Diploma in Embodied Relational Counselling
(Level 4)

Who this diploma is for

This diploma is suited to those drawn to a practice based in the experience of presence, depth, cultural humility, and the subtle intelligence of the body and the relational field. Graduates leave with a strong foundation for trauma-informed and socially aware clinical practice and are well prepared to progress into supervised client work and professional registration pathways.

The diploma will:

• Stand alone as a comprehensive foundation in relational therapeutic counselling

• Provide a strong base for those who may wish to progress onto the NARM® Therapist Training or other relational therapy frameworks

On successful completion, graduates will receive a Level 4 Counselling Certificate, aligned with eligibility for membership of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), a key professional benchmark in the UK.

What the Training Actually Looks Like

This is a deeply experiential training. While there is a strong theoretical foundation, the primary way of learning is through direct experience, reflection, and relational practice.

In-person weekends (Friday–Sunday)

Year 1:

• Friday & Saturday: lectures and facilitated experiential group work, weaving together embodied practices, relational inquiry, and the theory explored in monthly online sessions
• Sunday: a facilitated grief process group, supporting students to develop a conscious, embodied, and relational understanding of grief, and to reflect on how grief may present in its many forms within therapeutic practice

Year 2:

• Friday & Saturday: focus shifts toward clinical practice, including role practice, demonstrations, and exploration of aligned modalities (including NARM and related approaches)
• Sunday: an interpersonal process group, supporting the transition into clinical practice and your ongoing development as a practitioner

Across the weekends, you will be actively participating—not just observing—developing your capacity for presence, attunement, and relational awareness in real time.

Online theory sessions (between weekends, 2 hours)

These sessions introduce and explore key theoretical frameworks, including attachment theory, relational psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, and trauma-informed approaches. They are delivered in a seminar-style format, combining teaching, discussion, and reflection, and are designed to help you make sense of your experiential learning.

Ongoing integration and reflection

Between sessions, you will be engaging in:

• Reflective journaling
• Reading and theory integration
• Developing your own embodied relational practice

This supports the gradual integration of learning, allowing the work to extend beyond the training room into your wider life and practice.

Group process as a core part of learning

The group itself is a central part of the training. It becomes a live relational field where patterns of connection, disconnection, repair, and growth can be explored in real time.
Year 1: an ongoing grief process group, held within a trauma-informed and supported framework
Year 2: an interpersonal process group, supporting the transition into clinical practice

Training Dates

In-person weekends are Friday to Sunday, 10am to 6pm UK Time

Year 1

8 weekends and 12 online theory sessions.

2027

2028

Year 2

9 weekends and 10 online theory sessions.

2028

2029

Frameworks & Lineages We Draw From

Relational and Somatic Foundations

We are rooted in contemporary relational and somatic approaches, including, body psychotherapy and touch-informed perspectives like biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy. These approaches share an understanding that healing is not imposed from the outside, but instead emerges through attuned relationship, nervous system regulation, and a growing capacity for agency, choice, and contact.

Developmental and Relational Psychology

We draw from developmental psychology, attachment theory, object relations, and relational psychoanalysis, offering a rich framework for understanding how early relational environments shape patterns of protection, identity, and connection. Rather than pathologising these adaptations, the training invites curiosity about how they once made sense — and how they may soften in the presence of safety and relationship.

Ecological, Indigenous and Justice-Informed Perspectives

We are also informed by earth-based understandings, wild therapy, and nature-connected practices that recognise humans as embodied beings embedded within larger living systems. These perspectives are held with respect and humility, alongside decolonial and social justice theories that invite ongoing reflection on power, culture, difference, and the social contexts in which suffering and healing occur.

Programme Structure

Year 1: Foundations — Theory, Experience, Integration

Developing the internal capacity to practise

Year 1 is focused on building the foundations of embodied relational practice — both personally and professionally.

This is where you develop:

• Embodied self-awareness
• Relational presence
• Capacity for reflection, consent, and boundaries
• An understanding of attachment, development, and adaptation

The emphasis is not on "learning techniques", but on becoming the kind of practitioner who can sit with complexity, uncertainty, and human experience without needing to fix or reduce it.

