Faculty
The course is taught by a highly experienced faculty, representing a wide range of theoretical approaches and disciplines. All have been selected for their ability to work relationally.
Course Director: Carolyn Cowan
Faculty: Elena O’Keeffe, Zoe Walker, Lucy van de Wiel, Dr Clarissa Smith
Carolyn Cowan, CD
Carolyn is a Psychosexual & Relationship Psychotherapist with further specialisms in Trauma, Maternal Perversion and Violence, Addiction in all its forms, Eating Disorders and Body Dysmorphia. She has over 20 years of teaching and mentoring experience in the pre-and-postnatal period, working with issues including birth trauma, diastases recti and tocophobia.
she initially trained as a yoga teacher, then as a pregnancy yoga teacher, doula and yoga therapist. After 10 years running pre-and-post-natal classes in yoga and working as a doula around Camberwell and Peckham, Carolyn began training as a psychotherapist gaining a London Diploma in Psychosexual Relationship Therapy, a Post Graduate Diploma in Advanced Couples Work, and a Post Graduate Diploma in Trauma Therapy, both with the NAOS-Institute.
Carolyn is an embodied psychotherapist who works with internal trauma cycles as they affect the mind, behaviour and regulation of the self. She is a member of the College of Sexual and Relationship Therapists (COSRT) and accredited with the National Counselling Society (NCS). For over 20 years (1999-2019) Carolyn worked with 2 NHS midwives, training 100s of yoga teachers from all over the world to work with pre-and-post-natal women. After experiencing 6 pregnancies that resulted in 2 children, both born naturally at home, Carolyn worked with attachment parenting for the first 8 years.
With further Diplomas in Perversion & Violence and Eating disorders & Body Dysmorphia with Tavistock & Portman, Carolyn brings a wealth of knowledge and insight to the notion of Maternal Madness, and the array of human experience that encompass issues in fertility, pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion birth, the postnatal period, psychosis, pre-and-postnatal depression, body dysmorphia, prolapse, loss of desire, sexual dysfunctions, relationship collapse (same and mixed sex), early sexual trauma and maternal perversions.
In addition to her private therapy practice, Carolyn also provides training for the treatment of drug and alcohol addictions, sexual compulsion, compulsive porn, shopping, gambling and cutting. Her Mastering the Addictive Personality Teacher Training course certifies the practitioner to work in prisons and rehab centres.
Carolyn is a successful yoga teacher and teacher trainer who harnesses her experience as a psychotherapist to train yoga teachers to be aware of the role an embodied yoga practise can have in supporting clients to deal with anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, negative history and physical responses to trauma in the body. In 2019 she was named among the top 16 yoga teachers in London.
Dr Clarisa Smith
Clarissa Smith is Professor in Media at Northumbria University in Newcastle, UK. Her work has centred on sexual media and representations for more than twenty years. She is particularly interested in the tensions between pornography, freedom and protections, ideas and experiences of intimacy, and how and why audiences engage with sexualised content.
Lucy van de Wiel
Lucy van de Wiel is a lecturer in Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London. Her research deals with reproductive technologies and reproductive politics, including egg freezing, embryo selection and telemedical abortion. She is the author of Freezing Fertility (NYU Press, 2020, open access) and is featured in a new feature-length documentary of the same name inspired by her research (Backlight, VPRO, 2021). Lucy was formerly a Research Associate at the Reproductive Sociology Research Group at the University of Cambridge and continues to be a network member of its collaborative research project Changing In/fertilities.
Lucy van de Wiel (2020) Freezing Fertility: Oocyte Cryopreservation and the Gender Politics of Aging – New York University Press (2020)
Zoë Walker
Zoë is an integrative transpersonal psychotherapist who completed five years’ teaching on the Postgraduate Diploma at CCPE and now works towards UKCP accreditation. She has an inherent fascination in who and how we be-came; the journey of the soul. The ‘trans’ personal perspective traverses across and beyond our lived experience (our personal stories and experience) and draws upon what came before our incarnation, what we may leave behind and our calling on how and what we might transform. Ultimately the transpersonal explores our consciousness, our relationships, our shadow and our unconscious through the spiritual, archetypal, intergenerational and intersectional exploration. All of which can be curated and examined through psychological, emotional and spiritual concerns, dreamwork, visualisation, symbolism and the soma.
Zoë is currently studying an MA in child, adolescent and family transpersonal therapy. She is a mother to 3 very different souls.
She is a certified Yoga Alliance breath and yoga teacher and has a daily spiritual practice.
Elena O’Keeffe
Elena O’Keeffe was born and raised in Soviet Union. She is a former British midwife, childbirth educator and author of book “The Mothers Journey” (published in Russian). She believes in gentle and safe birth. She has taught variety of techniques for conscious conception, pregnancy and birth for over decade. Her vision is simple – bridging the gap between spiritual and mainstream midwifery.
She currently works in female PICU in mental health hospital writing about perinatal mental health . Her second book “Broken Daughters of Eve” is due to be published at the end of this year.
www.themothetsjourney.co.uk