About
Lucia Cockcroft
Trainee person-centred counsellor. Yoga and mindfulness teacher since 2007. Former journalist, which mostly taught me how much people will tell you if you stop talking.
How I got here
I spent about a decade as a journalist, first on business magazines and later freelance, writing about yoga, travel and wellbeing for magazines and for The Guardian. It was a job built on interviews, which is to say a job built on listening carefully and asking one more question than felt comfortable.
In autumn 2007 I did my first yoga teacher training at an ashram in northern California, and I have been teaching ever since: classes, workshops and retreats in the UK, abroad and online. I co-founded Yoga at the Mill in Chelmsford and co-run Satvada Retreats, which takes small groups to Morocco and Norfolk. During the pandemic I moved to the Essex coast, and I now teach in Frinton-on-Sea as well.
Counselling is the thread that pulls all of it together. Yoga and mindfulness taught me what happens in a body under strain, and how much changes when someone is given honest attention for an hour. Training as a counsellor is how I learned to offer that attention properly, with a framework and a supervisor behind it rather than good intentions.
Training
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2007
200-hour Sivananda yoga teacher training
At an ashram in northern California. The start of everything that followed.
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2008 onwards
Teachers I keep going back to
Sarah Powers on yin yang yoga and mindfulness, Norman Blair on yin, Catherine Annis on Scaravelli, Judith Lasater on restorative yoga, Charlotte Watts on somatic practice.
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Since 2009
Satvada Retreats
Co-founded with Darren. Small residential yoga and mindfulness retreats in Morocco and Norfolk, and online.
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Since 2014
Yoga at the Mill
A studio co-founded at Moulsham Mill in Chelmsford, running classes and courses in person and online.
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Mindfulness
MBSR certification and a postgraduate diploma
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction with Ed Halliwell, followed by a two-year postgraduate teaching diploma in mindfulness-based approaches from Bangor University.
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Now
Person-centred counselling training
PLACEHOLDER: course title, provider and year of qualification. In placement, in supervision, and a student member of the BACP.
How I work
Person-centred, which is a technical way of saying I am not the expert on you.
Person-centred counselling starts from the idea that you already hold what you need to work out, and that what has been missing is a relationship in which it is safe to look at it. So I do not diagnose you, set you homework, or arrive with a plan for your life. I pay close attention, I am honest with you, and I try to understand your experience from the inside rather than from a manual.
In practice that means sessions that follow you. Some weeks are all talk. Some are quiet. Sometimes I will notice that your shoulders have climbed towards your ears while you describe something you say is fine, and I will say so, because bodies are often ahead of words. That instinct comes from seventeen years of teaching, and I use it lightly. This is counselling, not a yoga class.
There is no need to be flexible, or young, or good at any of this. I am none of those things either.
Away from work
I swim, badly and often. I walk the beach near my house in most weathers, play the piano to a standard best described as private, and still write when I can. Given a free week I would spend it in a cabin somewhere rural with poor phone signal.