In 1982, I quit a lucrative corporate career because I found that I was living the life my parents wished for me and not my own.

In 1984, feeling lost after aimless travelling in Europe, I ended up living in a community in York and underwent an experience of nondual awakening. This experience was involuntary, life-changing and mind-blowing and I undertook the meditational and physical practices of classical and hatha yoga in order to regulate my nervous system in order to deal with the impact.

I spent the next six years studying and practising yoga, buddhism and western psychology whilst finding a variety of non-vocational jobs in order to make ends meet. I also began to practice ceremonial magick and began a love affair with the ‘big picture’ philosophy of Ken Wilber. 

By 1990, I had come to recognise that my soul purpose was to be of service to others, and, with this in mind, I trained as a yoga teacher with the British Wheel of Yoga (1990-1993) and as a Mental Health Nurse, registering in 1992.

I spent the next ten years nursing in five Mental Health Trusts, navigating my way as therapist rather than biomedical interventionist. I worked in Acute Admission Units, Day Hospitals, a Therapeutic Community, an Addiction Centre and a Semi-Secure Unit.

During this time, I held yoga classes at Essex University, in day centres, gyms, an NHS elderly assessment unit, a chronic back pain clinic and, briefly in a primary school.

In 1996 I began training at the Manchester Institute for Psychotherapy, graduating in 2001. By the end of this training, I had a room in this Institute and ran a thriving practice. I quit nursing in 2000.

In 2000, I divorced my wife of 12 years and we both actively co-parented my son who was three years old at the time. My work, yoga teaching and the joy of parenthood kept me occupied for most of the next ten years.

I undertook the practices of Theravadan Buddhism in 2001 and completed several 5- and 10 day silent retreats at Amaravati Monastery.

In 2006, I began five years of Tibetan Buddhist practice (Kagyu lineage) under the supervision of a senior student of Kenchen Thrangu Rinpoche. 

In 2009, I founded the Calderdale Yoga Centre in Hebden Bridge which became a thriving regional hub for spiritual activity. I moved on in 2016; the Centre continues to thrive.

During this time, I qualified as a Provisional Supervisor and Trainer in Transactional Analysis and began a supervisory practice alongside my established psychotherapy clinic.

In 2015, I completed my training as a Certified Integral Psychotherapist in the USA with Mark Forman. 

2017; I graduated with Distinction as an Associate Life Coach with Integral Coaching Canada and added transformational coaching to my practice.

In the same year, my son fled the nest and I remarried and relocated to Hove on the UK south coast. It was then that my wife Rose and I embarked on a journey into the world of modern tantra and shamanism. (Rose had been a practitioner for fifteen years prior to this and it was she who initiated me). 

From 2017 to 2022 we served a five year apprenticeship with John Hawken, an internationally-renowned master of modern tantra and shamanism. We graduated as members of his Paths of Transformation Teaching Faculty. We have completed certificates in Tantric Bodywork (although I no longer engage in hands-on therapy in this respect). I also studied Bioenergetics with John in 2019. 

John is now in semi-retirement and bequeathed us his Tantric Lovemaking for Couples year-long three-module training course which we continue to run at his centre in the Czech Republic.

In 2020, Rose and I founded Find Your Magick, facilitating workshops in classical/modern tantra, shamanism, couples work, integral theory bioenergetics, dance and psychotherapy. We run workshops and retreats in the UK, Europe and Asia.

In 2020 I began to work with classical Tantra in the Trika lineage with Christopher Hareesh Wallis, completing a six-month immersion in 2021.

And in 2022, I was made Lead Facilitator for James Stevenson’s Awaken As Love retreats and have facilitated these worldwide.

As the above may indicate, I have devoted my life to teaching, facilitating and personally practising the means to living a life that places a spiritually-informed grown-up in the driving seat, carrying a detraumatised infant self as creative, joyful, innocent passenger-playmate.

What have these four decades taught me?

That all my life experience and education has been in the service of leading me into open-hearted innocence.

That everyone is trying to get by in the best way they can, which is a truely heroic endeavour, given the weight of ancestral trauma we carry and the way we inflict its patterning on one another. 

That, in the light of the foregoing, the exercise of love and compassion to all beings does not necessitate that we have to be ‘nice’ at all times. But it does suggest that if we navigate others with empathy and respect, we help the world and do not contribute to its current pain.  

That life is, at once, gorgeous and horrible and bizarre and dancing in it is… well, it is what it is. I personally find that hugs, kindness and chocolate smooth my path through it.