Visual Landscaping has been developed by Simon and Jo Walker over the past four years through their facilitative work with individuals and small groups.

The process involves the facilitation of a mental visual ‘landscape’ by each client. This arena functions as a symbolic space through which new mental symbols and metaphors can be explored.

Visual Landscaping is a specific form of metaphor therapy and the structure of the language process sits within the discipline first pioneered by David Groves. Its specific kind of symbolic modelling adopts similar rules to other forms of metaphor therapy.

However there are some distinctives:

The Visual Landscape is always ‘cued up’ by the same verbal cue sequence. In other words, each client creates a personal mental space from a single, consistent stimulation process. This sequence has been developed through experiential practice and refinement with groups and individuals over a four year period. More than three hundred individuals and numerous groups have used the sequence.

As a consequence of this, the symbolic types that are introduced and managed are highly consistent, though the specific form they come to ‘embody’ is always personal and client led.

The Visual Landscape can be analysed using the Personal Ecology Profile (PEP)- our proprietary psychometric process- which extrapolates consistent, meaningful interpretation from the visualised symbols. The PEP conforms to BPS psychometric standards for acceptable levels of reliability.

The Visual Landscape can be used as a ‘public language’ in group therapeutic and mentoring processes. Because the symbolic types are consistent to all in the group, the variety of meanings can help an individual express personal differences in a group context.

Visual Landscaping is primarily a ‘future-orientated’ therapy. In other words, rather than exploring the past through the process, as a psycho-dynamic model would, it is used to express and explore potential future changes that could be made to a person’s symbolic world. In other words, transforming current, embedded, visual metaphors is the primary process of change.

Visual Landscaping was designed, ultimately, to be an arena for prayer within the Christian tradition of visual meditation. Spiritual disciplines such as Ignatian disciplines have been used in the church to facilitate prayer and scriptural meditation for many centuries. Visual Landscaping has explicit ‘room’ for such spiritual meditation, encounter and conversation. At its deepest level, the process encourages communion with not only others, but the world and the divine Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Visual Landscaping is being used

• In 1:1 coaching contexts in business
• In relationship management coaching and support
• In Spiritual Leadership Formation at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford for trainee vicars
• In small groups for peer mentoring on retreats and quiet days