Begins Sept 14th  2024

10 Saturdays over 5 months

Venue Ockment Centre Okehampton

Price £1200

About The Course

This 10 day Diploma Sandplay is recognised by the National Counselling Psychotherapy Society (NCPS) and carries ‘Advanced Specialist Training Status’ and is designed for qualified and registered counsellors, psychotherapists and play therapists.

The 10 day Diploma course will be Integrative and Humanistic.  Sandplay is a gentle, often silent, meditative therapeutic tool that enables clients to rest in and explore the rich symbolic and metaphorical resource that is the inheritance of all humanity.  For the therapist It is the adventure of a lifetime.  For both therapist and client a hugely creative and sustaining tool for personal growth and healing.

Talk therapy is focused on the client’s use of words.  While talk is a component part of sandplay the process is sensorial and intuitive, tactile and visual.  Our hands fire the imagination in ways that words cannot.  We will hold fast to the belief that it is always the client as explorer who knows best as they embark on an experiential journey of self-discovery.  The therapeutic explorer’s assistant will need to be skilled in all facets of the therapeutic relationship, have a fascination for the depth of the symbolic and be humble in the face of that deep and ultimately unfathomable resource.

Sandplay is a wonderful medium for creating a personal Myth.  This is perhaps one of the most exciting challenges for any of us.  Carl Jung felt that everyone he worked with over thirty-five years of age was suffering from a loss of myth.  Without a myth he felt that each of us is vulnerable to being overwhelmed by a sense of meaninglessness.

A wise myth speaks to the individual and supports wholeness, energy and draws upon the resources available to us in the unconscious.  The myth has to be ‘sound’, fit experience and the context of life and be open to change and evolution and enable the posing of the right questions and enable living with them.

The next Diploma Sandplay will focus upon the hero’s journey and will aid the exploration and shaping of each members personal myth to live by.

The course consists of ten modules designed to provide confidence in the practical procedures of sandplay therapy.

Course Content

Module 1: The symbolic significance of Sand – The alchemical metaphor.

Module 2: The Humanist sandplay paradigm.  The hero’s journey begins.

Module 3: Resourcing the heroic quest—your sandplay collection.

Module 4: The water element in Sandplay: fertility and tsunami.

Module 5: The Fire element: passion, anger and power in sandplay.

Module 6: Sandplay with children and young people.  The adolescent hero.

Module 7: Supervision in the sand—the air element.

Module 8: Subpersonalities in the sand.

Module 9: The hero’s journey and renewal.

Module 10: Celebration

About Ken's Work

Ken Rabone’s work on Sandplay has been published in the journal of the BACP and in the journal of The American Sandplay Society.  He has now trained many therapists in this most creative and therapeutic medium.  The Diploma is designed to give therapists of diverse orientations the confidence to begin using a sandtray with both adults and young people.

The course days are spaced  so that each student has time to  process their experience and write up their reflections in a journal.  This reflective work will be the basis for the student’s Creative Portfolio upon which the award is based.  

"The weekend before the course begins I visit the beach near Prawle Point in Devon. I sit on the sand with the waves lapping at my feet, and sift sand through my fingers, I reflect how this act can release the kind of inspirational reverie that has inspired poets and artists for millennia. Between the sea and the shore exists the fringe of the sand. Here a meditative space can be found to focus attention on that which can often be lost amidst the cut and thrust of daily life - a meditative and emotional space that encourages the intuitive, the tactile and the visual. Sifting sand in a sandtray invites us to occupy this same liminal in-between, space. Between the sea, the great unconsciousness, and the land of our awareness, lies the liminal strand. As I sift the sand the invite arises to imaginative engagement and to play."
Ken Rabone

Contact us

Email: office@safespaceforcounselling.com

Telephone: 07801 248421