Each month you will meet one of our members and learn a little more about what makes them tick.

This month meet Malachy Coleman's Room With a View...

Although settled in Nantes for over 10 years now, Malachy Coleman remains the dedicated traveller he always has been at heart. "I travel with the people I meet, the books I read as much as the places I visit. Over time, my interests have multiplied," he says, pointing to a desk cluttered with piles of papers, notes, books and photos. "I love discovering new and unexpected relationships between things. When I was growing up in Ireland, I remember as a schoolboy trying to find the one thing I was really good at, so that one day I could start looking for a real job. But I was interested in just about everything. So that made choosing difficult."
 
In the end, Malachy did lots of different jobs both in Ireland and France. He washed dishes, co-founded a film and video co-op, worked in a prison, worked for a multinational, and even filmed buffalo on a farm in Normandy. "A lot of people try to follow a certain career path, but that simply didn't work for me. Over time, I've learned to trust my own instincts more than anything else."
 
When he arrived in France for example, he had never studied or spoken French before. When he thinks about it now, he admits "it appeared to be a pretty reckless thing to do". But he loved the experience of jumping in at the deep end. "That's how I tend to do things. It was very hard at times not understanding what was being said around me," he remembers, "but the language learning experience was very enriching. However, I wouldn't advise anyone to do it that way. But if you want to, just go right ahead."
 
Then one day in 1993, while living in Paris, his curiosity led him to a conference about a body centred approach to psychotherapy called Biodynamic Psychology. One of the characteristics of Biodynamic Psychology is the use of therapeutic massage. For the first time, he heard someone explain that the body has a sensorial memory of itself that is quite distinct from what people actively remember. Simply touching someone on the arm can help a person reconnect to their sensorial memory leading to positive emotional release. "I had always felt I had something in my hands that I hadn't been able to define and didn't know what to do with. And suddenly here was a way to develop this potential that made so much sense." By the end of the conference, Malachy walked away having decided he was going to train as a psychotherapist even though he hardly knew what it entailed.
 
As it turned out, Malachy has now trained for over ten years in Biodynamics, Biosynthesis and NLP, embracing a multitude of techniques. But the central thread running through his therapy work is the importance and the place of the body in the healing process. "Psychologically, people often understand their difficulty but still nothing changes," he notes. "However, we are emotional and biological beings too." Because of old shock, the body holds back with a tightness in the chest, a pain in the back, hands or feet turning stone cold. Something else is necessary. A massage, a contact, a particular gesture at the right moment may help to release the inner movement that is constantly seeking to emerge in the body. "Co-creating the possibility for this change with my clients is my passion as a therapist."

To find out more about Malachy's practice, click his pic to the right....