Six-week experiential programme
Develop confidence
in your own experience.
Six appointments with an occupational therapist provide a scaffold for direct experience. Begin with one condition in your life that matters to you, and explore your relationship with it through the six themes.
Explore the six weeksRecognition and conditions
From hearing an idea
to recognising it in yourself.
Our starting point is that qualities such as curiosity, joy, clarity and steadiness are already resources of the human mind. Being told this can remain theoretical when you cannot access them. The course invites you to recognise a quality in direct experience, then explore the conditions that help it become available.
At the beginning, you choose one condition in your life that you want a clearer relationship with. It might be sleep, meals, phone use, movement or rest. What matters is that it is meaningful to you. We return to it across the six themes and look closely at what you experience and recognise over time.
Attention moves and changes. Focus can narrow onto something; attention can also hold a wider internal and external experience. We become familiar with those possibilities through your own experience, beyond a judgement that your attention is simply good or bad.
In the sessions, you explore your experience with an occupational therapist and can feel held through that process. We stay close to what you can recognise for yourself: what you experienced, what helped and what you can see changing. The invitation is to develop confidence and authority in your own experience, and respond from there. Honesty, recognition, creativity and feeling held can recur throughout the six weeks.
“Everyone has the capacity to generate the energy of mindfulness.”
Thich Nhat Hanh · Our Appointment with Life
The course outline
Six weeks, with room
for your experience.
We keep returning to your chosen condition as the themes give us different ways to explore it. We can revisit them and adapt the sequence and pace around what is happening for you. Each week includes the reason for its place in the outline.
- Week01
Recognising attention and making room for honesty
Choose one condition in your life that is meaningful to you: sleep, meals, phone use, movement, rest or another part of your day. Begin with an actual experience of curiosity, brightness, interest or steadiness, and make room for a brief, truthful note before a choice around that condition.
Why here
Recognition lets you experience that potential for yourself. An honest account gives us something to explore together around the condition you chose.
- Week02
Joy and creative forms
Bring back what happened around the condition you chose. Explore what attracts, discourages or supports your engagement with it. A reward, some help or a connection with another activity may be useful. Encourage your own discoveries and allow the form to change.
Why here
Creativity follows your actual reasons and what you enjoy. An intention can stay alive while the way you approach it keeps changing.
- Week03
Staying in contact with experience
Explore a point of contact that is accessible to you. Pen and paper, movement or another form may help you remain with your internal experience without getting lost in its push and pull. The invitation can be short and playful. Bring what you notice back to the condition you are exploring.
Why here
This gives you a way to become familiar with your mind as it is, whether comfortable or uncomfortable, without needing to label or immediately change it.
- Week04
Feeling internally held
Explore containment, bodily coherence, stability and somewhere within yourself to relax. The expandable balloon is one possible image; making it bigger is not the aim. Notice what helps you feel held while you explore your chosen condition. We also review how the coaching is working after four appointments in total.
Why here
Attention can be experienced as spacious, open, grounded and held. This theme gives us room to explore that experience and adjust the support.
- Week05
Bringing discoveries into ordinary choices
Return to an ordinary situation involving your chosen condition. Bring honesty, a helpful point of contact and qualities you have recognised into the same exploration. Change the conditions around the activity and notice what becomes accessible.
Why here
We stay with one condition over time and look at the changes you can recognise for yourself. What you discover can inform another creative arrangement, with room to change it again.
- Week06
Reflecting and choosing what to carry forward
Look together at your relationship with the condition you chose: what became recognisable or available, where honesty remains difficult, which forms have some joy in them and what support would be useful next. Decide whether to continue, adjust or finish.
Why here
A defined period of support gives the exploration a shape. We attend to changes you can recognise, including how you relate to the condition, even when the outcome you hoped for has not yet happened. You can take something from it without promising that an arrangement must now last forever.
Honesty, with somewhere to bring it
Hear the reason
before judging it.
Suppose the intention is to try bedtime at ten o'clock. When the time comes, you want to keep watching something or stay on your phone. You are allowed to choose that. Just before choosing, the invitation is to pause and make a brief, truthful journal note about what is happening within you.
It might be as simple as wanting to keep watching because it is fun and sleep feels boring. That is enough to bring into the next session. The work is becoming comfortable hearing the truth about your own experience, with someone who can stay with you in that honesty.
Bedtime is one illustration. You might choose meals, movement, phone use or rest instead. We keep returning to the condition that matters to you, hearing what you experience and recognising changes over time. Keeping the original arrangement is not the measure of whether honesty happened.
“Genuine means being really friendly with yourself.”
Pema Chödrön · A Field Guide for Dark Times
Creative forms can emerge from the actual day. Nisha's example is turning on a bath and doing the laundry while it fills. Discoveries like this can bring some joy to an intention. The form can keep changing as you find what engages you.
Read Honesty, joy and creative changeContact and feeling held
Find something
you can connect to.
Pen and paper can be like an anchor with a line in the ocean: a point of contact with internal experience, without getting lost in its push and pull. Movement or another accessible form may offer a different way in. The exact form is something to explore together.
The balloon is another possible image for feeling held, with room for what is happening within and around you. A larger balloon is no better than a smaller one. We look for containment, stability and somewhere in yourself to relax.
The membrane is another image for a flexible interface with experience. It can expand or contract and be more or less open. We explore contact with it, without forcing an ideal size, openness or shape.
“Stay directly in contact with the experience.”
Christopher Titmuss · Guided Body Scan Meditation
Short, playful contact can be a beginning. Five minutes, perhaps twice a day, is one possibility to adapt with your coach to what feels realistic. You do not have to label everything or immediately do something about it.
Read Attention, focus and feeling heldThe resources behind the course
Read alongside the exploration.
Attention, focus and feeling held
Spaciousness, the balloon and an accessible point of contact.
→ Honesty and choiceHonesty, joy and creative change
Hearing your own reasons and letting creative forms change.
→ Recognition and accessRecognising the qualities of attention
A broader vocabulary for discovering resources of your mind.
→Arranging the sessions
Six 30-minute appointments.
$125 AUD each.
Sessions are online through Google Meet with Elsa Barnett. Each appointment is paid separately before confirmation. We discuss fit and availability with you, review the work after four appointments in total and reflect together at the end of the course.
Coaching is for children and adults. An adult parent or legal guardian makes the enquiry, consents to coaching and signs the service agreement for anyone under 18.
With less than 24 hours' notice, or a missed appointment, the full $125 fee applies. With 24 hours or more notice there is no fee and a full refund. If Seeds cancels, there is a full refund. Read the complete service agreement.
Enquire about coachingSource notes
The reasoning and sources.
The sequence brings Nisha's recordings and clinical thinking into six themes. Honesty and recognition run throughout. The six-week period and 30-minute appointments are the structure of this service, rather than an established treatment dose. The individual arrangements and the person's experience guide how we use that structure.
Nisha's starting point is that these qualities are already resources of the natural human mind. Thich Nhat Hanh's The Five-Fold Steps of Training discusses capacities within us and learning to recognise them in experience. SN 46.51 describes conditions that nourish the development of qualities. These sources inform the explanation; the balloon, anchor and programme formulation are Nisha's.
The brief quotations are attributed immediately above. Pema Chödrön discusses friendliness towards oneself; Christopher Titmuss's invitation comes from a longer body-scan teaching. The companion article on qualities of attention gives further sources and explains the vocabulary. The public SEEDS model was originally presented for paediatric occupational therapy; this course applies its way of examining interacting conditions to the coaching work.