EP#006 | Mark Craven | Shaky Humans & the Plane of Possibilities
12/7/2020
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1:02:27
This episode of the Body Knows Podcast is with Mark Craven. Mark is a Senior Counselling Psychotherapist for the Royal Trinity Hospice in London, giving support around grief and loss. Our conversation delves into his path, his training and his practice to support the trauma and bereavement of his clients, and their coming to terms with terminal illness, and the end of life.
His own early physical trauma lead him on lifelong journey of enquiry to make sense of the human experience. From his first steps in the fitness industry, to studies in hypnotherapy and NLP - in part to manage his own negative relationship with the body - and on to his therapeutic training.
We discuss how a desire at first to mend and transcend the body eventually transformed into a deeper, embodied comprehension Mark has learnt to integrate the body into his therapeutic practice, which he contests, can be missing in some modalities and training of cognitive, talk based practice.
He is an eloquent proponent of aligning with our animal nature to release pain and understand life, and of movement as both a therapy in its self, and a pre-therapeutic aid. There’s talk too of his sabbatical year that he undertook to manage work based stress, where Mark studied meditation and mindfulness in South East Asia, long before it was a common place practice and tool used to do so.
For him the body has always been an ally amid his therapeutic career, and over time he has integrated its ‘loving presence’ into his work. Mark is a husband and a father of three children and he shares his own strategies to find wellbeing, and make friends with our bodies in connection with one-another and our-selves in the midst of daily life.
Ultimately this conversation carries a message of hope and communicates our ability to adapt and cope as shaky humans, even as he helps people face some of the core fundamental wounds of life.
This was the first interview we held, and we are so excited to be finally sharing it with you all. Mark isn’t a person who promotes himself on social media, instead focussing on his clients, his personal enquiry and his family. This is a profound and illuminating conversation and we’re honoured to bring his compassion and understanding.
We have a favour to ask you; if there’s one person you know who would benefit from this conversation then please pass it along to them. This act would help us so much in sharing our mssage and our mission.
Someone we would love to thank for doing this in the last month is Dr Heather Abernethy, who’s loving support for our show on social media is greatly appreciated. We see you Heather, and you can find her at - https://www.instagram.com/drheatherabernethy/ - all one word, where she also has links to her wonderful YouTube recourses.
Finally, we’ll be transitioning to a monthly release schedule from this episode onwards. This podcast is a on-going learning experience for us both, and a work of passion, and we’re finding the bi monthly release schedule a bit too much for our lives as parents, partners and people and we can hardly not talk the talk, and not listen to our bodies! Thanks all for now. Have a wonderful holiday season and we will be back with you all in 2021.
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