Counselling & Coaching

I am available for counselling and coaching in person 60 - 90 minutes, using any of the video call options:

•  Facebook 

• Gmail 

• Skype

• Zoom

I have been successfully using  Expressive Art Therapy through video calls. To learn more about my work read the Approach section on this site.

Outcome

• Learning about your beliefs and hidden assumptions 

• Mindfulness tools for everyday life

• Finding new sources of inspiration 

• Learning about your emotional blockages, and how they effect your relationships  

• Learning about your relationships 

• Learning to be authentic 

• Learning about the power of Gratitude 

• Personal self care practices 

Cost:

(sliding scale possible)  

Compassionate Inquiry is a therapeutic approach developed by Dr. Gabor Maté. CI reveals what lies beneath the appearance we present to the world, unveiling levels of consciousness, mental climate, hidden assumptions, implicit memories and body states that form the real message that words both express and conceal. Through CI, we can recognize the unconscious dynamics that run our lives and how to liberate ourselves from them. 

Developmental trauma happens when there isn't space for us to feel what we feel, our attempts not to feel our emotions are controlling us more than we want. In order to heal we welcome our emotions and learn how to hold them.

Our lives can be determined by the emotion we try not to feel on compensate for. 

We develop coping mechanisms that keep us from experiencing us the way we really are - authentic self.  

If you don't want your life to be determined by your past, then allow yourself to feel exactly what's there right now. Using Ci means that:

• I will stop you during your stories to inquire about your feelings

• I will go way back to your earliest childhood memories

• I will inquire about your relationships

• We differentiate between feelings, assumptions and beliefs 

• I will ask you to sit with your feelings to acknowledge and hold them

Healing means the capacity to hold pain without external needs to sooth our pain. We learn to hold pain when we know it is endurable and it will pass. 

Ritual is a healing modality which speaks to the soul, the soul is feed by beauty and by meaning. Rituals allow us to find healing for our soul when there is no cure for the body. My life is all about rituals, I start my day by giving thanks, before I eat, when I get up, before I sleep, when I play.  

• How do you start your day when you get up? 

• What are your first thoughts? 

• What do you do when you eat? 

• Do you give thanks, show gratitude? 

• Do you multitask during your day? 

• Do you play, how do you have fun?

My daily practice helps my clients to heal by learning to slow down, hold and acknowledge their pain, forgive oneself and others, give thanks and develop a daily gratitude practice. 

Ruppin Academic Center’s (Israel) Pinhas Berger and colleagues (2019) suggest that people who don’t express gratitude are missing out on an important potential source of fulfillment. As they note, gratitude “correlates with positive feelings, prosocial behavior, and physical health and can enhance well-being” 

I have been going through many losses in my life including my grandparents and parents in my early twenties. I was able to express my feelings and find meaning in ritual and art making. Growing up in a family with various healing and therapy professionals dealing with grief and bereavement gave me an early start in this work helping many people to go through this new chapter of their life. 

The topic of death can be complicated and disorienting, let's find   some words for the grief you are experiencing:

• Ambiguous grief, meaning the person is physically present but psychological absent. 

•  Anticipatory grief happens when you know there will be a loss, but it has not yet occurred. 

• Disenfranchised grief is when people experience loss that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported.        

Getting through the challenging days

I can guide you through reconciliation; to experience reconciliation, it requires that you descend, not transcend. Medicine Art will help you with reconciliation and to go through it: 

• talking it out

• writing it out

• playing it out 

• painting and drawing it out

• dancing it out 

• acting it out, etc 

Expressive Art Therapy is the perfect approach to express yourself experiencing grief. When words are inadequate, art and ritual making are the perfect tools for healing. Rituals are symbolic activities that help us, together with our families and friends, express our deepest thoughts and feelings about life's most important events. 

Rituals:

• Lend legitimacy to the process, beginning, ending, "benchmarks" 

•  Lend "sacredness" to loss and grief 

• Reaffirm a sense of self, community, identity, connections 

• Place "the moment" in context

Occasionally I do house visits, bringing an instrument of our choice. We start the ritual by switching our phones/ devices off, to be fully present to what is, to create a healing space we reduce our senses and only bath in candle light. We light a candle in a dark room, start by giving thanks. Maybe we sit in silence for a while, share or talk about: 

• Our intentions for this sacred gathering 

• What is happening to us in this moment, body sensations, tight throat, sweaty palms, feelings.

• The person we are grieving for

• What we wish for in this moment 

• What ever is on your heart

After the the music, ( 60 - 90 minute session) we share again if we like to or simply sit in silence, silence is important to move through to experience our emotions we often can't because there is no space for it.  
Trauma is not simply to what happens, it's a result of our inability or lack of opportunity to move through it (by Peter Levine Phd)

Signs of reconciliation 

As mourners embrace their grief and do the work of mourning, they can and will be able to demonstrate the majority of the following: 

• A recognition of the reality  and finality of the death 

• A return to stable eating and sleeping patterns

• A renewed sense of release  from the person who has died. They will have thoughts about the person, but they will not be preoccupied by these thoughts

• The return of capacity to enjoy experiences in life that are normally enjoyable

• The establishment of new and healthy relationships

• The capacity to live a full life without feelings of guilt or lack of self- respect

• The drive to organize and plan one's life toward the future

• The serenity to become comfortable with the way things are rather than attempting to make things as they were

• The versatility to welcome more change in life 

• The acknowledgment that the pain of loss in an inherent part of life resulting from the ability to give and receive love

This process takes time to go through, maybe I can assist you with various artistic tools or ritual making that might help you to move forward. 

Going through this process of healing my self and with clients has made me realize that there seem to be common themes after we come to reconciliation where we might learn to:   

• Mature in a way 

• Become more authentic 

• Slow down 

• Forgive oneself and others 

• Reunite with old friends and family 

• Focus on nourishing relationships  

• Be more present 

• Be more compassionate with ourselves and others  

• Look at life differently

• Develop  gratitude  

• Recognize and acknowledge how much we really loved the person  

A journal can help you to go through this process. Good grief is based on memories, allowing your feelings to be expressed will help you to heal. You might even want to write in your journal as if you were talking to your lost loved one, as if they sit beside you.  

I developed a simple "Emotional Rating" system to the left, of five smiles which instantly show you how you felt when you browse your journal ten years later.  

When you feel stuck in your life,  drawing or writing can be the medicine to uncover forgotten memories and resources such as:

• What was my favorite game as a child?

• What did I wanted to become? 

• What beliefs did I have about the world?

• What other interests did I have?           

• What did you do for motivation?

• What inspired you? 

Our lives are run by our emotions we are trying to suppress. When we keep grudges and grievances, we retain everything that goes with them: anxiety, irritability, anger, depression, weight gain or loss, lack of trust in ourselves and others, insomnia, addictions . . .

Forgiveness is a big topic, for everyone from teenage years until the end of life. 

Learn to:

• sense the weight of the suffering you still have because you can't forgive 

•  reflect on the benefits of a loving heart 

• let go of suffering

• forgive, a process which starts with small steps 

• set the intention of forgiving and wanting to learn from challenges