Mary Smail is a senior Drama Therapist and psychotherapist/trainer working in private practice at SoulWorksUK. www.marysmailsoulworks.co.uk
She was Director of the Sesame Institute UK and International, London, UK, until 2015. This educational charity promoted the importance of the creative arts in all psychological transformation through a way of working called the Sesame Approach. Sesame has been used in the UK as a trauma therapy since 1964. It trusts creativity and healing to speak through metaphor, movement, story, and sound – with words and left-brain thinking as a secondary process. The Sesame Approach is practiced as a dramatherapy intervention worldwide and throughout the UK.
From 2008, Mary moved away from the MA Sesame training at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London, by withdrawing from an academic setting and devising Psyche and Soma, Soul Making through Sesame, a continuing professional training for health professionals who are registered within their discipline. With its ‘reversed curriculum,’ the course differs from a ‘higher education’ pedagogy which stipulates goals and outcomes. Psyche and Soma allow the core of the person, the meaning-making soul, to be the teacher. The course has run in London, Wales, Serbia, and Austria. The next training is set to run in Vienna in 2024.
Mary also teaches students at Re-Vision Counselling & Psychotherapy with a Soulful Perspective.
She is co-author of Myth and Fairy-tale in Dramatherapy - The Golden Stories of Sesame and The Village of Grief – a new model for bereavement (publishing Nov 2023). Her particular interest explores the notion of the human soul and the presence of grace in the process of vulnerability, seeming failure, and rule-breaking; and in the deep lands which death, bereavement, and grief open to all.
She is a Scot living in south London and she constantly thinks about moving away to be close to the sea. She has two black cats and a lot of other things!
