Psyche and Soma Student and Graduate Feedback

The following is feedback from students and graduates of previous Psyche and Soma Courses:

 

Training for a certificate or qualification denies the opportunity to 'drop down' into a place where the soul lives. A course lives in the head offering an understanding rather than a feeling. Psyche and Soma allowed me to access the feelings that are needed to navigate the stormy waters of a creative intervention. My practice has been illuminated with a warm glow of deeper understanding. Since Psyche and Soma I have been honest with the kind of work I really want to do, this has expanded my practise and I have been offered exciting work I never imagined was even out there.

Nikki Disney, Dramatherapist - Psyche and Soma graduate

 

I came on Psyche and Soma as a qualified music therapist with 8 years of experience in clinical practice. I wanted to develop further skills in movement alongside my music therapy interventions. What I actually gained however, was so much more than a set of new skills! The course invites us to set sail on our own experiential journey, and leads us into that deep inner place at the heart of what it means to be who we are. We then draw what we have discovered out again having been nourished as therapists, with the potential not only to deepen the quality of our therapeutic relationships but also to extend our ability to live and work as creative, alive individuals.

Diana Whelan,  Music Therapist - Psyche and Soma graduate

 

The Psyche & Soma course in its own unique and oblique ways offers many magical and mysterious opportunities to find soul connections through myth, enactment, movement, play and lots more. Soul connections with others and also deep within. The course will invite you to cross thresholds and there you can find the courage to risk being disturbed and changed.

I have worked as a clinical psychologist for over twenty years now. I needed to bring my work beyond the two talking heads in the two chairs and to be, well, disturbed and changed. I credit Psyche & Soma with giving me and my practice many imaginative possibilities for dipping into a vast resourceful reservoir that nurtures vitality and creativity and comforts with a settling sense of trust in the ineffable. 

Dr Philip Moore, Consultant Clinical Psychologist - Psyche and Soma graduate

 

There is a sense of ‘Psyche and Soma BC, and Psyche and Soma AD’ ‘bookmarking’ my development as a psychotherapist and human being. Things have never been the same! I work completely differently, and yet I am still doing the same thing. I don’t use drama and movement in therapy with all my clients,  but the space between my client and I is more alive, freer and more relaxed. Because of this, there is more room to ‘play’ in the way Winnicott meant: helping our clients to unblock whatever gets in the way of their own ability to live their life in the spirit of play and exploration.

Elizabeth Heren, Psychotherapist, Facilitator and Writer - Psyche and Soma graduate

 

I had been working for nearly twenty-five years with my company Volcano Theatre and five years as a craniosacral therapist when I encountered Psyche & Soma. I was also coming to the end of a year long Clore Leadership Programme arts fellowship. My own research led to an interest in new models of leadership that were more creative and more embodied.

I had become very interested in the connections between leadership and human potential. This was the context in which I became a student on Psyche & Soma. As someone who had a performance background I found the course challenging but deeply transformative. I found myself unlearning my performance skills and letting go of a familiar and protective persona. I came to deeply love the opportunity to have a space to play with others. Like myself, many arts professionals have difficulty in letting go the critic and product oriented mindset and trusting in an emergent process. Gradually over the course I was able to let go this fixation on “what it looks like” in favour of “what it feels like.

My co-travellers on the course were my great teachers with regard to this. Mary Smail has done a great work of leadership in devising and running this course. It looks and feels effortless what she does until I found out how hard it was to do it myself! One of the big attractions of the course for me was the invitation to do this work with others as a requirement of the training. The continual process of being facilitated and then facilitating others was very powerful. I was supported in challenging myself to run three one-day “art of possibility” workshops locally using the Sesame approach.  The approach has informed and transformed my own teaching.

The practical work on the course involving working with voice, movement, mark-making, personal reflection and ritual was up-lifting and also took us to some deeply emotional places. This wasn’t just about using arts techniques and then adding a psychological interpretation. This was about weaving –the threads with which we weaved were the body and soul, psyche and soma. This informed and enabled the great unfolding journey that at a glance looks like only ten weekends. The work continued in the spaces between the weekends – in the group supervision, but mostly in how it affected our lives. Psyche and Soma supported an eighteen-month process of deep transformative change for myself and everyone else who was there for the unmissable ride of the soul.

Fern Smith, Co Founder Volcano Theatre, Theatre practitioner - Psyche and Soma graduate