Embodied Relational Diploma in Counselling (Levels 3 & 4)

Relational and Somatic Foundations

We are rooted in contemporary relational and somatic approaches, including the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM), body psychotherapy and touch-informed perspectives like biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy and the Neuro-Affective Touch (NA Touch). 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.

Year 1: Theory, Experience, Integration

Creating the relational container and journeying through the embodied elements of developmental and relational theory.

The Approach:

Year 1 focuses on engaging with theory and integrating it experientially. We create a potent healing relational container among ourselves, for ourselves, while undertaking deep inquiry into the theories that underpin embodied relationality.

Theory is studied in monthly online sessions and the in-person weekends both integrate this theory through lived experience and create a living experience of a supportive relational container.

As such we provide an conceptual understanding AND an experiential, felt sense of how we create the important relational elements within and between ourselves and as a group which informs the container we ultimately want to hold for our clients.

We also offer an on-going grief group process held by specially trained grief facilitators as part of our experiential weekend in Year 1.

Year 2: Skills, Frameworks, Clinical Practice
Grounding the embodied elements of theory in clinical practice

The Approach:

• Role practicing and demonstrations of the work
• Introduction to aligned approaches and modalities including the Neuro Affective Relational Model (NARM) and Neuro Affective Touch (NA Touch) among others.
• Students engage a supervisor and begin placement (mid-October) with supervised clinical hours (100 hrs to be completed)
• The grief process is replaced by an inter-personal group process.

YEAR ONE

There are a total of seven (7) three-day weekends in year 1 (Friday-Sunday, 8 hours/day).

Term 1 (Nov 2026-Mar 2027)

Term 2 (Apr 2027-May 2027)

Term 3 (June 2027-July 2027)

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.

To be awarded the Level 3 & 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. A maximum of 2 in-person days per year and 1 online theory session across the programme may be missed. Any missed in-person day must be compensated through an additional supervision session and a 500-word reflective paper. A missed online theory session requires the student to listen to the session recording, arrange a supervision session, and submit a 500-word reflective paper.

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.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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

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:

• Learning happens through relationship, not control - Knowledge emerges through dialogue, presence, and mutual influence. Authority is held transparently and accountably, not denied.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Hope is an active, relational practice - Hope is grounded in values, relationship, and action under conditions of uncertainty.
• 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.