Vision and Values
Transpersonal Art’s in Therapy Training is a challenging and enriching journey towards greater self-awareness and life management, leading to personal confidence and practical therapeutic skills. Each Module deepens the theory and practice of working holistically with clients, and how to case manage their journey, using a client-centred methodology.
The course provides the skills and knowledge essential for counselling practice including working with clients, working with groups, life transformation, grief, loss, risk management, children and life transitions and case management.
Our programme presents counselling approaches that emphasise the integration of body, mind, spirit, and environment within the context of one’s society. This unique course offers students a holistic, client centred approach to counselling and therapy for students. It provides a humanistic approach to mental and spiritual health and well-being.
The first part of the course is orientated towards applying self-awareness methods to gain insight into one’s personal narrative and life experience. Transpersonal work is about seeing behind the mask and attempting to experience greater authenticity and creativity in one’s life by enhancing what they have already done that is healthy and worth acknowledging. It takes our human potential and pushes us to cultivate already developed skills. It also combines scientific knowledge with traditional healing models and techniques that demonstrate how different cultural beliefs define notions of normality. Learning through direct experience ensures that the theory is embedded and embodied and that students engage deeply with their own experience to support healing and self-knowledge. It’s action learning! Here, experience itself is the source of learning and development and we champion the spirit of enquiry.
Because most of our intake are mature students, we assume they do have significant life experience and wisdom. This experience is then informed by transpersonal knowledge, so the counsellor/ therapist develops his or her own unique style and emphasis.
The second part of the course focuses more directly towards the application of these techniques when working with clients.
This is an experiential course, exploring how we bring depth, intimacy and presence to relationships with others, with our world, and within ourselves.
Our training emphasises self-discovery. Too early an emphasis on skills in therapeutic training can encourage the student to use techniques as a defence against the anxiety of being in the inevitable uncertainty of the counselling situation. In our training, both theoretical perspectives and the development of counselling skills are initially presented in an implicit experiential way and only later made explicit. This building on inner experience is part of the ‘inside-out’ learning method in which students integrate skills into their own reality rather than using them as technical means to an end.
Through a deep engagement with the visual arts our students are enabled to enter ‘an educated co-operation with image intelligences’ (Angelo 2003), whilst through the art of counselling they are enabled to bring this co-operation as facilitation of the transformation of others. In the tradition that Robert Lawlor calls anthropocosmic, ‘restated in our time by Rudolf Steiner, RA Schwaller de Lubicz and others’ (Lawlor 1982), we believe that an imaginal engagement with the Muses or the arts and their archetypal language, facilitates individual expression and improves health.
Students learn client-centred counselling techniques, case management, ethics, working with different populations, legal obligations and setting up a practice. Students also complete 100 days of supervised clinical experience.
We respect each individual’s search for meaning, and are respectful of the views and belief systems of our students. Tobias students are exposed to cognitive approaches to psychotherapy, as well as to experiential modes of healing engaging the full spectrum of human consciousness. Tobias invests in a vision of a community tolerant of individuality, fostering counsellors and therapists who are able to validate and support meaning in their clients’ experiences.
For such a community to be viable, students take on an attitude of personal responsibility for their own self development, so that they become models of exemplary practice for their clients. Tobias seeks to become a model for how an educational institution can support the emergence of more ‘conscious’ individuals who aspire towards authenticity and who can build communities and be connected to their environment. Our goal is to foster a new generation of integrated practitioners and thereby bring psycho-spiritual work into the mainstream of therapeutic practice.
Tobias is founded upon the principle that both individual healing and collective evolution begin with an individual’s willingness to engage in self development involving the ‘whole’ person, encompassing body, mind, spirit and environment.
In her poem, Why I wake early, the late Mary Oliver (1982) reflected on the meaning and nature of the human soul and concluded that it was (mostly) unknowable. …and what the soul is, also I believe I will never quite know. Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, touching, and loving.” Despite the intangibility of the soul, maintaining the integrity of the learner’s soul and their internal emotional lives and regarding them with compassion and intentional kindness are very much our guiding principles in course design and teaching. Doing this is the creative challenge of our work.
We place a high value on the sense of community generated within the student and graduate body.
Bibliography
Lawlor. R (1982) Sacred Geometry: Philosophy and Practice – Art and Imagination
Oliver M (2017) Devotions The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
Who was Rudolf Steiner?
Dr Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) born in 1861 in what is now Croatia, studied natural science, incorporating the philosophy of JW Goethe (1749-1832) in Vienna and soon became a respected thinker. He called the results of his work Anthroposophy – a term derived from two Greek words Anthropos and Sophia, which means man and wisdom.
Anthroposophy is a modern spiritual path that cherishes and respects the freedom of each individual. Its fundamental basis is to understand human beings through three dimensions of Physical body, Soul and Spirit.
For Steiner, Anthroposophy was the path that could ‘lead the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe’. Rudolf Steiner’s vision of Art, as with all forms of human expression, is that it should be a reflection of the human being’s experience of the divine.
For more information about Tobias or any courses, please get in touch by emailing info@tobiasart.org.
