Love and relationships
When relationships go wrong our world can be turned upside down. We may be overwhelmed by emotions of confusion, anger and loss. The end of a relationship can feel like the loss of a precious part of ourselves. This shows the power of love. Through love we seek our sense of being at home in the world, we seek to be whole and to find in another what is missing in our life.

Renewal can help you find new life in your enduring relationships, or recover your sense of self after a relationship has ended. We can also help you understand and change negative patterns in your relationships. The source of these may lie in unresolved experiences from the past. By encouraging self-understanding, we can help you free yourself from these patterns and find new and more fulfilling ways to love and relate.   back

Confusion, Anxiety and Depression
We all have days when we feel anxious and frustrated. But what is happening when we can't shake our dark moods? When our anxieties and confusion start to intensify and dominate our days? These are signs that something is wrong. Instead of our energy flowing out into life in a fulfilling way, it is blocked inside and works against us.

When we are feeling depressed the critical question is why? The source of our depression may lie in painful and confusing experiences that we have not been able to resolve. These unresolved experiences may leave us with exaggerated fears, self-defeating ideas and feelings of vulnerability.

At Renewal we will help you understand how these burdens hold you back. This process takes your anxieties out of the shadows of your life where they have power to haunt you, and places them in the light of your consciousness. In this new light your experiences can be placed in perspective and freed from irrational fears and anxieties. Some aspects of your experience can be integrated into your life while others can be let go. Discovering and dealing with the source of your depression will liberate your energy and get life flowing again.   back

Grief and loss
Our sense of a future is at the core of our life. When we experience loss that goes to the heart of our hopes and dreams we feel grief most intensely. Our vision of the future no longer seems possible and we feel cast adrift. The pain of this loss may not only be experienced as grief, anger and depression, but also as physical sickness.

To recover from deep loss, it is essential to understand and express the intense emotions contained in our private grief. With time this brings acceptance and relief, and can clear the way for a new future.

At Renewal we will support you in coming to terms with your loss and help you find a new pathway to the future. In order to find this new way, you may need to let go of certain plans and hopes that are no longer possible. This acceptance opens the doorway to a new future that is possible, and offers to bring energy, meaning and joy back into your life. This is not only a process of recovery, but also one where we find new potential within ourselves, and new life in the world outside.   back

Career and life transitions
What career path is right for you? This is an ongoing dilemma: first you have to understand your abilities and potential, and then find an opportunity in the outside world, while at the same time dealing with the expectations of others and the pressure of earning a livelihood.

Sometimes we find ourselves unhappily living out the unfulfilled careers of our parents. Sometimes we may have dreams of an ideal vocation but are unable to make them real through tangible, creative work. Sometimes a career path that had worked well for us in one stage of our life, loses its meaning when we move into a new phase.

At Renewal we can help you identify the reasons behind your dissatisfaction and use this understanding to find a career path that is both practical and true to your self.   back

Sexuality
Sexuality is a powerful and creative force in our lives. It reflects our deep desire for ecstasy, union and creativity. Our relationship to sexual energy has far ranging effects beyond our sex life. It influences our emotions, sense of identity and capacity for creativity in all its rich and varied forms. Sometimes it is difficult to be open to the power of sexuality without being overwhelmed. At one extreme, we can feel closed off, fearful of physical intimacy and lacking in creative self-expression. At the other, we may feel so obsessed with sexual gratification that we cannot focus on the task of creating a productive and meaningful life.

At Renewal, we will help you find the right balance between the physical, emotional and creative dimensions of sexuality in your life. If you are confused about your sexual orientation, we will encourage you to understand and be true to your authentic sexuality. You have the potential to move beyond feelings of anxiety and fear and use the power of sexual energy as a source of creativity and freedom, as well as pleasure.   back

Questions of meaning and spirituality
Our inner world needs the nourishment of meaning like our bodies need food. Our instinct for meaning is entwined with our search for transformation, unity and peace. This search brings us to the realm of spiritual questions. Do I have a soul? What do the words destiny and God mean to me? How do I balance personal freedom with a sense of family and community? How do I face the mystery of birth, death and eternity? How do I make sense of conflict, loss and suffering?

