Creativity | Work & Purpose | Spirituality | Nature
Through the Core Spirit platform I offer Mentoring & Coaching consultations. If you are interested in Psychotherapy sessions (UK only), please visit my website and contact me via the details provided there.
My unique approach reflects an ongoing synthesis of personal and professional experience over the past twenty years in the fields of Art, Psychotherapy, Spirituality, Nature, Mental health & Social care services.
Who I work with
I work with individuals in the UK and internationally. It is not necessary to have any prior experience of mentoring, coaching, or therapy in order to meet with me. The mentoring sessions do not follow a set program or teaching format. They are conversations, where together we shape each encounter according to what you need from it.
The main areas that my Mentoring & Coaching sessions can help you to engage with and explore.
WORK & PURPOSE
Whether you work within a large company, or are an individual with your own endeavor, together we can explore the significance of work in your life, the challenges and rewards it presents you with, and how a vision for soul and creativity can be present to enrich the working life.
REFLECTIVE PRACTICE FOR COUNSELLORS, PSYCHOTHERAPISTS, AND OTHERS IN THE FIELD OF CARING FOR BODY, MIND, AND SOUL
A time and space that nurtures you and your work in a different way to clinical supervision (but is not a replacement for it). Perhaps some of the themes mentioned above are of interest or importance to you, but feel like they are ‘squeezed out’ of professional life. Please get in touch to discuss how meeting for mentoring sessions could be useful for you.
ART AND CREATIVITY
- For makers and creatives of any kind, at any stage of the journey/career, who would like to explore their work and its themes in depth.
- You might be keen to embrace your creativity, but be finding it difficult to connect with, or unsure how to begin.
SPIRITUALITY & THE TRANSPERSONAL
- Whether you have a particular religious faith, or your path is more inclined to the mystical or magical, we can explore your experience. Transpersonal implies the ‘spiritual’, but more broadly refers to a sense of connection with something greater than the individual self, and reaching one's potential for development.
- If this area is unfamiliar, but you are interested in engaging with this aspect of yourself in a new way, then we can consider what that might look like for you.
- If you are feeling somewhat isolated with your relation to the sacred, which is not unusual in cultures that have lost much their reverence for the divine, you might consider this an invitation to a form of spiritual companionship.
NATURE & THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN-WORLD
Living with awareness of the more-than-human-world and our place within the web of life. We can cultivate and honour your reverence for Nature, and explore how connections weave their way through art, work, vision, and a sense of being in the world. We can hold a space for witnessing both the beauty and power of places, landscapes, and other species that resonate with you, whilst also acknowledging experiences of grief relating to damage, changes, and loss.
Soul-oriented Mentoring & Life Coaching
Mentoring sessions provide a confidential, informal, and compassionate space in which to explore and develop your life through soul-filled conversation. We will cultivate an appreciation for mysteries of psyche and soul by welcoming the richness, inspiration and meaning available through spiritual, depth psychological, and artistic perspectives. You may wish to focus on a specific area of your life, or be seeking more wide ranging conversation.
For those who live, work, or make art with openness to a spiritual or soul-oriented impulse, there are great benefits in being able to share and explore your experience in confidence with another human heart that is sympathetic and alive to these perspectives.
Our conversations emphasise listening to the wisdom of inner life, developing a deeper understanding of yourself, and meeting the world as fully as possible by bringing your particular gifts and talents closer to the surface.
The mentoring / coaching sessions embrace spontaneity and exploration, as well as a more practical focus where appropriate, which can include goal-setting, planning, structure and use of time.
We might consider our meetings to be a kind of *temenos', which is a Greek term for space kept apart from the routines of daily life, specifically for the purpose of attending to the divine.
Much mentoring and coaching has commercial or financial success as its exclusive goal. Whilst being visible in the world, making a living, and creating success on your terms are welcome to feature as important elements in our work together, we will attend to these themes with same respect as any other, prioritising depth of personal and spiritual integrity in all you do.
How Soul-oriented Creative Mentoring / Life Coaching can benefit you
- Grow in confidence about your life, recognising the richness already present, and also identifying what you need to welcome into it.
- Emphasise and expand upon your gifts, talents, and strengths.
- Overcome blocks and obstacles that are limiting you.
- Deepen your possibilities for living with a sense of vision and purpose.
- Nurture your capacity for awe, wonder, and beauty.
- Getting ideas and projects off the ground, and following through with them.
- Finding fresh perspectives that help with existing work or situations in life.
- Moving on from ways of being that do not serve your deepest purpose and idea of a life well lived.
- Encountering true imagination, and finding new ways to express this.
Options
We can meet for a single session, every now and then, or on a regular basis up to weekly meetings. I offer a discount for block booking of 4 sessions (either 60 or 90 minutes), please see my website for details.
My experience & background
My experience comes from over 15 years of professional work with individuals and organisations in the areas of psychotherapy, mental health, and visual art. I have gained a developed understanding of both therapeutic and creative processes, which I believe are very closely related, and work in tandem to facilitate personal enrichment and healing.
My path into this work was shaped by positive experiences of psychotherapy, combined with lifelong passions for creativity, spirituality, and nature. I've found this field to be very broad and inspiring, encouraging curiosity about life and the potential for growth through human connection.
As an artist I am dedicated to the development of my work, which falls somewhere between the contemporary and the devotional as a practice. My paintings and drawings have been shown at exhibitions in England, Scotland, and Wales, and I have sold work to private collectors in the UK, Europe, USA, and Australia. In 2019 I became an elected Professional Member of the Society Of Scottish Artists (SSA), in recognition of commitment, originality and skill.
For the past 5 years I have worked in private practice as an Art Psychotherapist in Newport, and also online. Prior to this I independently ran art and ecopsychology groups, and have also worked in the NHS as an Art Psychotherapist. For ten years I moved between in a variety of roles within mental health and social care services in England and Scotland, including work with children and adolescents, adult psychiatric settings, and people with learning disabilities. My experience includes supervising staff, and managerial duties.
Education / Qualifications
I have a first class Ba(Hons) degree in Fine Art: Contemporary Media, from the University Of South Wales. I completed the MA Art Psychotherapy qualification at Goldsmiths College, University Of London, in 2013.
