welcomeLesley Hayes is a UKCP registered Integrative Psychotherapist, a UKRC registered Counsellor, and an accredited Full Member of AHPP, the Association of Humanistic Psychology Practitioners. She is also a writer, a poet, a mother and a grandmother in a loving, ever-expanding extended family.
The information here provides some insight into her work, and how she might help you. If you'd like to know more, please visit the contact page - and take some time to travel through the rest of this site, as you contemplate what it is you are looking for in therapy. ...And before you begin this particular journey of exploration, here are some quotations…
Is it not, then, a strange inconsistency and an unnatural paradox that "I" resists change in "me" and in the surrounding universe? For change is not merely a force of destruction. Every form is really a pattern of movement, and every living thing is like the river, which, if it did not flow out, would never have been able to flow in. Life and death are not two opposed forces; they are simply two ways of looking at the same force, for the movement of change is as much the builder as the destroyer. ~ Alan Watts We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibres, our actions run as causes and return to us as results. ~ Herman Melville
~ Rabindranath Tagore For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
~ Lorna Catford, Ph.D. and Michael Ray, Ph.D. A human being is a part of the whole that we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature. ~ Albert Einstein Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. ~ Carl Gustav Jung Thus, the appearance of things changes according to the emotions, and thus we see magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves. ~ Kahlil Gibran You can’t have a relationship with other people until you give birth to yourself. ~ Sonia Sanchez Outside ideas of right doing and wrong doing there is a field. I'll meet you there. ~ Rumi It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow. ~ Alice Walker
~Luciano de Crescenzo
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. ~ Anais Nin
But the important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognise it, because your heart would not have been purified by the long quest. ~ Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum
There are many paths to enlightenment. Be sure to take one with a heart. ~ Lao Tzu
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The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow. I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.
The hero's journey, then, is one of spiritual transformation. Whether we are talking about resolving the specific challenges in your life, or about the nature of the creative process, you can think of yourself as a kind of heroic alchemist finding a way to bring something rich and valuable out of what appears to be base. As the grandfather of psychology, William James, has said, "Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact." You may be able to do this simply by weaving your metaphorical magic wand and changing your outlook so you see and experience an old situation in a different way. Or it may require a full frontal attack and a search through dangerous foreign lands. You may be conscious of your yearning for this transformation, or you may accidentally fall into it. 
We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another.