"Humankind is
a being in search
of meaning"
— Plato

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The MIECAT approach is dedicated to the pursuit of meanings. It aims to support individuals who wish to understand more about themselves, groups wanting to explore shared meanings, and for organisations that rely on collaborative person centred approaches to achieve work related goals.

Education in its broadest sense is about acquiring the knowledge to live, love and work. MIECAT is an educative and re-educative body. Counselling or therapy is just a special form of the same inquiry: to acquire knowledge about how to be in our lives, in our work our relationships and with ourselves.

Learning to know more about being is really always the purpose, in both counselling and education. We are always reconstructing our perceptions, learning to understand our emotional responses, sharpening our intuitions and trusting the reliability of our being in experience. In doing this we can be more fully present in our experiences, so that we can imagine the possible choices and make them. This results in a strong feeling of being present to oneself as well as to others, a reliance on oneself, as well as a respect for, and trust in, the others with whom we share our lives.

Human meanings are constructed in the purposeful search for authentic knowing that is found in lived experience. This search uses our thinking processes, our imagination, felt body sensing, memories, feelings and emotions. MIECAT uses a multi-modal, experiential arts approach to the exploration of significant life meanings. This form of inquiry is based in respect, compassion and commitment to the search for an authentic way of living.

MIECAT facilitates the processes of understanding:

• that disparate meanings may arise in our experience of being;
• how to discriminate the meanings that matter;
• how to tolerate the dissonances and incompatibilities of experience;
• how to select and construct a perspective that enables us to live in and through the challenges of the ordinariness of our being without falling prey to devastation from anxiety or depression;
• the return to a sense of the continuity of ourselves in our own being, in order to balance that with adaptations to the needs of others;
• how to hold on to that fundamental flow of creative energy fused with emotion, intuition and reflective thought, which constitute the essences of our potential for being.

The MIECAT inquiry has developed from the epistemological base of phenomenological psychology, heuristic research, experiential therapies and humanistic counselling practice.

Approach