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Teallach is the Gaelic word for hearth stone. Find details here on upcoming Mental Health CPD events, Embodied Psychotherapy Workshops and Retreats
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.. in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. Mary Oliver In Blackwater Woods Photography Katia Chausheva www.teallach.com
Deepening the Senses - Awakening Bealtaine Day Retreat
Hi Everyone, **Places are already filling up for Deepening the Senses Retreat...Early booking is advised!! This will be the last of the 'journey inward' Day retreats for this year so do book now to avoid disappointment **. I am delighted to announce that 'Deepening the Senses - Awakening Bealtaine' Workshop/ Retreat will take place on May 5th in the peaceful setting of the SCCUL Sanctuary in Clarinbridge, Co. Galway. Why not start your weekend and mark the beginning of the Summer with a unique day retreat, only 15 minutes outside Galway city. Drawing on an Embodied Psychotherapy approach you will immerse yourself in the myth of Bealtaine, deepening your connection to the archetypes and the symbolic language of dreams to awaken a more authentic connection to yourself. Please click on the link below for more information. Testimonials from January 2017 - "The awards i am leaving with are invigorating and life altering" "I really enjoyed the experience, the unfolding and learning was so deep but not intense which allowed for some tremendous work...astonishing!" "It was amazing" more details on www.teallach.com
Rebel Girls
Parents of little girls and writers of children's books..this may be of interest to you ❤ www.teallach.com
Childless: why is society so frightened of women without children? – video
An exploration of society's expectations of women and the unconscious fear of women who step out of that norm. A fear rooted in patriarchy. www.teallach.com
Carl Jung's Psychological Diagnosis Using Mandalas ~ Fractal Enlightenment
Mandala is like a design that triggers something within us, a sacred geometry in which we recognise our self and our place in the cosmos. www.teallach.com
Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds
Why do we hold onto beliefs when faced with facts that show our beliefs are wrong? interesting read www.teallach.com
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'Love is the real power. It's the energy that cherishes. The more you work with that energy, the more you will see how people respond naturally to it, and the more you will want to use it. It brings out your creativity, and helps everyone around you flower. Your children, the people you work with--everyone blooms'. Marion Woodman Photography-Steve McCurry Loikaw, Myanmar-Burma www.teallach.com
Photos from Eileen Ní Shuilleabháin MSocSc and MA Psychotherapy and Supervisor's post
I am feeling so grateful to the wonderful people who came today to Deepening the Senses Day Retreat and shared so open heartedly in the experience. It was such a lovely day. The sun this morning was shining, the room full of such beautiful light, the real feel of spring in the air, the beautiful setting that was ' the Sccul Sanctuary' and the kindness of Mary this morning helping me set up. The fire was down and we really had a magical day. Thank you everyone ❤ grá mór, Eileen. Until we meet again x www.teallach.com
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This quote sums up very well the physical tension and emotional pain that precedes internal growth. We very often respond to that discomfort by trying to move away from it. What is important and difficult in those times is to trust and to stay awake to the potential it is bringing'. ❤ "Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.” ~ Alice Walker Photography unknown www.teallach.com
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Happy International Women's Day ❤ " Please hear me, girl. The world has enough women who know how to do their hair. It needs women who know how to do hard and holy things" Anne Voscamp Photography unknown www.teallach.com
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Attachment theory and the ANS system. This excellent article captures succinctly those dynamics. www.teallach.com Understanding Attachment: How Our ‘Old Stuff’ Defines Us The “old stuff”—the things we carry from the past—cycles through our lives, in and out. We hold it in glimpses of childhood, images and emotions that are sometimes disconnected from one another. We carry mud puddles and faces, toys, bedrooms, yards. We hold memories of clouds, angles of sunlight on the side of a shed. Our bodies maintain postures of humiliations and accomplishments. They hold our sadness and fear, our anger, trust, and hope. Living within our adaptations, we take what we are given biologically and survive childhood by ignoring the parts of ourselves that remain unreflected. We may discard the bits that trigger caregivers, and we may take their instantaneous bodily reactions to us as representation of the entire world and build our expectations and strategies around these. After childhood, as we begin to explore and adapt to any number of new systems, we may start to recognize the arbitrary nature of systems themselves. This realization may lead us to to gradually and naturally gravitate toward reconnection with the parts of self we previously left behind. With this transition often comes a mix of acceptance and grief. Our templates of childhood experience may lend form to our expectations in