Self-Discovery: The Journey Within

People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.

––St. Augustine

Self-discovery is the process of uncovering who we truly are and learning how to embrace and live in alignment with that truth. It involves delving beneath the surface of our everyday selves to explore our deeper desires, values, motivations, and potential. This exploration often requires patience, courage, and a willingness to challenge our assumptions about ourselves and the world.

The ancient Greek philosophers understood the fundamental importance of this pursuit, famously encapsulated in the maxim "Know Thyself." It’s an age-old truth that resonates across time because much of our suffering and dissatisfaction arise when we live disconnected from our true nature. When we fail to live in harmony with who we really are—whether because of societal expectations, fear, or confusion—our lives become fragmented, leading to stress, anxiety, depression, and a sense of “something is missing.”.

Engaging in self-discovery helps us bridge that gap. It allows us to align our external lives—our careers, relationships, and actions—with our inner world. This alignment fosters a sense of wholeness, clarity, and empowerment, essential to living a purposeful and fulfilling life. Without this inner knowledge, we risk living someone else's version of success, perpetuating a cycle of discontent.

Good health, both mentally and physically, cannot be fully realised without self-awareness. Living authentically reduces the tension and stress that arise from living in conflict with ourselves. By understanding our needs, desires, and limits, we make choices supporting our well-being, leading to a healthier life.

Self-discovery is not a destination but a lifelong journey. As we grow and evolve, so too does our understanding of ourselves. The more we learn about who we are, the more equipped we become to navigate life with wisdom and grace. It's a journey worth embarking on, as it ultimately leads to a deeper sense of peace, fulfilment, and inner freedom.

Awareness: The First Step to Transformation

Awareness is the most basic and foundational experience of consciousness. It is the essential quality that allows us to engage with both the external world and our internal landscapes. To be aware is to have full, direct consciousness of something—whether it is a person, an object, a thought, or a feeling.

Awareness is a dynamic form of experiencing. It is the continuous process of being in touch with the world around us through our senses—vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. But it also extends inward, enabling us to be attuned to our inner world: bodily sensations, emotions, thoughts, desires, needs, attitudes, and actions. Through awareness, we recognise how we move through life and how life moves through us.

Being aware means paying attention, but in a particular way. It is attention free from judgement, effort, or the impulse to control or change anything. Instead of trying to alter what we experience, we allow ourselves to witness it as it is. In this way, awareness invites acceptance and presence.

To be aware is to feel truly alive. It sharpens our sense of aliveness, grounding us in the present moment. In those moments of pure awareness, we are connected both to the richness of our surroundings and to the depths of our own inner life.

Awareness is the first step in any meaningful transformation. When we bring awareness to our thoughts, behaviours, and reactions, we begin to see patterns and responses that were previously unconscious. Without the need to force change, simply observing these patterns with awareness allows a natural, gentle transformation to begin. Over time, this mindful observation shifts how we engage with ourselves and the world, leading to personal growth, healing, and deeper understanding.

Breaking the Cycle of Automatic Thoughts

Automatic thoughts, also known as inner talk, are our ongoing internal commentary on the world and our place within it. This inner dialogue is perfectly natural; it’s part of how we interpret life and our experiences. From moment to moment, we assess events, measure how we're doing, and decide if what’s happening feels good or bad, safe or threatening.

One defining quality of these automatic thoughts is their subtlety. They occur so frequently and so quietly that we become almost numb to them. They hum along in the background of our minds, often unnoticed and unexamined.

Another characteristic of these thoughts is their spontaneity and speed. Automatic thoughts pop up immediately, without analysis, reacting to whatever’s in front of us. They’re brief, often just a few words or an image, capturing a whole collection of past memories or impressions.

Some automatic thoughts are accurate, helping us gauge situations and avoid danger. Others, however, are misguided, alerting us to threats that don’t exist—these are what we call negative automatic thoughts.

