My name is Tania Steyn and I am a holistic life counsellor. I am consumed by a passion to understand people, to find out what makes them 'tick', what motivates them to do the things they do, why don’t they do the things they know they should do, and if things don’t work out the way they planned, what do they need to help them through life’s challenges.

I am also fascinated by the wealth of information that we can access by studying concepts such as the conscious and subconscious mind, the collective unconscious, instincts and archetypes, and how they play out in people’s personalities, relationships and development of the self.

I believe that each of us are born with a passion or motivation to do specific things in life.  Following our passion leads us to our purpose and if we can succeed in living our purpose, we reach a place of personal power.  It is at this level that we reach our full potential and make a significant contribution to both our own lives and to those around us.

My passion for the past twenty years has been to study topics such as:

• astrology
• the enneagram
• archetypes
• numerology
• symbols
• metaphors
• mythology
• the hero’s journey
• metaphysics
• personality typing

To use a metaphor, I see us living in a cosmic toy store where we have free will to choose the toys we want to play with.  By using each of these toys with the intent to explore our truth and beauty, we can learn so much about ourselves, expand our self-awareness and open up a treasure chest filled with promise and possibilities.  These toys then act as lenses through which we take a curious, playful look at ourselves and discover our talents, skills, personality traits, values, passions, unexplained urges, drives and ambitions.

These explorations will also help us identify our obstacles, self-limiting beliefs and hidden fears.  Some of these findings will be familiar to us while others might surprise us.  We may also find our untapped potential, the talents or skills we never developed because they were frowned upon or discouraged by our parents, culture, religion, society, race or gender expectations.  Slightly more confronting would be to take a look at our shadow side, the parts of ourselves that we deliberately buried because we were afraid or ashamed of them.

By working consciously with our shadow parts, we can transform and integrate them into our whole self, someone who fully owns all their parts and can live lightly and freely as there is nothing to hide.