Tag: counselling

thing 33: ‘feast on your life’: being a counsellor

‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’…  I find myself thinking that a lot, these days. How fortunate I am, then, to have a job which acts as an antidote to despair and fear. I write thing 33 in celebration of the joys of being a person-centred counsellor.

It’s true that washing up, vacuuming and ironing are three activities which only become interesting when the alternative is writing up my client notes. Never mind that notes are an essential part of the work, being a place to reflect, self-supervise, allow feelings and ideas to come to the surface, get a meta position on the work… Meh. As (more…)

thing 7: ‘come, poor Jackself’: a shiatsu session

“…and I don’t need to see your pants.”

Thus runs the unusual—and, to me, quite brilliant—strapline on a poster for a friend’s shiatsu practice.* For those of us with what Clive James has called ‘the right set of personal inadequacies’ (or rather, who feel we have them), the thought of physio, massage, or any other kind of body treatment is often tainted by the prospect of Having To Reveal Our Body To Someone Else.  (more…)