Teaching and learning

Our beautiful new group of thirteen students who started the Soul Therapy course last month are settling in now and beginning to feel at home at the Soul Therapy Centre. The Advanced Year and the Practitioner Group are thriving too, so I guess we can relax and enjoy teaching for the rest of the year. The exams for national accreditation are scheduled for mid April, and the candidates are all busily revising the Manual, the Codes of Conduct and the Disciplinary Procedures. I'm sure they will all do well, and in a few months we should have six more Registered Healer Members of the British Alliance of Healing Associations. Our external examiners are always happy with the standard of our candidates and so far have passed all of them because of their high standard of training and their impressive dedication to the healing profession.

I have been studying just recently, too. I took an intensive course with four other psychologists & psychotherapists to become an Interpersonal Mediator. It was run by Mike Talbot, the Director of UK Mediation, the most highly regarded training organisation in the field. It was fascinating and very different from the therapeutic approach to solving conflicts. It is much preferable to litigation, which is always costly and takes ages, as does arbitration and, unlike the latter two methods, it is usually a win-win outcome, whereas the other methods are win-loose at enormous expense. After the course ended, I had to write six essays and assignments. so now I am even more sympathetic to my own students. After such a rigorous training, I feel well equipped to tackle mediation cases now.

Montevetro, Geese and Educational Assessments.

This evening Nick and I visited a friend who has just moved in to Montevetro, the apartment building on the Thames at Battersea designed by Richard Rogers. What a beautiful place, spacious and airy with a great view of the River. She has two cats and they are still finding their paws in the new place, but they are as pleased as our friend is with the gorgeously light spaces. Only problem is they are tormented by the Canada geese who waddle past and jeer at them in the mornings. She gave me a present of a beautiful jacket, black silk with gold embroidery, which had belonged to her mother. I am absolutely delighted with such a lovely and unexpected gift.

I am gradually getting through my backlog of reports that I have to write: Two educational assessments and one feedback on one of my students written assignments. The difference is striking and reminds me of how radically my work has changed now from when I worked for the Inner London Education Authority as a Consultant Educational Psychologist. It is good to do assessments with adults as well as children these days, it reminds me of the old times when life was certain and only based in the physical world. Now, running the Soul Therapy Centre, my work takes in the magical world of spiritual healing and subtle energy techniques that are so fundamental to health and wellbeing.