Do some people need to feel anxious? Is it an addiction, a comfort, or just a crippling affliction? Is there a way of finding out what we really need and like, when free of the constant worry and fear?

Losing my bag with all my documents in it was a shameful, disempowering experience. When I was writing about loss of identity in a spiritual sense, this was not what I meant!

In the Biblical Book of Ecclesiastes, there’s a beautiful passage which begins “To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heavens”. In the past few weeks, I’ve learned a personal lesson in the importance of making time and space for all the necessary purposes of life, not just the work-based ones.

As the economic recession grinds to what we hope is a conclusion, many of us find ourselves materially poorer than we were in 2008. But do we fail to count our less-tangible inner reserves? Let’s remember some other kinds of wealth that no scheming banker can ever take away.

Empathy facilitates understanding between counsellors and clients who do not speak the same language. What about online therapy, in which the language is there, without the bodily resonant experience of empathy?

Buddhism and Taoism have emerged into the mainstream of therapeutic thinking. But Confucianism seems to have been left out, which is a shame, because this ethical and spiritual pillar of the East has much to say about the therapeutic process.

Being an ethical practitioner of counselling requires us as therapists to take care of our own needs for nourishment so that we are able to offer a nourishing therapeutic relationship to clients. The risks of not doing so are potentially damaging to all of us.