Ever since I watched on the BBC an Indonesian acupuncturist set light to a piece of newspaper with his bare hands, I have been intrigued by the question of what is possible for human beings? The Buddhist path invites this question also, by encouraging practitioners to identify with the creative and skilful aspects of experience rather than the habitual and destructive. It invites a profound inquiry into what is wholesome? and indirectly what is health?

My training in Core Process Psychotherapy has offered me a holistic, multidimensional, and profound vision of the complex web of conditions that affect human beings and create our suffering. Just as importantly, it has offered a portal or doorway into the resources that make resilience within the human condition more possible.

For me, this has been the alchemy of Buddhist heart work and the growing understanding of Western neuroscience. Resilience, balance and the felt experience of well-being are seen as a basic human inheritance not a luxury for the privileged few. The process of restoring our basic human dignity in the face of this complex human experience is important to me.

I feel deeply privileged and fortunate to be working with the group of inspiring and creative individuals who are the Teaching Faculty at the Karuna Institute. The Faculty is deeply committed to training psychotherapy students to meet the world and human experience directly and to explore the conditions by which we and humanity around us may thrive.