Welcome to the website for Heart of Stillness Therapy

Life presents us all with challenges from time to time. Seeking professional support at such times and finding a therapist who feels right for you can be daunting. My aim with this website is to give you a sense of who I am and how I work. I hope this will help you in deciding if you’d like to get in touch and arrange an introductory session.

Let me tell you a bit about myself.

I’m Jillian and here are a few things you might like to know about me:

I have a Masters in Counselling and a Post Graduate Certificate in Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy from the University of East Anglia. I’m an accredited member of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy. I divide my time between private practice and a charity in Norwich, although working on Zoom now means that my clients and supervisees come from far and wide.

I also have 30 years of experience studying, practising, and teaching yoga internationally. I have always found that spirituality, self-awareness, and psychotherapy overlap and complement each other in many ways and I have trained widely in spiritual, yogic, and psychotherapeutic practices.

I try to offer a safe and welcoming space where we can sit together in presence and bring our attention and tender curiosity to all aspects of your experiencing.

Counselling and Psychotherapy

My counselling practice is firmly grounded in my primary training in the person-centred approach and influenced by my ongoing practice of Focusing.

Person-centred counselling is a humanistic talk therapy which holds that every individual has within a vast resource for self-awareness, purposeful growth and self-actualization. It means that you are at the centre of the therapy and that I attune deeply in order to know as best I can how you experience yourself, your relationships, and the world around you.  It holds that what we yearn for is to be truly seen, heard, and felt by another, and that when we experience this we change and grow in a natural way.

The person-centred approach offers a profound commitment to respecting the individual, acknowledging and honouring moment-to-moment experiencing, and accessing and following your own inner truth.

I also work from a Focusing-Oriented approach. This type of psychotherapy has a person-centred approach as its basis.  We may well spend time talking just as we do in counselling. But the invitation here is to slow down and pay closer attention to your inner bodily experience. Research shows that this ability to attend inwardly is the most important element in effective therapy and moves us past what we already know about ourselves into new insight and discovery.

I work mainly with adult individuals and couples.

Focusing

What is it?

Focusing is a simple bodily process for emotional healing. It listens to the messages of the body and tunes in to an inner felt sense of knowing. Many of us rely so heavily on the mind and intellect to get through life and resolve our difficulties that we can end up disconnected from the wisdom of our inner body.

During counselling, we mostly engage our minds when talking things through, and this is often very helpful. But knowing something cognitively can only take us so far, and sometimes leaves us circling repetitively in things we already know. Discovering new insights about ourselves may require something more than our rational minds, especially since repetitive thinking and intense rationalising are strategies we use to avoid knowing and feeling our deeper wounds.

Focusing holds that the intricacy of living is far greater than any concept or thought can convey, and that a pre-cognitive ‘knowing’ is implicit in everything we do. If we shift our attention away from our habitual thinking patterns and pay attention to this inner knowing, we can feel it in our being and let it guide our living.

Focusing brings us gently back to the subtleties of the body. It helps us tune in to that felt sense of knowing, teaches us to listen deeply to our inner world, and to relate to it with curiosity and compassion. We discover that our ‘I’ is bigger than all the issues we carry within us. We find a peaceful space that holds all our issues and allows us to relate to them from a safe distance. Focusing works because the life force within us naturally wants to flow and move forward toward resolution and wholeness.

In a world that seems to over-value rational thinking at the expense of our inner somatic experiencing, Focusing can return us to a sense of connection with ourselves and enable us to live from a place within us that is deeper than thought. All we need do is step aside and listen tenderly to the messages from the body.

How can I learn Focusing?

The beauty of Focusing is that you learn it for yourself and once it is learnt, you have a skill for life that you can use by yourself whenever you want. In fact, it is intended to be practised either alone or with a partner. You are learning to trust your own inner knowing and not to rely on any therapist or other person’s opinion.

You may like to try a single one-to-one session to give you a taste of the Focusing process or to spend time with a particular problem in a Focusing way. If you would like to learn Focusing for yourself,  I offer a 5-week course of 90-minute sessions. This will cover all the basics and should give you the confidence to practise at home on your own.

Many people practise Focusing with a companion. If you have a friend or partner you would like to learn with, I offer a 6-week course of 90-minute sessions where you will also learn the art of being an attuned empathic listener in order to support your partner’s focusing.

I also offer workshops and CPD training days. Please contact me for more details.

SUPERVISION

Our work as therapists and counsellors can be personally demanding and isolated. The Supervision relationship may be one of the most important relationships we have and needs to feel supportive both professionally and personally.

My intention as a Person-Centred Supervisor is to hold you, the therapist, at the centre of a welcoming space that aspires to be both nurturing and developmental. A Person-Centred Approach to Supervision is founded on empathic listening and unconditional acceptance and aims to provide a space where we can explore and review your way of being with your clients and in the world as well as any personal matters that may be arising in your life and your work. In addition to sharing our impressions from the client narrative, it aims to stand back a little and make more room for the multi-layered nature of process and relationship.

If Focusing is a practice that appeals to you, we can use specific exercises to facilitate a more felt exploration of your work. A Focusing stance in Supervision places more emphasis on phenomenological exploration rather than on theory. It encourages us to stay close to our own and the client’s experience rather than interpreting or analysing.

I welcome Supervisees and Trainees from any theoretical orientation.

I recognise the importance of finding a Supervisor who feels right for you. To help you with this, I invite you to contact me for a free initial chat via Zoom.

Fees

Sessions are offered weekly, preferably at the same time. Each session lasts for 60 minutes and includes time for payment or other business. I arrange sessions solely with the person seeking counselling and work mainly with adult individuals and couples.

PAYMENT METHODS

BACS Cash Paypal

TESTIMONIALS 

LINKS

Here you will find some links to articles of interest and other resources that you might find helpful.

I was the poster girl for OCD. Then I began to question everything I’d been told about mental illness

Rose Cartwright: ‘The relief of being diagnosed had been brutally short.’ Photograph: Sophia Spring/The Guardian

Six years ago, I sat halfway up a spiral staircase in an old medical library in London, watching an actor recreate one of the most intense moments of my life. We were filming a TV drama based on a memoir I’d written about my struggles with disturbing sexual and violent intrusive thoughts.

The story had started when, aged 15, I was suddenly bombarded by relentless, maddening doubts about core aspects of my identity: my capacity for violence and abuse, my physical appearance, my sexuality, whether I could trust my bones not to break. Graphic, unbearable thoughts and images started looping in my mind, thousands of times a day. I had no language for my devastating anxiety, or for my shame, so I kept it all a secret for 12 years.

The scene we were filming that day was based on the euphoric moment in my 20s when I first discovered that my thoughts were typical symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and that there were others out there battling this common enemy. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Fuck. It’s OCD. I’ve got OCD!” said actor Charly Clive as she read a list of symptoms from the medical textbook in her hands, giving voice to the astonishing clarity and relief that diagnosis can bring in a bewildering mental-health landscape.