User:Elizabethmaitreyi/Maura Sills

Maura Sills (1950, Edinburgh - ) is a psychotherapist, spiritual teacher and co-founder of the Karuna Institute. Today she offers teachings and retreats internationally as well as overseeing the professional trainings at The Karuna Institute.

Maura Sills is primarily responsible for the development of the psychotherapy model called Core process psychotherapy which is taught in a professional training at The Karuna Institute. She founded the institute in 1984 with her then husband Franklyn Sills. Maura has worked in the field of psychotherapy and psychospirituality, whereas the craniosacral therapy has been pioneered by Franklyn.

Life

Maura was born Maureen Forrester in 1950 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her brother, Ronald was born 5 years later. After her education in Edinburgh, she qualified as an Occupational Therapist in 1971 and eventually became Senior Lecturer in Applied Psychiatry and Group Psychotherapy at the London School of Occupational Therapy as well as District Head Occupational Therapist at the Middlesex Hospital, London.

It was during these early years in London that she encountered Neo-Reichian work and underwent Reichian analysis herself. She was deeply influenced by Dr William Emerson who became a long-term colleague and friend and also by Ian Gordon-Brown, founder of Transpersonal Psychotherapy.

It was in the early 1970s that Maura got involved in Buddhism. Her first seven years of Buddhist practice were in the Chan tradition and it was in 1974 at a Buddhist Chan Institute in London that she met Franklyn Sills who was to become her husband and spiritual brother. During the seventies Maura was exploring a variety of humanistic psychotherapeutic approaches. Five years later the couple married and moved to Berkeley, California where Maura continued her Buddhist studies.

In the USA Maura worked initially at Stanford University Medical Centre in the Department for Comprehensive Medicine but it was the Esalen Institute, California, that has as its raison d'etre a long-term enquiry into self-referential consciousness that we may imagine made a deep impression on Maura. This existential approach, which values the "deeper, richer, more enduring" brought her into contact with the influences of Gestalt therapy and Primal Therapy..

Whilst she was working in America, Maura was also about Tibetan Buddhism as a Kum Nye student at the Nyingma Institute, Berkeley. She subsequently met her teacher, the monk and meditation teacher,Taungpulu Kaba Aye Sayadaw, from upper Burma, considered by many to be an enlightened being. Maura took temporary ordination for a year with her teacher.

Maura spent three years in America and it was undoubtedly the formative experiences she had there which were to prove so influential and which seem to have sown the seeds for Core Process psychotherapy. This did not come into being until her return to England, however.

The powerful influences she encountered in the US give some insight into how Maura began to synthesise her beliefs, her professional experience and her psycho-spiritual insights into her own Core Process Psychotherapy. The combination of the influences of Emerson, Gordon-Brown, Buddhism and Gestalt go some way to explaining the understanding of personality formation upon which Core Process Psychotherapy rests. She has said that the work of Anne Overzee was also a major influence. Anne became a Core Process Psychotherapist and eventually Co-ordinator of Training at The Karuna Institute.

These three aspects of her formation, the clinical training, the Buddhist training and the enquiry into existence that came together when she returned to the UK to produce a prototype of the core process psychotherapy she then began to practise. Maura returned to her clinical practice and began offering trainings in Core Process Psychotherapy at the same time. She and Franklyn co-founded the Karuna Institute in 1984 which found its permanent home near Widecombe-on-the-Moor in 1991.

Maura was a founding member of the Association for Accredited Psychospiritual Psychotherapists, and a co-ordinator of the Spiritual Emergency Network UK. She and Franklyn have two daughters, Laurel and Ella. They have now divorced although their joint work at The Karuna Institute continues.