Marcia Burton

About Marcia

I have been a practicing counsellor/psychotherapist for over 25 years. I am an Approved Clinical Supervisor with the BCACC. My style is gentle, warm, compassionate and playful and practical. I have experience assisting individual clients and couples with issues such as grief/loss, depression, anxiety, stress, parenting, relationship conflict and life transitions. My work is underpinned by a trust that every person has access to a natural state of wellness. I see my role as assisting others to remember and reconnect with their inner strength and innate wisdom.
I am well-trained and experienced in using mindfulness-based and body-centred approaches. I offer a holistic and wide-angled perspective on personal issues. I believe that pain and difficulty are inescapable aspects of life, and that we all suffer at times. Although we cannot necessarily stop pain/difficulty from coming into our lives, we often are not fully aware of our capacity to change our relationship to it. In making this perceptual shift, many clients begin to feel less identified with their difficulties and experience feeling empowered, exploring new ways to “relate to” their difficulties..

I formerly worked as a Mental Health Clinician with the Salt Spring Island mental health team. I have maintained good connections with this local mental health support system on Salt Spring, and have the ability to work closely with mental health professionals and doctors where appropriate.

As well as offering individual counselling and supervision, I facilitate mindfulness-based experiential groups for counsellors/helping professionals and the general public.
I am a Certified Teacher of Mindful Self-Compassion, a skills-based resilience-building program to support people to be kinder to themselves. I am a Senior Trainer of the Hakomi Method of Mindfulness-based Psychotherapy and offer training and workshops in this approach to build self-awareness and enhance empathic communication skills. I am a Facilitator of Right Use of Power, a system developed by Cedar Barstow to explore and give language to how power dynamics show up in relationships, (especially the therapeutic relationship) where there is a power differential. In 2019, I co-authored an Ethical Framework for the Hakomi Education Network. My Masters Degree is in Counselling and Psychotherapy from Bath Spa University in the UK.