Self Awareness
Blossom into you is a counselling process focused on expanding your self awareness in order to consciously create the life you are dreaming of. The process is creative and versatile and can be applied to any aspect of our lives, from personal growth and health, relationships with partners, children and colleagues, to careers and living a life filled with passion and purpose.
The aim of my counselling process is to provide a safe space where you can freely explore your gifts, talents and skills, as well as the limiting beliefs and fears that keep you from reaching your goals. Together we will look at where you are now, where would you like to be and how are you going to get there. We will craft an action plan to help you work step by step to build the life you really want, a life filled with passion, purpose, power and peace.
My process include creative activities that engage the right side of the brain to help you access your creativity, imagination, intuition and new ideas. It is important to bypass the logical, thinking left side of the brain because it tends to keep us stuck in limiting beliefs. Using different lenses enable us to take a step back into the position of the observer from where we can look at ourselves objectively, curiously and playfully. Different lenses help us look at ourselves from different angles and each time discover ever more about ourselves as we are all very interesting, complex, multi-faceted human beings!
Taking a good look at ourselves from the observer position has two important benefits:
1. Enhancing our self awareness.
Becoming aware of all the aspects of our personality and how they play out inside our minds and in our relationships with the people around us, help us to identify the aspects that are helping us grow and evolve and which ones are keeping us back. This awareness gives you the ability to take control over all these aspects and direct them to work for you in order to help you grow and reach the goals you set for yourself. Not learning to take control may keep us stuck in unconscious, compulsive behaviour patterns and wondering why nothing seem to work for us. Self-awareness gives you the power to consciously choose how you will respond in each moment and thus enable you to create the life you are dreaming of.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Viktor E. Frankl
2. Finding our passion and life purpose.
By working through a process to help us define our talents, skills, personality traits, values, passions, interests, abilities, hopes, dreams, unexplained urges, drives and ambitions, we become more aware of what makes us truly unique. (Tip: These are usually the things that make us loose track of time and space and that we will do for free. And NO it is not spending hour after hour on Youtube or Facebook!) The next step is to identify what we want to do with these gifts, how to combine that which we love, that which we are good at, with what the world needs and that which we can be paid for.
“In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted.”
CG Jung.
Trying to become more self-aware can be like trying to find the pieces of a puzzle, the puzzle being the picture we are building with our lives. We don’t know what the final picture is going to look like (and it is ever evolving!) and we don’t always know which pieces we have to work with. Looking at ourselves through different lenses help us discover more and more pieces of ourselves. The more pieces you have to work with, the easier the puzzle becomes. Some of the pieces may be colourful and easy to work with while others may be dark and challenging. It is important to remember that it takes both colourful and dark pieces to build a picture with depth and meaning.
The lenses I like to use in my counselling includes, but are not limited to: astrology, archetypes, the Enneagram, numerology, personality typing, symbols, myths, metaphors, dreams and the hero’s journey.
"We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring,
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
T.S. Eliot (Quartets)
Mindfulness:
Mindfulness and Self-awareness go hand in hand, you can't have the one without the other.
Mindfulness is the ability to be in the moment, here and now. To be aware of what is going on inside our bodies and our minds, and also what is going on around us. This presence is the first step into claiming our power, as we have no power over yesterday or tomorrow, the only place is here, now. We do this mindful observing from a place of loving kindness towards ourselves and others, and not judging or becoming attached to any specific thought, feeling or behaviour.
Very important is accepting that life is a mixture of light and dark and that we can’t have the one without having the other. Just as the sun rises everyday to be followed by hours of sunlight, it also sets every night and is followed by hours of darkness. We have to accept that life is exactly the same, that there will always be light and dark moments and that they are both needed to help us learn and grow.
Being mindful help us to enjoy and make the most of our light moments and using the light to help us grow and reach our goals. Mindfulness in the darker moments help us to face what comes up, work with our shadow material and learn from it to evolve into an ever stronger, fuller expression of our true self.