background image
29th March 2024 

Core Process Psychotherapy

Mindfulness-based Core Process Psychotherapy brings the wisdom and awareness practices of Buddhism into a one-to-one therapeutic context. Rather than one person sitting down alone to still the mind and cultivate the art of being present, two people – therapist and client – sit down together to enquire compassionately, in a whole body-mind sense, into what is happening. It is a gentle, highly effective way of bringing awareness and insight to your unique personality process and all the knots and difficulties that stop you from enjoying an easier, more joyful way of life.

Brilliant sanity
As well as offering an in-depth enquiry into the personal, Core Process Psychotherapy also understands that the personality, with all its glitches, preferences, compulsions and buried wounds, is not the sum total of who we are. 'Co-arising' with all of that is something much more spacious. Our core state: the inherently luminous, unified field of awakened heart/mind that can be experienced when we step back from our habitual, conditioned patterns of thinking and behaving. In Buddhism, the core state is sometimes described as our true nature, Buddha nature, awakened mind or brilliant sanity. It is a place of non-separation, and both Buddhism and Core Process Psychotherapy recognise that this fundamental state of wholeness, or health, is potentially available to all of us, no matter what our experience, in every moment. It is each person's birthright.

Lasting transformation
Over time, the practice of slowing down and being in the present with an empathic other enables us to trust more in the fluidity and freedom of the core state. And it is this reconnection – to ourselves, to another human being, to our ever-present true nature – that allows the fearful, restrictive habits of the small self to ease and for long-held traumas to be resolved. It is the cultivation of awareness itself that opens the door to the possibility of deep and lasting transformation.