essions are conversations about your experience, ideas and ideologies regarding yourself, other people and the world as a whole. They normally happen once a week for the main duration of our work in order to create a stable pattern, get closer to each other and at the same time get closer to yourself.
The sessions can be experienced as a stepping out from everyday life, getting a view of it from above and imagining what else it could be. Each session presents the challenge of turning a subtle sense or an inner monologue into a dialogue. It can move from the seemingly mundane, into what is most meaningful or what you find unbearable. These sessions can become a joint effort to unsettle the rigid, knotted bundle of stories and beliefs we live in, so we can make and follow new threads.
Existential therapy transforms the science of psychology into an art form of conversation and human relationship. It is not based on a specific belief, theory or worldview, but rather on the attempt to uncover, challenge and reinterpret the beliefs and theories that structure the experience of being you. It is a continuation and a practical strand of existential philosophy and phenomenology: a field of thinking about our existence as human beings in worlds, traditions, cultures and relationships; and also a poetic attempt to counteract the systematisation of human experience through institutions and dogma.
"..we possess ideas but we are possessed by feelings. They lie too deep for understanding, astir with their own spirit, carrying us along with them" (adapted from a sentence in Thomas Flanagan’s The Year of The French.)
Sessions are confidential conversations about your past and present experience of being human. They normally happen every week on the same day and at the same time in order to create a stable pattern and open a space for transformation. Yet as these sessions can offer different things at different times they can also be arranged as an occasional or a one-off conversation.
The sessions can be experienced as a stepping out from everyday experience, get a view of it from above and imagine what else it could be. By listening deeply to ourselves and trying to express what we are feeling we can notice what stands in the way of these things.
Each session presents the challenge of turning a subtle sense or an inner monologue into a dialogue. It can move from the seemingly mundane, into what is most meaningful or what we find unbearable. These sessions can become a joint effort to unsettle the rigid, knotted bundle of stories and beliefs we live in, so we can make and follow new threads.
The sessions work through an exchange of words and meanings, and also through the interaction of feelings and sensations: those uncanny forces that move us and draw spirals around who we are and a lot of what happens around us. Each session creates a possibility for getting in touch with this intricate and visceral level of our existence; the water that runs in the channels of our stories.
In these sessions we may sit, lie down, walk, talk, be silent, be in nature, play drums or listen to music, role play, paint or find any way to express or tap into the depths of our experience.