Theory is introduced through monthly online seminars and is continually brought into the experiential weekends, where it is explored through direct, lived experience.

Across the year, you will move through key developmental themes including:

• Belonging and the relational container
• Embodiment and felt sense
• Attachment and early development
• Grief and emotional depth
• Power, consent, and autonomy

By the third term of Year 1, you will have developed a strong foundation in relational and embodied awareness, and will be assessed for readiness to begin supervised clinical practice.

Year 2: Application — Skills, Practice, Clinical Work

Bringing your learning into real-world counselling practice

Year 2 focuses on integrating what you have developed into clinical work with clients.

You will:

• Be working with clients in an approved placement
• Complete a minimum of 100 hours of supervised clinical practice
• Deepen your ability to work relationally in the "here and now"
• Integrate theory, embodiment, and therapeutic skill into practice

The training becomes more explicitly practice-oriented, including:

• Role practice and demonstrations
• Exploration of aligned modalities (including NARM and related approaches)
• Ongoing interpersonal process work to support your development as a practitioner

By the end of the programme, you will have:

• A grounded, embodied approach to counselling
• Experience of working with clients in a supervised setting
• The foundations required to move into professional practice and further accreditation pathways

Entry Requirements

This programme is designed for practitioners who are already working with people in a supportive or therapeutic capacity. You may be a therapist, somatic practitioner, coach, nurse, midwife, social worker, or other helping professional with experience of one-to-one work. If you hold a Level 2 and Level 3 counselling qualification, you are ideally placed to apply.

If your background is in a related field rather than formal counselling training, we warmly encourage you to get in touch — we assess each application individually and consider the full breadth of your experience and training. All applicants will be required to attend one of our Heart-Based Experiential Weekends as a prerequisite to the training. If you are unable to attend, please inform us so we can explore other ways of assessing the application.

Certification Requirements

To be awarded the Level 4 Diploma in Embodied Relational Counselling, students must meet all of the following requirements.

Attendance: Students are required to complete 450 training hours in full, comprising 408 in-person weekend hours and 42 online theory hours. 

Clinical Practice: Students must complete 100 hours of supervised clinical work, fulfilled through an approved placement.. Further details regarding placement requirements will be confirmed in due course.

Assessed Work: Students must complete the following three assessed components:

• a reflective paper drawing on a personal journal kept throughout the programme
• a clinical case study paper
• a research presentation.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Skills & Capacities You'll Develop

Throughout this training, you will cultivate:

Presence & Holding

• Being present without doing or efforting
• Trusting the life force and what needs to emerge
• Holding the belief that repair is possible and clients are not broken
• Willingness to be changed by the relationship
• Comfort with the pause and the unknown
• Centring the awareness that clients are the experts of their own experience

Relational Skills

• Listening with your whole being
• Open-heartedness
• Tracking the process of connection - disconnection, and expansion - contraction
• Attuning and resonating
• Co-creating space that enables vulnerability

Embodied Awareness

• Grounded presence in your midline and adult self
• Capacity to listen through your body
• Understanding how you feel, know, and make sense
• Being comfortable with transitions
• Centering aliveness and pleasure

Clinical Capacity

• Tracking processes in the relational field
• Working in the here and now
• Noticing, reflecting, asking with curiosity
• Saying truth, seeing truth
• Being okay with missteps
• Developing "eagle eye" - seeing the whole picture
• Considering and reflecting on your own internal experience
• Working with inter-subjectivity and difference
• Tending to grief and supporting emotional completion

Ethical Stance

• Decolonizing approach - eye to eye, not superior
• Reinforcing client agency
• Holding many imaginations without reductive thinking
• Living the work authentically, not just practicing it
• Compassion for both clients and self
• Non-pathological, resource oriented approach

Support, Supervision & Guidance

This training is designed to be both challenging and deeply supportive. You are not expected to navigate the process alone.

Support is woven throughout the programme in multiple ways, recognising that this work involves both professional development and personal process.