Negative automatic thoughts can profoundly impact how we behave and make decisions. They share several common traits:

1. Unconscious: These thoughts arise without our conscious awareness.

2. Distorted: They don’t align with reality. If we stopped to examine them, we’d see their flaws, but instead, we often accept them as true without question.

3. Negative and Unhelpful: They tend to fixate on past regrets or future fears, forecasting the worst. They frequently lie at the heart of anxiety and depression.

4. Powerful and Automatic: Running in the background, these thoughts trigger one another—a single anxious thought can snowball, fueling more anxiety and drowning out rational thinking.

5. Persistent: Negative automatic thoughts are often deeply ingrained in our minds.

Breaking Free from the Cycle

The good news is that this cycle of automatic thoughts can be broken. We can transform our inner dialogue by becoming aware of it and choosing to replace negative thoughts with constructive ones. This process, called de-conditioning, allows us to regain control over our inner narrative—and ultimately, our lives.

The Seven-Eyed Model of Supervision: A Comprehensive View of Supervisory Practice

The Seven-Eyed Model of Supervision is a process-orientated approach that integrates both the relational and systemic aspects of supervision. It focusses on the relationships between the client, therapist, and supervisor while also considering the interplay between these relationships and their context within the wider system.

The model is called “seven-eyed” because it addresses seven distinct aspects of the supervision process, as explained below.

My supervision approach integrates the Seven-Eyed Model by Peter Hawkins and Robin Shohet with the Psychosynthesis model, incorporating a transpersonal perspective.

Image: D. Djukic

Here is a description of the seven different eyes:

1. Focus on the Client and what and how they present

This mode focuses on what actually happened in the sessions with the client:

• How the client came to be having sessions; their physical appearance; how they move and hold themselves; how they breathe, speak, look, gesture, their language, metaphors, images and the story of their life as they told it

• What they chose to share, which area of their life they wanted to explore, and how the session’s content might relate to previous sessions

• The choices the client is making

• The connections between the various aspects of the client’s life

2. Focusing on Interventions

The focus here is on: 

• Strategies, skills and techniques used by the therapist; when and why they were used

• Developing alternative strategies and interventions

3. Focusing on the Client-Therapist Relationship

The aim of this mode is to help the therapist gain greater insight and understanding of the dynamics of their relationships with their clients. This includes:

• Addressing contract and boundaries; therapeutic alliance and how it develops

• How the session started and finished, what happened around the edges of the sessions, metaphors and images that emerged

• Paying attention to the client’s transference

4. Focusing on Therapist’s Process

The focus is on how the therapist is consciously and unconsciously affected by the work with their clients and how they deal with this. It includes focusing on the therapist’s emotional reactions and countertransference, their development, and how they resource themselves. 

5. Focusing on Therapist-Supervisor Relationship

The aims of this mode are:  

• To ensure the quality of the working alliance between therapist and supervisor

• To explore how the therapist-supervisor relationship might be unconsciously playing out or paralleling the hidden dynamics of the work with the clients

6. The Supervisor focusing on their own process

Here, the supervisor pays attention to their immediate experiences in the supervision session – what feelings, thoughts, and images are emerging for them while listening to the therapist and in response to the material shared by the therapist. The supervisor uses these responses as another source of information about what might be happening in the client-therapist relationship.

7. Focusing on the Wider Context in which the work happens

This model takes into consideration:

• The context of the client—client’s family, social, cultural and economic context

• The context of the therapist’s profession—employing organisation or training agency

• The wider world of the therapist and supervisor

• Professional codes and ethics (e.g. BACP, UKCP)

All of the above is addressed within the Transpersonal context

The tanspersonal perspective includes:

• Looking for creative possibilities and seeing “crises as the opportunities for growth”

• Addressing meaning, values and common humanity 

• Holding the emerging higher purpose (I-Self connection)

While supervision ideally involves all seven modes, incorporating each one in every session is not essential.

Reference
Hawkins and Shohet (2006) Supervision in the helping professions. Open University Press, McGraw-Hill Education

Six Types of Courage: Pathways to Face Life’s Challenges

You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honour.