You may find yourself facing these urgent questions, but not know where to turn. The answers offered by traditional religion may seem out of date and irrelevant, while a materialist perspective is soulless. At Renewal we encourage people to have the openness and confidence to look for answers by drawing on their personal experience and inner resources, as well as the knowledge and experience contained in authentic spiritual traditions. We will support you on your own journey of self-discovery and spirituality.   back

Parents and Our Sense of Self
We inherit more from our parents than meets the eye. They are our first role models, teachers and audience. They shape our patterns of relating, ideas about life and sense of self. We benefit from their qualities and accomplishments. We are also influenced by their imbalances, unresolved experiences and unfulfilled tasks. In order to understand ourselves better, we need to understand how we have been shaped by our parents and their environment.

Although our parents influence our development they do not define who we are. At our core is our distinct self. One of life's tasks is for us to nurture and express this individuality while also making sense of our parents' legacy. In developing our authentic self, we may find ourselves facing competing pressures. We feel the need from within to be true to ourselves and distinct from our parents. We may also feel pressure from them to validate and emulate their world. Combined with this, we may sense a need to deal with our parents' imbalances and 'unfinished business'.

These pressures can pull us in different directions, cause conflict and make us feel confused about who we are and want to be. At one extreme, we may maintain a close relationship to our parents, and be attuned to their values and expectations, but feel that our own potential and independence is not fully developed. At the other, we may reject our parents and their values in an effort to be true to our individuality. However, in rejecting our parents we may also reject aspects of ourselves that resemble them and are part of our potential. We may also find ourselves living out aspects of our parents' unlived life in an unbalanced way.

At Renewal we can help you find your own path between these extremes. We encourage you to strengthen your individuality and also seek to understand the role your parents have played in shaping your identity. This process is one where you can also reclaim lost parts of yourself. In doing so you gain greater self-understanding and an expanded sense of who you are.   back

Negative Patterns of Behaviour
We learn by experience and this includes our mistakes. But when we make the same mistakes again and again we are caught in the rut of a negative pattern. What fuels this behaviour? It is partly fuelled by habit and familiarity but more importantly by underlying needs which we seek to fulfill. Our behaviour may bring some temporary satisfaction but we pay too high a price and the needs return unfulfilled. We are left with a sense of wasted time and energy.

How do we free ourselves from these negative patterns? First we need to identify the pattern and then understand what we are really seeking from the behaviour. We must accept for ourselves that the pattern of behaviour doesn't work - that the reward it brings is counterfeit and leaves us feeling as unsatisfied as before. The underlying need that motivates the behaviour, however, is real and should be respected. The problem lies in the way we seek to fulfill it, not the need itself. Repression is not the solution.

As part of the strategy for changing negative patterns, we need to become aware of the circumstances that trigger the behaviour. We then can anticipate when the pattern begins to emerge and make a conscious effort to redirect our energies in a new way. At renewal we will support you through this process of self examination and change. We will help you gain perspective and find constructive and sustainable ways to address your needs; new ways that can be integrated into the rest of your life. We will encourage you to persevere and to avoid the temptation of going to extremes. You can break free of negative patterns and liberate your energy for growth.   back

Dreams and the Subconscious Mind
Beyond the shores of our conscious mind lies the ocean of the subconscious - a rich inner world of resources and potential. Our subconscious is full of life and intelligence. It is multi-layered and mysterious. It is the source of our innate qualities as well as our intuition and creativity. The subconscious contains authentic parts of ourselves yet to be realised. It is also the storehouse of our life experience, including the raw emotion that accompanies times of difficulty and confusion. When we fall asleep at night, dreams well up from this complex inner world.

Dreams are like a foreign language. This is why they are so baffling to us. In order to make sense of our dreams we need to appreciate that they communicate through the language of symbols. Dreams cannot be taken at face value. You need to look behind the literal images of dreams to understand their real message.

Dreams are trying to tell us something important that our conscious mind finds difficult to accept. Under these circumstances, our subconscious may try to get our attention by shouting at us and throwing up extreme and sometimes grotesque images in our dreams. The content of these dreams is exaggerated and should not be taken literally. Nonetheless, contained within the dream is something of value. What we need to do is face the dream and unravel its meaning. When we do this we find that the shouting stops, the masks fall away and we are helped by what the subconscious has to give us.

At Renewal we will encourage you understand the meaning of your dreams. We will support you in accessing the potential of your subconscious mind while at the same time strengthening your day to day relationship with life. We will use our knowledge and experience to help you decipher the symbolic language of your dreams. Dreams offer an opportunity to deal with unresolved experience and unexpressed emotion. We will help you integrate these into your conscious life without feeling overwhelmed. Dreams not only tell us what is out of balance in our life but also help us find the keys to expansion and new life.   back