Sonya Welch-Moring from Anger to Peace

 My anger journey began a long time ago.   I remember very clearly, I was seven years old and my family had just moved from London to Essex.

I had loved our old home in Croydon; it was small, detached with a front drive that my sister and I would play in and a lovely walled back garden with sunflowers 6 feet high.  In the kitchen there was a pantry, something that I’ve wanted ever since and it just felt safe and comfortable, home.

Essex was something altogether different, it felt cold and distant, sure I had my own bedroom,but it was dull and boring and everyone was very white and I was very black, I just didn’t fit in.

Anger began to consume my life from that day forward and I hated every minute of the rest of the time that I lived there which was 10 long years before I escaped at 17 and came back to London.

It’s taken decades to step away from the impact of that anger on my life and find some inner peace, sometimes on bad days I revisit it but mainly I can consign those memories to the past.

It’s also taken a long time to realise that some of those experiences were positive and have helped shape who I am today.  Growing up black in a white culture has given me great insight into different cultural thinking and armed with that I’ve travelled the world and learnt about other people and ways of living.

And to comes the realisation that my experience is not unique, it’s different and played out by many people from different backgrounds and colours who have experienced different patterns of alienation with similar results.  I’ve stopped feeling guilty or asking what if, I’ve made peace with my inner conflicts and regained my identity who I want to be in the world.

Peace Markers is the work that has developed out of those early experiences, it’s a visual and narrative approach to finding inner peace.

Everyone is different, yours may not be an anger and conflict story, it may be about lack of confidence, not feeling good enough in your family group or a myriad of other reasons. Peace Markers has at its core a vision of healing past hurts and reconciling external limitations, it’s about overcoming, frustration and disappointment and allowing peace in.

The moment when things started to shift was when I made the decision to train to become a mediator, I’d recently found my life partner, got married, bought a house and made myself self-employed all in the space of a short period of time and I was happy but broke.  When I came to mediation I realised that there are two types of people who become mediators, those like me who are comfortable with anger (generally because we have had issues with it) or those who avoid it and want to explore the issues.

So I did my Community Mediation training, followed by a Family Mediation programme and over the next ten years I took those skills, integrated them with my emerging role as a facilitator and developed a global group working model to resolve conflicts and bridge differences.

The latest leg of the journey has been the addition of graphic tools and templates.  It’s the creative part of the work and puts visuals at the heart of the story of finding inner peace.

Peace Markers uses graphics, group-work and peace-mapping, tools and processes  with individuals, couples and groups to help them resolve conflict  and resistance in relationships and find new ways to connect, communicate and collaborate, all ‘markers’ on the road to peace.

 BIO

Sonya  coaches individuals within her own private practice and as a consultant to organisations.  She uses mediation frame-works, systemic processes and creative solution focused forums to facilitate learning about race, culture and ethnicity.  Her expertise in global group work supports the resolution of inter-personal and professional differences and conflicts, obstacles to inner and outer peace become clear and solutions to problems can be identified.

She is a trained family and workplace mediator, has an MSc in Human Resource Development and is a Master NLP practitioner with a Post Graduate Diploma in Systemic Management.  A Level 2 Reiki practitioner for the last 10 years, she has an interest in intuition alignment with conscious living practices.