Mission

I aim to support each person who comes for counselling to live a rich, full and meaningful life.  I want to nurture and support the full expression of each person’s unique being in the world.   I seek to hold the quality of every single client’s life as precious and recognise that through their relationships and actions each individual has a significant impact on our world.  Using the medium of the counselling relationship, I aim to take part in creating a better, richer more wonderful world.

I aim to be immersed and actively involved in deepening my own understanding of human nature and what awakens the human spirit.  I seek to effectively communicate this learning to others.  Through my writing I want to contribute meaningfully to the lived understanding of healing practitioners and other interested people.

Professional experience

I studied Transpersonal Counselling at the Phoenix Institute of Australia.   The education model was strongly experiential and self-reflective, which fit well with my own perspective on therapeutic relationships.  This is not about diagnosing and fixing, but providing a strong relationship within which clients can explore and understand themselves.  In providing a healing relationship, the self-awareness and integrity of the counsellor is a vital factor.

I am a qualified member of the Australian Counselling Association, which has strict requirements around Ongoing Professional Development and Professional Supervision.

Before beginning practice as a private counsellor, I had a broad range of experiences within the human services. I have worked in the mental health field with a broad range of clients, including those experiencing depression, anxiety, paranoia and suicidality.  I have also been employed within the drug & alcohol sector in rehabilitation centres working with people who have significant substance addictions.  I have also worked with youth at risk and am a qualified Youth Worker.

I have a deep interest in men’s work and the rediscovery of our culture of a positive and noble masculinity.  I have participated in and facilitated men’s circles for a number of years.

Personal

I’ve been told that I’m a good listener since I was young, and friends have always sought me out to talk about what’s going on for them.  Having my own private counselling practice feels like I’ve finally found the base for my work in life.  I feel deeply grateful that I have the opportunity to do work that i truly love.   It’s been a winding road to get here, having studied Aerospace Engineering straight out of high school.   I studied this with very little passion for over four years until one night with six months to go of the course I had an intense experience of  perspective on my life.  It was like seeing my life from a great height as a moment in time.  Through this it became clear to me that deep down the course was actually irrelevant to me.  I quit the next day and never regretted it.

I then travelled up the East coast of Australia and also in Southeast Asia.  Whilst in Thailand I did my first Vispassana (ten day Buddhist meditation retreat) which was another significant event in my life.  It felt like I had stopped moving for the first time in my life – before then i had been simply running on momentum without ever actually looking at what it was all about.  This was part of a growing relationship with experiences and perspectives that might be called spirituality, something which had not been a part of my childhood in the same way.  It seemed like a new world to me and I began to try and find my way amongst it.

Soon after this my best friend was killed whilst we were in Thailand, and I returned back home for the funeral.  I found myself back in the world that I had left with increasing difficulty in contacting my experience of the spiritual, my sense of value and meaning.  I went into something like a depression for a few years.

As time went on I slowly found myself more able to accept who I was and that my life didn’t feel amazing and deeply beautiful all the time.  At the point where i was just beginning to feel “ok” again, I travelled in India for over a year and came back feeling the desire to create something in the world.  From this point I began to explore different roles in the human services, finding my way to counselling.  I also met my partner Anna and we began creating a family.  This certainly grounded me in a whole new way.  From here I have found myself able to build  a life which is steadily moving towards beautiful and amazing all the time.  I am more able to appreciate the lows and the difficulties as also being valuable and meaningful, and I also feel simply happy more of the time.  It remains a journey.

In my spare time (with three kids under five there doesn’t seem to be much of it), I like to play guitar, draw and write in my diary.  I enjoy playing squash, though I’m more competitive than skilled.  I also love going to music, dance and lifestyle festivals over the summer.  I don’t seem to get out in the bush as much as I’d like, but when I do i appreciate it deeply.  I love to sit around a fire almost anytime.