About my therapy practice

I am a UKCP-registered psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, and one of the Directors of the Karuna Institute, a UKCP-accredited postgraduate training organisation offering a diploma in Mindfulness-Based Core Process Psychotherapy.

I have been in private practice since qualifying in 2003, working with individuals at depth alongside teaching, supervising, and contributing to psychotherapeutic training in the UK.

My path into psychotherapy was not direct. I began my career in the film industry, before a deepening interest in holistic practice led me toward aromatherapy and then into specialist work supporting people living with HIV and AIDS, with organisations including London Lighthouse and across NHS treatment schemes.

It was my own experience of suffering that opened the deeper path. I encountered mindfulness practice and found in it a path of compassion.

How I work

My approach is rooted in Core Process Psychotherapy, integrating Buddhist psychology, compassion practices, and western psychotherapeutic understanding, with the trust that our suffering, met with awareness and care, contains the seeds of our own wholeness.

As a psycho-spiritual psychotherapist  I am interested in the subtle embodiment of the deep imagination and the healing potential of working with nature and the land.  I have a deepening interest in the place of transitions, particularly in midlife and how spiritual crisis can be a deeply creative calling.

I bring a somatic and trauma-informed lens to the work, drawing on training with Babette Rothschild and, more recently, on Identity-oriented Psychotrauma Therapy (IoPT), in which I have recently completed my graduate training.

My practice is also shaped by Celtic spirituality, intergenerational and ancestral healing, eco-psychology, and a long-standing contemplative practice.

The thread that runs through everything

I am Irish and my roots in the west of Ireland, its landscape, culture and history have shaped me as a person and a practitioner in ways I am still discovering.  The Irish experience of colonisation, of silenced language, severed land connection, and inherited grief, is not abstract to me.  It lives in my body and in my people.

This has deepened my interest in ancestral and intergenerational healing; the ways in which the unprocessed experiences of previous generations can live on in us as patterns of fear, shame, disconnection, or longing. I am also interested in how mainstream psychotherapy has sometimes carried unexamined assumptions about what it means to be well, to be a self and to belong.

• Qualifications
• Professional Memberships