Lesley Hayes, Psychotherapist
My professional training has included process-oriented and Jungian analytical psychology, existential phenomenology, humanistic, integrative and transpersonal psychotherapy. Working from a transpersonal perspective, I am committed to supporting others through times of transition and personal growth, and promote various forms of creative expression with individuals and groups, using dreamwork, guided visualisation, art, and meditation.
How can I help?I have had a wide experience with individuals and couples in both long and short term counselling and psychotherapy, working with various age groups, and issues including depression, grief, chronic body symptoms, gender dysphoria, addiction, eating disorders, post-traumatic stress, and childhood or adult sexual abuse. I also offer supervision to counselling and psychotherapy practitioners, and clinical supervision and consultations for other professionals. Integrative counselling and psychotherapy
It helps people come to terms with life and face their deepest truth, finding fulfilment and freedom through self-knowledge, in realising and becoming their real self. Taking an optimistic view of human potential, it encourages development of personal power and responsibility, enabling people to take control of their own lives. It promotes authenticity, spontaneity, creativity, self-actualisation and love. Transpersonal psychotherapyTranspersonal psychotherapy recognises that a person's ultimate nature is beyond the individual ego, and draws techniques and understandings from a wide variety of psychological and spiritual sources. It deals with a full range of psychological problems, seeking to ease human suffering and help people clarify and understand the nature of their transpersonal experiences. These may include mystical, transcendent or near-death experiences, bringing insight into the nature of reality beyond ordinary experience, or dreams with deeply archetypal and transpersonal themes. On the other hand, a transpersonal psychotherapist might not deal directly with transpersonal content, if it is felt that the person needs to work on other issues such as relationships or emotional control first. The transpersonal context does not have to be explicitly recognised.
Meditation, ritual, shamanic practices, and other transpersonal processes, along with traditional psychotherapeutic techniques, can support this journey. Transpersonal process refers to the use of techniques derived from transpersonal or spiritual disciplines such as meditation, ritual, or visualisation. A transpersonal therapist could suggest that someone design and carry out a ritual to mark the ending of a relationship or to grieve the death of a parent, or they might recommend meditation as a means of opening the awareness to unconscious, repressed material that needs to be dealt with, or as a means of relaxing.
What is The Transpersonal?
Underneath all conditioning, all learned behaviour, all imposed beliefs which are neither your truth nor the truth of you, you were born innocent. It is that innocence beyond the masks of the personality which we seek to rediscover... the innocence of being - the "inner sense" - beyond description.
There is a mystery at the heart of us that we long to discover... yet we have moments of realisation that our very being contains the question and also the answer. Life is continually changing, evolving, dying and being reborn. As one door shuts, another opens. We find, with practice, that when there is no apparent door, we need only to imagine it, and then step through it. At the end of the out-breath there is the in-breath, the inspiration. For every death, there is a rebirth, and in each ending, a beginning... top | back |
I am a 
Integrative counselling and psychotherapy works with a synthesis of concepts and practices from different traditions, exploring what it is to be human, as an individual and part of society. Seeking to integrate the whole person, it considers body, feelings, intellect and spirit, and life in process - seeing the meaning and value of all things and the sacredness of our being. 
Transpersonal psychotherapy considers an alternative perspective on psychological illness. Depression, for instance, might signal someone's disconnection from deeper sources of meaning and fulfilment in their life. Denying the sacred and attaching one's identity to the personality causes suffering, as spiritual systems have taught for thousands of years. Feelings of depression might be a sign of questioning fundamental assumptions about separateness and isolation. This, in turn, might open into greater awareness of one's connection to the universe, a sense of one's intrinsic value, and an unconditional appreciation for life.
Depressive symptoms might well indicate the need for going deeper into the depression, rather than removing its symptoms. Such a "journey of descent" has been recognised throughout traditional psychologies and in many versions of the "heroic journey."
The Transpersonal world is beyond the everyday singular human existence. It covers all the aspects of an individual, facilitating the transformation of the personal self and allowing the Greater Wholeness to be seen, not only of the individual, but of humanity and beyond. 
We find as we continue our journey of experience that nothing is ever really complete. Learning, Self Discovery and Evolution are fractal things... ever expanding and ever contracting... at one and the same time. We are involved in a continuously creative process where we are both creator and that which is created.