About the practice
A practice of one, on purpose.
Terra & Still is one coach, six clients at a time, and a room above a brickworks. Small on purpose — the cap is the product, not a stage the practice is trying to grow out of.
Who you sit with
I spent eleven years believing the answer was to spin faster.
I ran operations for a logistics firm through its worst decade and I was good at it, in the specific way that means you are the person called at eleven at night. Every problem had the same shape and the same fix: more effort, applied sooner. It worked for eleven years and then it stopped working in about a fortnight.
I took up throwing in the year afterwards because it was the only hour a week nobody could reach me. It was not meant to be a metaphor. But you cannot force a pot — push harder and it goes off true faster, and the wheel simply will not argue with you about it. The first honest thing anyone said to me in that period was said by a lump of clay.
I trained as a coach properly after that: a two-year person-centred qualification, four hundred logged hours before I charged for a twelfth of them, and monthly supervision with an external supervisor I do not choose to please. Terra & Still opened in 2021. It is deliberately a practice of one — six people on The Wheel at a time, so the hour you get is the hour you were sold.
I still throw on Thursdays. Badly, and on purpose. It is difficult to be precious about someone else’s wobble when your own bowl collapsed the same morning.
How this practice runs
Four rules, kept without exception.
- 01
You keep your hands on the clay.
Nothing is done to you and nothing is handed over finished. Every sentence that matters in this work will be one you said first — we make room for it and hold the wheel steady, and that is the whole of our job.
- 02
Nothing leaves the room.
Sessions are confidential without exception, other than the legal one: a real and immediate risk of serious harm. If that line is ever near, you will hear it from us before anyone else does. Notes are yours, stored encrypted, and deleted on request the day you ask.
- 03
Six at a time.
The Wheel is capped at six concurrent clients. It is the reason there is sometimes a wait and the reason there is never a junior coach you did not choose. If the cap is full we tell you the real date a place opens.
- 04
The hard thing gets said early.
If we think you are in the wrong programme, working on the wrong problem, or would be better served by a therapist, you hear it in week one — not in week nine when the invoices have cleared. A fast no is the most useful thing a practice like this can offer.
The room
A converted brickworks, and one good chair.
In-studio sessions happen in a single high-windowed room on the top floor of a brickworks that stopped firing in the 1970s. There is a wheel in the corner, a shelf of greenware in various states of failure, and two chairs at an angle rather than facing off across a desk.
It is quiet, it is warm, and there is no reception. You come up the stairs at your time and there is nobody else there — which is the point of a practice with six people on the books.
- Getting there
- The address and door code go out with your confirmation. Ten minutes from the station, parking on the yard.
- Access
- The studio is up one flight with no lift. Ground-floor sessions can be arranged, and remote works exactly as well — say the word in your enquiry.
- Remote
- Video or voice-only. Around two-thirds of clients never come to the room at all.
- Hours
- Tuesday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, with two evening slots a week held back for people who cannot take an hour in daylight.
If that sounds like the right room
Come and sit in it.
Twenty minutes, no fee.
The first conversation is not a sales call — it is twenty minutes to hear what is spinning and say honestly whether this practice is the right one. If it is not, you will leave with a name that is.