It’s coming up on a year since I began writing this substack. I felt I was taking a bit of a risk stepping into my voice, especially around some contentious issues. It’s been less scary than I thought, and I have been humbled and touched by the resonances my writing seems to have had with you. I wanted to take a moment to reflect on that and share a little with you about my thoughts for the future.
But first, as the subscribers continue to grow and article views cumulate past initial expectations, I wanted to stop and say thank you. We live in an age of attention deficit and fragmentation, so your readership is all the more precious, and dare I say, needed.
During my psychotherapy masters in 2013, I came across the qualitative research method organic inquiry and remember feeling that familiar sensation of homecoming. Jungian’s talk about that sensation as an important indicator along the individuation journey, occurring particularly when you meet a likeminded person who is also on that quest. I didn’t quite grasp it at the time, but I now see the research method was showing me not just something about researching an academic dissertation, but about a way of being which has come to permeate much of my life.
Organic inquiry invites us to work closely with our unconscious processes through dreams, creative inquiry, reflective indwelling, and the like, while also holding a gentle relationship to concretisation. It is with this spirit that I can see the emergence of themes and new directions from my writing, which I am reflecting on in this post.
I probably publish less than a third of what I write, indeed writing is my main creative and reflective activity. As I have selected from the odds and ends that I jot down, intuiting which drafts to extend into something bigger, I have come to hear an inner voice which always seems to have an eye on a bigger context. To that end, some of the posts have started to formulate their way into something more substantial (more on that in the future), while the posts on this blog, at least for now, seem to be coalescing around four themes.
These are:
Climate & Metacrisis: The issue of our time. Posts which look at the psychic and spiritual implications of the anthropocene and the risk of societal collapse.
Raciality: I am adopting a term I’ve learned from Fanny Brewster’s writing, mainly because I think it gently contains several complex and potentially divisive topics. To me, this is an interdisciplinary area which includes thinking about racial trauma (which is often intergenerational and collective), but also invites us to understand personal psychology down to an instinctual level, as well as our personal, familial and collective historical stories. Within these, of course, lie the spiritual and archetypal dimension of raciality. Rich, but difficult territory.
Difference: An area close to my heart, which in mainstream psychology, is often explored from, shall we say, a “less than depth” perspective. This encompasses race, gender, sexuality, and other dimensions of difference. These I explore in their relevance to individual therapy practice, but also to map against dynamics in groups and society at large.
Clinical Perspectives: Reflections and opinions on specific psychospiritual matters that emerge in the consulting room or in integrative therapy discourse. These topics are from my own experience and subjectivity, but are offered as something for other practitioners to think about in relation to their own work.
Other stuff: Yeah, make that five! This section is kind of placeholder, leaving room for emergences that don’t fit into the above — like this post.
I hope these categorisations will help me organise and deepen my thinking, but they’re also offered as a thought starter to you as reader. If there’s something amongst these topics that you’d like me to write on, maybe you can leave a comment below, or contact me through X or Instagram.
In the coming weeks I will organise the settings on substack around these categories which should make things a bit clearer if you are browsing previous posts.
Finally a further word of gratitude as I know my posting is not super-frequent. This is largely down to my schedule. On that, I might mention here that I took this academic year as a chance to step away from institutional commitments for personal reflection. It’s proved valuable already with lots more time to be with my muse. So, thank you for your patience. I hope and intend that for all, this might be a productive year, in rich, wise and potent ways.