Robert Braid Counselling

When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to re-perceive my world in a new way and to go on. It is astonishing how elements which seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens. How confusions which seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard. Carl Rogers

My dear friend, Karla Combres, and many others are hosting a province wide online vigil marking one year of covid in Saskatchewan. This is a great offering to support people in connecting with others in the province, and to find strength in community as we remember the many losses over the last year.

As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know. That takes an enormous amount of courage. Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Our entire psychic, physical, emotional, and spiritual makeup was shaped in the long evolutionary sweep of our species. Our inheritance includes an intimate and permeable exchange with the wild world. It is what our minds and bodies expect. Eco-psychologist Chellis Glendinning calls this original enfoldment in the natural world the primal matrix. We were embedded in this matrix of life and knew the world and ourselves only through this perception. It was an unmediated intimacy with the living world, with no trace of separation between the human and the more-than-human world. Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal & The Sacred Work of Grief

We live in a culture that celebrates activity. We collapse our sense of who we are into what we do for a living. The public performance of busyness is how we demonstrate to one another that we are important. The more people see us as tired, exhausted, over-stretched, the more they think we must be somehow indispensable. That we matter. Joan Halifax, Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet

Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me. Neither the Bible nor the prophets neither Freud nor research neither the revelations of God nor man can take precedence over my own direct experience. Carl Rogers

"Community and individuality are not an either/or choice, any more than life and death are. Instead, they are the poles of another great paradox. A culture of isolated individualism produces mass conformity because people who think they must bear life all alone are too fearful to take the risks of selfhood. But people who know that they are embedded in an eternal community are both freed and empowered to become who they were born to be." Parker J. Palmer, The Active Life: Wisdom for Work, Creativity, and Caring

The truth is, you don’t know how much time you have left. All you know is that no matter how many times you’ve done something, there will come a day when you do it for the last time. What if this day that’s already arrived is your last opportunity to enjoy your favorite cup of coffee or the cool fall breeze as you walk to work?... What if it’s your last chance to offer forgiveness, to express love, or to be kind to others? What if you don’t have time to play out your dramas for even another single day? Sit with that for a moment. What do you notice when you bring to mind the brevity of your life? Or the life of your loved ones? Does that change anything about what you plan to do today? Or how you’ll approach doing it? When I’m willing to be completely honest with myself about the fact that I don’t actually know if I will be alive tomorrow, everything changes. The entire context of my life shifts. I’m reminded of the preciousness of every passing moment. A sense of clarity arises about what matters most, as well as a natural desire and willingness to let go of the things that no longer serve me. I invite you to recognize that your life truly is precious and that it does not last forever. Perhaps today you will allow this recognition to shape how you relate to everything that captures your attention.