I spent last weekend at a wonderful retreat giving Spiritual Balance Counselling to the guests. Mellulah in Milton Abbas is a special place and the retreats that are held there by my gorgeous friend Saira Francis are always a treat.
The guests each had a session with me and it was a very special experience that I am very grateful to have been a part of. For obvious reasons I can't share with you what happened with each person but I can tell you that it taught me a great deal more about how we all share the same vulnerabilities, worries, hopes and fears. Sharing those with another person, an impartial person who is not there to judge but to listen, can be all that is needed for the burden to be lifted for a while and for the beginnings of clarity to arrive. You don't actually need another person in order for this to happen, counselling is simply facilitating - it is allocated time and space for you. It helps you to address the things that you have kept bottled up waiting for that moment called 'when I have more time'. The benefit of counselling, is that it gives a specific date and time for this to happen - it is an appointment with yourself. Having another person there, though not necessary, does help. It can be hard to work on yourself alone, to force yourself to look at things.
The other thing that counselling does is it gives your feelings an actual voice. So often we deal with things in our head, the voices go round and round as thoughts and they are never said out loud. There is great power in hearing your own voice say words that previously have only been thoughts. Saying things out loud allows you to analyse them properly - when you say it out loud does it still feel true? Or has your voice reminded you that this thought has been magnified to such an extent in your head that actually you do not have the strength of feeling about it that you thought you had. You can also find the opposite, saying something out loud has suddenly enabled you to face a deep truth and it is from this point that you will be able to move forward.
Acknowledgement of your feelings is important. It doesn't mean that acknowledging them will make them harder to shift or make them true - it simply allows you to 'try out' their truth and see whether they are still valid for you. If the feelings are valid and voicing them tells you that, yes, this truly is how I feel you can then get to a point of choice. You can choose whether to act on this truth, to hold it a little while longer until you know what you want to do, or to ignore it completely. The power is in the choice and knowing that you have the choice. Choosing to do nothing when you have fully acknowledged the truth of what you feel is still a choice that you have made in full awareness and that is far more beneficial to your well being than an unconscious choice to ignore something.
Love Nova xxx