Aristotle

Courage is a quality everyone aspires to possess, yet it is often misunderstood as merely physical bravery. In truth, courage takes many forms, each of which we may need to call upon as we navigate the complexities of life. There are six distinct types of courage, each vital for facing different kinds of challenges:

1, Physical Courage – Acting Despite Fear

Physical courage is the most recognised form of bravery. It involves taking action despite the risk of bodily harm or even death. This type of courage is not just about fearlessly charging into danger but also about developing physical strength, resilience, and awareness. It’s the determination to endure, persist, and stand firm in the face of bodily threats or challenges.

2. Emotional Courage – Embracing Vulnerability

Emotional courage is the strength to follow your heart, to face and experience the full range of human emotions—whether they be joy, sadness, fear, or anger—without becoming consumed or attached to any of them. This type of courage allows us to be open to emotional experiences, even when uncomfortable or painful. It requires vulnerability, as it invites us to feel deeply and honestly, without avoidance or suppression, and to remain authentic despite emotional risk.

3. Intellectual Courage – Expanding your Mind

Intellectual courage is the willingness to challenge one's own thinking, step outside the comfort zone of familiar knowledge, and embrace new ideas. It is about learning, unlearning, and relearning in an ever-evolving world. Intellectual courage encourages curiosity and open-mindedness, enabling us to let go of long-held beliefs that no longer serve us and adapt to new perspectives with flexibility and grace.

4. Social Courage – Staying True to Yourself

Social courage is being yourself in the face of potential social repercussions. It involves risking embarrassment, rejection, or exclusion to maintain your authenticity. Social courage is essential for leadership, as it often requires standing apart from the crowd, expressing unpopular opinions, and making decisions that may not be socially approved. It’s about being honest, maintaining integrity, and not allowing the fear of others’ judgements to dictate your actions or words.

5. Moral Courage – Standing Up for What is Right

Moral courage is the resolve to stand up for what you believe is right, even when it is uncomfortable, unpopular, or comes with personal cost. This courage is closely tied to ethical behaviour and integrity, as it compels us to make decisions based on our principles and values. Moral courage often involves confronting injustice, speaking truth to power, and advocating for others, even in the face of personal risk.

6. Spiritual Courage - Finding Purpose and Meaning

Spiritual courage is the strength to face suffering, pain, or uncertainty with dignity and faith. It involves a heart-centered approach to life, enabling us to live with purpose, compassion, and a sense of connection to something greater than ourselves. Whether through religious faith or a deep personal philosophy, spiritual courage provides the resilience to endure life’s trials with grace, to live in alignment with our values, and to seek meaning even in the darkest times.

Courage is not a singular trait but a spectrum of qualities that allow us to navigate life’s uncertainties with strength and resilience. Whether we face physical threats, emotional vulnerability, intellectual challenges, social pressures, moral dilemmas, or spiritual trials, courage provides the foundation for meaningful and purposeful action in the world.

Adapted from ‘Six Types of Courage‘, by Dungate & Armstrong

The Science and Art of Affirmations

Affirmation is a positive statement used to reprogram your unconscious mind; a statement, when said to yourself over and over and with feeling, will intensify the internal forces and manifest change in your life.

Listed below are certain rules to be followed for optimum use of affirmations:

• Always use the PRESENT TENSE. Say, “I am healthy," “I am calm," “I am optimistic," or…

• Only POSITIVE affirmations work. The unconscious mind is incapable of dealing in negatives. So, if you say “I am not fat”, then when the affirmation reaches the unconscious mind, the term “not” is ignored, and it becomes “I am fat.”.

• REPETITION. To bring about significant changes in your life, affirmations have to be done several times a day till they become a reality.

The principle behind the working of affirmations is similar to that of drops of water falling on a rock. A few drops will not make any difference to the rock, but if the drops fall continuously, then, over a period of time, the rock will be worn out.
If you do affirmations for only a few days, the expected results may not come.

You become what you think about all day long.

Ralph Waldo Emerson