Vision and Values

The Transpersonal Arts Counselling training is a challenging and enriching journey towards greater self-awareness and personal development, leading to personal confidence and the development of professional therapeutic skills. Each module deepens the theory and practice of working holistically with clients.

The course provides the skills and knowledge essential for counselling practice, preparing students to work with a diversity of clients, presenting issues and therapeutic settings.

This is an experiential training, exploring how we bring depth, intimacy and presence to relationships with others, with our world and within ourselves.

The first part of the training is orientated towards the application of self-awareness methods to gain insight into one’s personal narrative and life experience. Transpersonal work is about seeing behind the mask and supporting greater self-awareness, authenticity and creativity, recognising that each person brings their own capacities, experiences and inner resources to this process. It takes our human potential and encourages us to cultivate already developed skills. Learning through direct experience ensures that theory is embedded and embodied and that students engage deeply with their own experience to support self-knowledge. Here, experience itself is a source of learning and development and we champion a spirit of enquiry.

Our training emphasises self-discovery. Too early an emphasis on skills in therapeutic training can encourage students to rely on techniques rather than developing confidence in being with the inevitable uncertainty of the counselling situation. While counselling skills are taught from the beginning of the training, they are developed alongside experiential learning and theoretical perspectives. This building on inner experience is part of the ‘inside-out’ learning method, in which students integrate skills into their own experience rather than using them as technical means to an end.

We recognise that students bring their own life experience and knowledge to the training. This experience is further informed and developed through the training, supporting each student to develop their own individual style and emphasis as a Transpersonal Arts Counsellor.

The second part of the training focuses more directly on applying this learning when working with clients.

Through a deep engagement with the visual arts, our students develop a relationship with image, imagination and the archetypal language of the arts. Through the art of counselling, they learn to bring this understanding into their work with others. We believe that an imaginal engagement with the arts can facilitate individual expression and support transformative processes.

We respect each individual’s search for meaning and the views and belief systems of our students. Tobias invests in a vision of a community tolerant of individuality, fostering counsellors 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 and develop a practice of ongoing self-reflection. This supports an awareness of what they themselves bring to the therapeutic relationship and their responsibility within it. Tobias seeks to model how an educational institution can support individuals who aspire towards greater authenticity, who can build communities and remain connected to their environment. Our goal is to foster a new generation of integrated practitioners who bring a holistic and transpersonal understanding into their therapeutic practice.

Tobias is founded upon the principle that individual healing and collective development begin with an individual’s willingness to engage in self-development involving the ‘whole’ person, encompassing body, soul and spirit, as well as their relationship to their environment.

In her poem Why I Wake Early, Mary Oliver reflected on the meaning and nature of the human soul and its unknowability: “…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” (Oliver, 2017). Despite the intangibility of the soul, maintaining the integrity of the learner’s soul and their inner emotional life, and regarding them with compassion and intentional kindness, are guiding principles in our course design and teaching. Doing this is the creative challenge of our work.

Source: Oliver, M. (2017) Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver. New York: Penguin Press.

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.

For more information about Tobias or any courses, please get in touch by emailing info@tobiasart.org.