Tutor Support and Guidance

The teaching team holds responsibility for the overall learning environment, including the emotional and relational safety of the group. You will be supported through:

• Ongoing tutor presence during training weekends
• Observation, feedback, and guidance on your development
• Opportunities to raise questions, challenges, or areas of difficulty

Group Process and Relational Learning

The group itself is a central source of support. Throughout the training, you will be part of a consistent cohort, allowing trust, familiarity, and relational depth to develop over time. This creates a space where:

• Patterns can be explored safely and in real time
• Experiences of rupture and repair can be worked through
• Learning is supported through shared reflection and dialogue

Supervision and Clinical Support (Year 2)

Once you begin working with clients, you will be required to engage in regular clinical supervision.

Supervision provides a structured space to:

• Reflect on your client work
• Navigate ethical and professional considerations
• Develop your therapeutic approach

How supervision is organised:

• Delivered in an online group format at regular intervals throughout your placement, with support continuing for up to 4 months after the course ends
• You are required to take supervision for every 6–8 client cases, across your 100 clinical hours — approximately 12–15 sessions over the year
• We will identify a range of supervisors whose approach aligns with our work. Supervision is intentionally rotated across the year, so that students experience different supervisory styles and perspectives — enriching your clinical development

Your responsibilities as a student:

• Contact supervisors directly to secure your place in a group
• Pay supervisors directly
• Pricing is yet to be confirmed

Why group supervision? The group format keeps costs significantly lower than 1:1 supervision, and also enriches your learning — you'll benefit from hearing about peers' cases alongside your own.

Readiness for Practice

Before beginning client work, you will take part in a readiness for practice review. This is a supported assessment process where tutors consider your development across areas such as:

• Self-awareness and reflective capacity
• Relational understanding
• Ethical awareness
• Ability to engage with feedback

The intention is not to "pass or fail", but to ensure that you feel prepared, supported, and able to work with clients safely.

Personal Therapy

As part of the training, students are required to engage in their own personal therapy — a minimum of 30 sessions across the two years of the programme.

Personal therapy supports:

• Deeper self-awareness
• Understanding of your own relational patterns
• The ability to work ethically and responsibly with others

We will provide a list of recommended therapists and modalities that align with the embodied, relational approach of this diploma. Students are encouraged to stay with the same therapist across the two years, as continuity supports deeper personal work and a more meaningful therapeutic relationship. If difficulties arise with your therapist, guidance will be available to help you navigate this.

Students are responsible for arranging and funding their own therapy independently.

Our Pedagogical Approach

We understand education as a relational, ethical, and a political practice. Learning is not the transmission of expertise from teacher to student, but a co-created process that supports becoming more fully human together. We reject extractive, hierarchical models of education in favour of dialogical, engaged pedagogy rooted in dignity, critical consciousness, and care.

Our approach, which draws on the work of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, adrienne maree brown, and Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone’s Active Hope, is centred on the following core pedagogical principles:

1. Learning happens through relationship, not control - Knowledge emerges through dialogue, presence, and mutual influence. Authority is held transparently and accountably, not denied.
2. The whole person is the site of learning - We engage mind, body, emotion, and spirit. Lived experience, embodiment, affect, and imagination are legitimate sources of knowledge.
3. Pleasure, aliveness, and safety are conditions for depth - Growth does not require chronic suffering. We design learning environments that support regulation, play, and joy alongside discomfort and challenge.
4. Consent, choice, and power are central - Consent is ongoing and revisable. Power is named, examined, and worked with rather than hidden. These practices model ethical therapeutic relationships.
5. Learning is emergent, nonlinear, and collective - Growth unfolds through small, relational moments. Confusion, rupture, and repair are expected parts of the process. Collective intelligence is prioritised over individual performance.
6. Critical consciousness and context are essential - Personal experience is always situated within social, cultural, historical, and systemic contexts. We explicitly engage questions of power, oppression, and location.
7. Grief, pain, and uncertainty are honoured - Grief, fear, and despair are signs of connection, not failure. We cultivate the capacity to stay present to suffering without hardening or withdrawal.
8. Hope is an active, relational practice - Hope is grounded in values, relationship, and action under conditions of uncertainty.
9. We practice the world we are teaching toward - Our pedagogy is fractal: how we teach reflects the therapeutic and ethical world we are helping to create.