About Margaret Forde

  -“I strongly believe that people have ‘the answer’ inside themselves already, and I see myself as a facilitator, someone who can help a client or course participant free out their energy so they can uncover their own unique path  and  sing their own song. In this way, I regard my clients and course participants as partners on a journey.  I love venturing into the unknown whether with a person or a group and the fact that no two people or situations are alike.”

Margaret is one of the leading individuals in Applied Positive Psychology in Ireland. Using the latest cutting-edge research from PositivePsychology, her approach focuses on developing positive resources and strengths in the individuals she is dealing with. Her years of experience and diverse background in psychology, yoga, meditation, relaxation, psychotherapy and coaching give her a broad resource base on which her courses and one-to-one sessions are based. Her courses are unparalleled in their comprehensive content and exciting results achieved by participants. In short, they have made a real difference to peoples’ lives. Click here to read their testimonials…

Qualifications/Experience

B.A (Hons Psych) , Diploma in Applied Psychology, H.Dip.Ed

Registered Counselling Psychologist,  Psychological Society of Ireland (P.S.I.) 

Registered Work and Organisational psychologist ( P.S.I.)

Accredited Psychotherapist, Irish Association of Holistic Psychotherapy (I. A.H. P. )

Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT 500) Yoga Alliance

Co-founder and Director of Training of the Irish Association of Holistic Medicine which runs training courses for professionals in the areas of Ki-Massage, Yoga, Holistic Dietetics and Nutrition, Positive Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy.

Private practice in holistic psychotherapy and positive psychology coaching.

Facilitator of courses and groups in positive psychology and meditation/mindfulness.

Stress management consultant.

Corporate training and coaching.

MY CAREER PATH

I was part of one of the first groups to study psychology in Ireland at an undergraduate level.  At that stage, there was quite an emphasis on philosophical psychology :  from the Greeks such as Plato and Aristotle, to the Americans such as William James,  all with a vision of man as a noble creature with a free will and a soul .  This interested me much more than Freud or the behaviour of rats in mazes.

My postgraduate course in Applied Psychology focused largely on humanistic psychotherapy. I was really inspired by the what I saw as the common goal that both Rogers and Perls (founder of gestalt therapy) had in their work: that of helping people break free of the conditioned values they had taken on from others, to a more authentic life based on their own self-actualizing principle and holistic sensing of the world.  I was also very interested in the area of values and organisational change.

I began my career as a guidance counselor in schools and set up my own agency to guide adults looking for career change. I soon came to the conclusion that many of the people I was dealing with needed not just a career change, but a complete “head” change. I felt I needed further help in answering the question “how do you really help people break free?


YOGA

I found it in a very unexpected direction. I took up yoga as a form of physical exercise. only to discover that  the “peak states” Maslow and Rogers talked about were actual and experienced by all the great yogis, and that traditional  yoga was a step-by-step system to calm the whirlpools of the mind and achieve inner freedom.

As I immersed myself in the philosophy and practice of yoga, I was amazed to discover that when the mind became still, I could come in touch with a higher power and there was a movement, a flow of life, an intelligence way beyond normal thinking from which you could draw inspiration and guidance.

FROM YOGA AND HEALING BACK TO PSYCHOTHERAPY

With the insights and mindfulness training I received in yoga, I found that the clients in my private practice were getting much deeper results. I became interested in developing a training course for counsellors and therapists incorporating holistic principles.  Around this time, I came across some articles written by Carl Rogers in 1986, towards the end of his life, in which he said that he had greatly under-estimated the spiritual dimension in his original formulation of client-centred therapy and now believed that “best results were attained when “I am, through the process of rapt attention, in an altered state of consciousness, in touch with the transcendent, my spirit in touch with the spirit of the person with me. At such stages, I am at my most intuitive, coming up with insights that seemed to have nothing to do with my thought processes, but which somehow turned out to be right. At such times, my mere presence seems full of healing.” From my own experience, I too was convinced that the state of the therapist was much more important than specific techniques and I set about developing a training course for counsellors and therapists based on holistic principles. 

DIRECTOR OF TRAINING COURSES

Together with Martin Forde (naturopath and osteopath) , I became involved in setting up the Irish Health Culture Association to promote the idea of positive health in Ireland, disseminating information on diet and nutrition, promoting physique contests, opening a gym etc. Eventually we decided that one of the best ways of promoting health would be to train therapists to work in the area of  positive health, so in 1985, we set up the Irish Association of Holistic Medicine to run professional training courses for holistic practitioners. These training courses are still running and were very successful in getting large numbers of practitioners promoting positive health principles around the country (see www.holisticmedicine.ie).

During these years, Martin and I also had three children. At the births, I was able to put yoga principles of meditation and pain control into practice.  I found that it all worked really well and that birth could be a spiritual experience rather than the way it is usually depicted.  I am still involved in teaching this application of yoga through my ante-natal yoga classes (www.yogaforpregnancyandbirth.com)