Larry Pell

I love this stuff! I’ve been around studying, doing or benefiting from Client Centered Therapy/ PCA for something like forty years now, on and off. I have a limited private practice in Encinitas, California where I live most of the time. I like to travel so clients may get some breaks in therapy, or do phone or Skype sessions with me, when I’m in Tucson, the Eastern part of this globe, or who knows where else.

I’ve studied CCT/PCA at the University of Minnesota and University of La Verne, the initial two quarters of the CSP sponsored Carl Rogers Institute, and was privileged to receive personal supervision of therapy sessions with Carl Rogers. I learned more in these sessions than in the rest of the Carl Rogers Institute, and more in CRI than in all my academic education. To me Carl was a great soul and I feel honored to have known him. I’ve also been around CSP for years and have gratefully benefited and learned from many of its members.

I have an interest, experience, and academic background in Empathy Training. I did a thesis (available in the Carl Rogers Library) on it and consider empathy the cornerstone of Client Centered Therapy.

I’ve been practicing a meditative yoga for the last forty years. I’m excited and enthralled by the areas of convergence and comergence (I make up words as it suits me) of this yoga and CCT/PCA. I have an outline written for a yet untitled book with chapters: (2) Carl Roger’s psychology and its spiritual leanings and (3) Paramahansa Yogananda’s yoga meditation and its psychological leanings.

I think of this work in terms of Client Centered Therapy and readily use the same principals in other areas, hence you see me referring to it as CCT/PCA. I suspect it’s so much a part of me that I can’t see how much it’s a part of me. Ditto for my meditation.

Aside from that, I enjoy distance swimming in the ocean, kayaking, hiking, and doing anything (or doing nothing) in nature. I grew up in Northern Minnesota often fishing and canoeing in the wilderness and thinking that was the normal world. A part of me lets go and comes alive in similar settings. I also like swing dancing, and am studying Chi Gung and Tai Chi.

I wrote a note to myself and have it where I’ll see it. It reads “Enjoy Life Now”. A visiting friend added to it so it now reads: “Enjoy Life Now-or else”.