10 Questions with Colin Thompson

• What led you to choose psychotherapy or counselling as a profession?

• I started my working life as a nuclear physicist. I’d just given up Christianity. Then as I started travelling, Buddhism made a lot of sense to me and I dropped research to work in the helping profession of teaching. So teaching was serving my desire to be in a supportive profession and Buddhism had sparked my interest in what makes people tick and of course it is very much interested in people’s well being. In my late forties, I quit a PhD in artificial intelligence and started studying psychology, more to understand myself better than as a serious attempt at a career change. Eventually, ten years later I emerged as a qualified psychologist, as it happened, just at a time when mindfulness therapy was appearing. My Buddhist practice stood me in good stead to follow this into my current career as a mindfulness based therapist.

• Which philosophical approaches have influenced your professional/personal development?

• Probably Buddha’s, Jung’s, and the scientific approach. I do like the objectivity and testing rigour that science can bring to a theory and indeed to a therapeutic approach, like say mindfulness. Jung on the other hand takes us deep into the subjective territory of self to make sure there is an inner and outer match. Buddha on the third! hand seems to bridge the two approaches bringing a “try this” approach to my inner world.

• Which particular aspects of health or the human journey are you interested in?

• Personal liberation, the ability to live a fulfilling individual life.

• What method/s do you use?

• I use mindfulness a lot with my clients. I find that approaching our feelings, especially the ones we find difficult, works far better than trying to “deal” with them. Similarly becoming curious about unhelpful thoughts seems to work a lot better than the CBT approach of challenging them. Having said that, much of therapy is just about listening, giving a client a sounding board and good common sense.

• When do you think the client will start to feel that progress is being made?

• When shifts start taking place, e.g. they become more reflective or start to take responsibility.

• How has therapy made you a better person?

• I love a good begged question. Has therapy made me a better person? Maybe that’s for others to assess. I do like the personal insights I gain from my clients and the need to be fully focussed.

• What do you like most about being a therapist?

• “Aha” moments and shifts with my clients are the most satisfying. And sometimes it’s me that has the “aha”!

• Do you ever have 'bad hair' days?

• Yep some days, especially when I’ve been away from work for a while, I can find myself just a little out of synch. As the Zen masters say, “If you miss it by a hair’s breadth you miss it by a million miles.” At such times, I fall back on principals and general rules, but I do feel I’m short changing my clients as I’m not fully connected to them.

• What do you think is the most significant problem we face, in the world today?

• Environmental damage and a loss of connectedness. Actually they are the same thing. If we are not internally connected, that is connected fully with our inner life; it’s difficult to become connected with the world around us. When seven billion people do this, the world suffers.

• Can you share the name of a book, film, song, event or work of art that inspires you?

• Definitely “The Tao of Physics” was a powerful book for me. It came out in the seventies when I had just started practicing meditation and was still working as a physicist. Fritjof Capra, himself a physicist, explained how modern nuclear physics fitted in much better with the Eastern world view than the Western. The Western world view was of a clockwork universe, with billiard ball like particles interacting according to fixed predictable laws. The Eastern view was deliciously organic, speaking of a connectedness and interrelating of all things – a oneness that I was experiencing in my Buddhist meditation. It also gave me a new perspective on the nuclear physics which I had formerly regarded as just another way of making predictions, but with Capra’s analogy between particle physics and the dance of Shiva, I started to see my nuclear science as a more mysterious exciting affair that continues to draw me deeper.