The Brain’s Response to Fear Last year we attended an ANZAP seminar Understanding the Emotional Brain. This started with a stimulating talk by Lea Williams and Russell Meares followed by a lively discussion on the subject. Lea Williams presented some recent work by her and her group on, amongst other things, the brain’s response to fear and [...]

Truths in Zen We don’t have to be Zen practitioners to hear truths from Zen – particularly when they come in the form of a lovely book like Nothing Special: Living Zen by Charlotte Joko Beck. Here’s a quote from this book that resonates with us and with the work we do with couples: I [...]

Conscious Loving In their impressive book Conscious Loving, Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks list the core commitments for transforming co-dependent relationships. What’s a co-dependant relationship? Well, that’s a subject for a whole other post, but at the moment let’s just summarise it as being one in which the partners have made unconscious agreements – to be [...]

Psychotherapy and Nonduality On the subject of psychotherapy and nonduality,  here’s a beautiful piece by John J. Prendergast that includes this summary on the possibilities as he sees them: It seems that more people are beginning to have intuitions of the insubstantiality of their conditioned self and of an underlying unity with the whole of life. Some of these people happen to [...]

The “Gloria” Films There’s a whole complicated background to Everett Shostrom’s “Gloria” films of 1964, much of which is lost in the sands of time. The three films, as we understand it, were the first time that three well-known psychotherapists worked with a (same) real client, on film – these being Carl Rogers (human-centered), Fritz [...]