing workshops and trainings that focus on or include an element of personal work. I continue to be in therapy myself. I am also committed to continuing to offer in-person sessions, as well as working online.

I have lived in London most of my life and was born here. I like to travel when I can, spend time with family and I have a passion for classical music, which I can let loose at London’s wonderful concert halls. I also watch plenty of TV, and off-set that with long walks in London and further afield.