Happy Third Birthday to Voxel Hub
Welcome to our November Newsletter.
How are you doing? I hope this email finds you safe and well. Most people I talk to these days find themselves surprised by the upcoming holidays and feel exhausted, so I hope that you can take care of yourselves and check in with your friends and colleagues. I sense the need for good, deep, soft wintering this year: slower pace, gentle candlelight, pampering evenings, more kindness, gratitude and companionship (by this, I also mean allowing ourselves time for stillness to reconnect with ourselves). I hope you can find ways to do so. Slow down and go softly.
At Voxel Hub, we celebrated our third Birthday with a quiet “yay” because the month was packed with significant milestones. This summer and autumn, we have reached a major step in our growth and finalised all our core ideas. And so you will see some changes in our working methods coming up soon. All for good, in line with our aim for clarity and with the purpose of supporting you. All are aligned with our core values.
I qualified as a counsellor (yay!), and so I will finally be able to open my private counselling practice early next year. A huge thank you to those of you who supported me and to those who waited for this to happen. Yes, new services are coming soon!
After six years of counselling studies, I have finally taken a long weekend off and visited my family in Italy. I aim for a balanced life, so I rest every day, every week, and I am keen on cutting down on air travel as much as possible – moving to more local micro-adventures. However, studies did take up most of my headspace, and thus I was unable to travel “my way” – open to new perspectives. Of course, it’s impossible to switch off personal intellectual development, so I reflected on the Venice Biennale in my digital wellbeing journal here. It was lovely to come back to this way of exploring new and old grounds.
Upon my arrival back to the UK, I delivered two liberation psychology courses in my counselling college. I hope to share more of those on our channels soon as well. I thank all my collaborators, participants and the college too for braving into this still radical way of working and for creating this beautiful opening not only for anti-oppressive work but also for thriving and nurturing each other in new, collaborative, carrying formats and spaces. I so cannot wait to continue with this work now with an added solid understanding of mental health too.
I hope that as I now put down my busyness and move into a softer way of being, you can join me too. Have a light, kind and beautiful December!
My favourite topic this month
This month I am sharing tips on liberation psychologies:
“Homecoming” by Dr. Thema Bryant
“Writings for a Liberation Psychology” by Ignacio Martín-Baró
“Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paulo Freire
“Toward Psychologies of Liberation (Critical Theory and Practice in Psychology and the Human Sciences)” by Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman
“Exploring Liberation Psychology: Teaching, Training, and Practice” on YouTube
If you have any ideas on the topic, please let me know! Thank you!
Resources
My liberation psychology course is sharable without mentions of the college, so I am happy to share with you the full list of all my relevant references.
I hope you will find this useful and let me know if you have any additions to this list. We will be gradually publishing more and more on the topic on our channels and our website, so stay tuned!
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Photo by Chris Blonk on Unsplash
