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Paul brings together a background in education, counseling, and ecology, with 15 years leading, training staff for, and managing wilderness-based adventure programs. Paul has worked for several outdoor programs, including 10 years with Outward Bound. While Paul has worked with a wide range of populations, from chemically dependent or adjudicated youth, to perpetrators of domestic violence, he most enjoys working with young adults committed to making a difference in their own lives and in the world around them. In addition to his faculty positions in both the RDP and ADGP, Paul serves as the Director for our Centaur Leadership Services program.
Much of counseling psychology focuses on developing relationships and opportunities for a client to nurture higher levels of personal awareness and to develop the individual’s ability to make more effective choices on behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual levels. Often the structural components of different modalities are designed to facilitate fresh insight through the initial disequilibrium and subsequent integration of new perspectives on persistent or habituated patterns of living. Equine assisted psychotherapy (EAP) is unique in that the client is asked to engage in partnership with a large non-human sentient being. Due in part to their psychology as domesticated prey animals; horses can be powerful mirrors of emotional congruence, clarity of intention, and quality of relating. This provides powerful opportunities for direct behavioral work with a variety of issues. Additionally as non-human partners in psychotherapy horses can provide an often needed access point to personal ecological and spiritual renewal. This program allows students to pursue licensure in counseling psychology while developing competence in the safe and ethical facilitation of equine assisted individual and group sessions.
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Recently Paul has been focused on working with horses as partners to develop effective relationship and leadership skills within his students. Aside from providing the academic structure and support for the masters level Counseling Psychology concentration in Equine Assisted Mental Health (EAMH), Paul has developed an equine based month long field group facilitation training for undergraduate students. This course focuses on awareness and practice of the relational skills essential for the facilitation of educational or personal growth based groups. For more information please visit Centaur Leadership Services
"In referring to the perceptual skills of an artist, the poet David
Whyte shares the image of a discernment or awareness that is sharp enough
to cut things together. As I explore the world I am less interested
in deciding who is right than understanding the relationship between divergent
perspectives. I
am curious about the thread of clarity that weaves through the attachment,
or more poetically the Zen butcher's knife that is sharp enough to cut
things together."
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