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Wade in the Water. A reflection on the courage it takes to enter life’s deeper waters, inspired by a song that carried both hope and freedom through history.

Wade in the Water While listening to a song by The Hanumen, the words wade in the water caught my attention. Something in their rhythm felt both mournful and alive, as if they carried a message about trust, surrender, and great courage. The phrase stayed with me, repeating quietly like a reminder to keep stepping into the deeper currents of life. In my work as a therapist, I often sit with people who are learning to approach their own emotional depths. This is work I recognise, because the same waters move through all of us. Learning to meet them with […]

Men Seeking Therapy: The Difficulty of Expression

The Language Men Were Never Taught In my psychotherapy practice in Middlesbrough, I have noticed more and more men beginning therapy not because they are failing, but because coping alone no longer works. For many, the decision to reach out feels uncertain, shaped by years of being told to manage rather than express, to stay in control rather than show feeling. The language of emotion was rarely modelled; it was something to be mastered or hidden away. By the time they sit down and begin to talk, many men find there are no words at all, only a tightening in […]

Being With Grief: The Healing Power of Staying Present

The Shape of Grief Grief is not a problem to solve, it is a landscape we learn to walk. It has no fixed map, no linear process, no right way to move through it. Sometimes it comes as a quiet ache, other times as a storm that brings us to our knees. In therapy, people often ask, “When will this pain stop?” or “How do I move on?” But perhaps the deeper question is “How can I be with this?” To be with grief, to stay close to it, to breathe with it, to allow it to unfold, is the […]

Working with the Shadows: Therapy, Fear, and the Meaning of Halloween

Facing the Shadows As the nights lengthen and October folds into its darker half, the air feels charged, ancient, symbolic, and full of mystery. Halloween, or Samhain in the old Celtic calendar, marks the turning of the year toward shadow. Traditionally, it was seen as the time when the veil between worlds thins, when the living can sense the presence of what’s hidden, ancestral, or unseen. From a psychological and spiritual perspective, Halloween isn’t just about costumes or fright; it’s an invitation to face what we usually avoid, our fears, our mortality, and the hidden parts of our psyche that […]

The Age of Confusion. Reflections on Kaliyuga and the Modern Mind

In many ancient traditions, time is not seen as linear but cyclical, moving through great ages that mirror the rise and fall of human consciousness. In Hindu cosmology, Kaliyuga is described as the final and most turbulent of these cycles: the age of confusion, quarrel, and forgetfulness. In Kaliyuga, the ancient texts say, truth becomes obscured. People forget who they are. The sacred is replaced by the superficial. The world accelerates, louder, faster, more divided, and the inner voice of wisdom grows faint beneath the noise. This is not just a myth about civilisation. It is also […]

The Necessity of Limitations. A reflection on growth, synchronicity, and the wisdom found at the edges of experience.

I often look back across my psychotherapy training and consider those stand-out moments and events that brought me to where I am today as a practitioner. Being someone who values a transpersonal (psychospiritual) perspective towards human development, I’m always intrigued by the many ways that life appears to demonstrate unseen forces at work in the lives of both clients and myself. More so perhaps, when moments of synchronicity (meaningful coincidence) occur in ways that invite, challenge, and inspire one to let go of the familiar and grow towards fullness of being, no matter how hard this may at first seem […]

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