relationships, to our style of attachment. These experiences may be preverbal, and we may lack the concrete language to articulate them, even to ourselves. But when intimacy reaches a threshold, a certain temperature, they often rise up within us, perhaps presenting as fear or anger, as an automated reaction that occurs without awareness and is typically witnessed only in hindsight, when the body has calmed. Meeting as We’ve Been Met for Generations When our needs are met by caregivers and by ourselves, reliably and consistently, throughout childhood, this pattern of connection is likely to continue throughout generations. Secure attachment can be understood to mean that we know how to be, with self and with other. The two extremes (anxious/avoidant) of insecure attachment can occur when caregivers do not know how to meet particular behaviors or emotions. Perhaps nobody modeled these skills for them, or perhaps they experienced trauma that affected their ability to meet our needs. Whatever the cause, when our early interactions are affected by this inability to have our needs met, we may begin to separate from parts of self and lose the connection to “other” as well as self. When a person with limited tolerance for internal sensation becomes a parent, a specific set of “containment” skills is often passed to the next generation. In other words, children learn how best to avoid the discomfort of being with self or other. On one level, this is purely adaptive and may even be beneficial, based on what has been experienced. On another level, this training to protect the self from internal sensation can become a tunnel through which children learn to navigate the world, and it may perpetuate a pattern. The parent is not the only teacher. Children learn from siblings, from relatives, through accidents, through the very unpredictability of life. In those homes where a child fails to define a sense of self or aspects of self are lost, an alternate cycle—a pattern of disconnection—can continue through generations, leading to extreme reactions and polarization. This insecure attachment may be avoidant or anxious, an internalized sense of rigidity or chaos, “too much” or “not enough.” Integration Through Differentiation Both within and without, we must define the pieces before building the puzzle. First we separate, identify, and name. We move apart to differentiate, to identify present changes since the previous separation. Then we come together. We join to experiment, to share what we have learned, to teach one another about ourselves, to teach others how to treat us, or to teach parts of self how to meet other parts. When our early interactions are affected by an inability to have our needs met, we may begin to separate from parts of self and lose the connection to “other” as well as self. One major challenge here is the underlying “wish” of either extreme that someone else will come, to save or redeem us, bring us worth, nurture or define us. This wish is often born of a hoped-for childhood experience that did not happen. To take ownership of our own lives, we must grieve this wish. Ownership often happens at a gradual pace. “If they are not coming, what must I do now?” Often ownership coincides with a relationship or takes place in a created community. There may be an underlying acceptance in the letting go, an acceptance that accompanies a recognized appreciation for what actually is: “In this moment, even without resolution of the ‘old stuff,’ I’m ok. I can grieve for those times when I was not ok. I am learning what my caregivers did not know at the time. My needs are met. My body is calm.” The Underlying Animal: Fight or Flight in Child Rearing When our emotion or behavior as a child triggers a fight response from parents, we lose agency and may feel invaded at a core level. This is a building block of avoidant attachment. We may carry an internalized ongoing feeling of being controlled, emotionally rejected, unheard. We may feel as if our needs don’t matter, that we are losing self. Thus, we may decide to give nothing more, to close down. These extreme responses serve to represent our individual positioning in a global pattern of basic human responses—fight, flight, or freeze—and illustrate the ways this pattern propagates, continuing from one generation to the next. Alternately, when a parent pulls away or flinches in the presence of something we perceive as our core self, we may internalize this flight response and continue to abandon ourselves throughout life, believing that some part of us is hideous and must remain hidden. This belief—and the subsequent creation of patterns of internal polarization that only serve amplify that part within us and make it more obvious—characterize what is known as anxious attachment. With the high prevalence of extreme attachment styles on a cultural and global scale, it may be of great importance to begin exploring our own reactions. At a foundational level, awareness and attunement to our own natural biological responses can potentially affect generations. References: Attachment. (2012). Encyclopedia on early child development. Retrieved from http://www.child-encyclopedia.com/attachment/introduction Kinnison, J. (2014). Type: Anxious-Preoccupied. Retrieved from https://jebkinnison.com/bad-boyfriends-the-book/type-anxious-preoccupied © Copyright 2016 Jeremy McAllister, MA, LPC, therapist in Portland, Oregon therapy. Org. Painting by Pablo Picasso www.teallach.com www.teallach.com
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