Amanda Archer Therapy

06/05/2023

What simple and beautiful advice. ❤️

In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write a famous author and ask for advice. Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to respond - and his response is magnificent:
“Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:
I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.
What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.
Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.
Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?
Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash receptacals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.
God bless you all!"
Kurt Vonnegut

27/04/2023

“When you bring your attention to a stone, a tree or an animal, something of its essence transmits itself to you. You can sense how still it is and in doing so the same stillness rises within you. You can sense how deeply it rests in being, completely one with what it is and where it is, in realizing this, you too come to a place of rest deep within yourself.”

Eckhart Tolle

Photograph of Morallee Tarn, Allen Banks, Northumberland

27/04/2023

27/04/2023

I have some new availability for weekly therapy. Please get in touch if you are interested and would like to find out more.

I am a UKCP Accredited Relational, Integrative, Creative Psychotherapist working from the Ouseburn, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Face to face and online therapy available for adult individuals. www.amandaarchertherapy.co.uk

04/12/2022

Silver
"How many years of beauty do I have left?
she asks me.

How many more do you want?
Here. Here is 34. Here is 50.

When you are 80 years old
and your beauty rises in ways
your cells cannot even imagine now
and your wild bones grow luminous and
ripe, having carried the weight
of a passionate life.

When your hair is aflame
with winter
and you have decades of
learning and leaving and loving
sewn into
the corners of your eyes
and your children come home
to find their own history
in your face.

When you know what it feels like to fail
ferociously
and have gained the
capacity
to rise and rise and rise again.

When you can make your tea
on a quiet and ridiculously lonely afternoon
and still have a song in your heart
Queen owl wings beating
beneath the cotton of your sweater.
Because your beauty began there
beneath the sweater and the skin,
remember?

This is when I will take you
into my arms and coo
YOU BRAVE AND GLORIOUS THING
you’ve come so far.
I see you.
Your beauty is breathtaking.

Author: Jeannette Encinias

Photo: Yasmin Rossi

30/11/2022

I’m feeling very lucky to have this view out of my therapy room window. 🌳❤️

25/11/2022

"Grandma, I'm tired. So tired of this life..."

"Take your tiredness, my child, and wrap it around yourself. Like a blanket in the cold winter months. Tiredness comes to make you a nest, to bring you to wear comfortable clothes, to make you sink into its warm embrace. I invite you to stay within yourself. Without strength, without thoughts, without actions. Like the snow that covers everything to soften the world, to make it muffled, to protect it from noise. Accept the flakes of your tiredness and let yourself be completely covered by them."

"I could die buried under there..."

"You will be reborn instead. Like the seed in the ground. Do not resist your weariness, do not reject it with a thousand actions, a thousand intentions, a thousand feelings of guilt. It just wants to take you by the hand and lead you to sink into the void. Right there, where the source of every inner strength lies. They taught us to be strong by resisting. But it is in surrendering that the true heroes emerge."

"I'm afraid, grandmother. What if fatigue will annihilate me?"

"My child, you are not afraid of tiredness but of losing control of yourself. The time has come for you to give yourself to life. And to generate together with it the most wonderful children: the fruits of your soul!"

Author: Elena Bernabè

Picture by Magic on Flickr

16/11/2022

I have some availability in my lovely new therapy room on a Wednesday and Thursday day. If you feel like therapy could help you or you just want to find out a bit more have a look at my website and get in touch for a free initial phone consultation.
www.amandaarchertherapy.co.uk
amandaarchertherapy@gmail.com

20/07/2022

Finally my therapy room is complete with a beautiful comfortable pink sofa. 💕

01/07/2022

I have a beautiful new therapy room in the ouseburn with availability for new clients. 🥰 To find out more have a look at my website www.amandaarchertherapy.co.uk

02/04/2022

‘There is so much creativity, life, vitality, and intelligence that becomes accessible to us as the shadow is integrated into one’s life. All the energy we once spent in avoiding, hiding, or performing is freed up for more creative purposes.’ ❤️

One of the central tenets of dreamwork is to become curious about the scary, repulsive, ambiguous figures that appear in our dreams.

24/02/2022

An absolutely magical trip to high force waterfall. The snow could have put us off, we almost turned back on the drive through the penines. So pleased we didn’t! ❤️❄️💦