About
Bio:
They say 'you are how you coach'. A typically clever coachy thing to say. But it's true, my life experience and learning characterise my approach.
Born in London in 1972, raised in middle-class Buckinghamshire, I was a prodigious academic and musical child, and very unruly. My dad (a musician) died when I was 13, ending my musical enthusiasm and beginning a lifelong journey with masculine identity, grief and retrieving creative purpose.
By the time I was 16 I thought I knew everything. Then a psychedelic experience shattered my clever little world-view, and started a lifelong interest in personal transformation and enquiry into the unknown (and some dark chapters of addiction and depression).
I dropped out of university to be an entrepreneur, intoxicated with early stage Bransonitis, and fortuitously stumbled into an Anthony Robbins workshop. Synchronicity, clarity and flow erupted. I went health-mad and got seriously ambitious, with business projects and with spiritual development.
Through the 90s I had a string of successful startups, that all went disastrously wrong. I had cutting-edge ideas (London's first juice bars; an early-stage internet project on sustainability) but was long on inspiration and short on aptitude. Plus, my motivations were all skewed: puffed up with privilege and spiritual ego I was chasing other people's dreams to cover up for unspent grief. I was totally lost, but couldn't see it and when the juice business went down – 50 employees and a lot of debt – I crashed, slowly. I didn't like the worlds I was moving in, or who I was becoming within them. The spiritual groups I'd been involved with had collapsed in politics and delusion, the vivid clarity of my 'awakening' times was a memory. All that was left was morning-pages and my yoga practice. So I got rid of my possessions, bought a guitar and followed a wonderful girl, to India.
I stayed for over 3 years, ending up in business with a friend from Delhi; living downtown, fully immersed (I didn’t manage to hold onto the girl..). I did a lot of chi kung and yoga; took some amazing pictures, and landed a broadcast film project on call-centres; studied permaculture, biodynamics, biogas systems and took a lot of trains.
I thought I was going to stay, but fortune tripped me up again, into a shamanic ceremony, which swept me off my yoga mat into a deep enquiry of shamanism and some long periods in South America. It also seriously reactivated my social conscience, and I launched another environmental media project.
After 3 years and a lot of trying, it burned out, and took the last of my entrepreneurial zeal with it. As that door was closing I discovered the Constellations work and knew instantly that it was the seed of real purpose. I felt called. What was most important though, was that I decided: I had to give up the idea that I could be anything, and resolve to do something. To move from career as identity — something seen from outside, to career as action — something emerging from the inside.
I spent 11 years in training and development before I started my practice — and honestly, I would probably still be training if it wasn’t for the kids. I needed the pressure of meeting a growing family economy to finally get my nose out of my navel. And, the actual business of being a parent and sticking with a marriage is by far and away the most important part of my developmental process: because it required dealing with feelings. Both my elite education and my transcendental philosophy had conveniently avoided the ugly business of what happens below the neck. Which it turns out, is where magic actually happens.
I thought the pursuit of magic would involve monastic austerities, esoteric schools, astral travel. But developing my magical anatomy started with hundreds of hours of holding crying infants, followed by a several years of warring children. Being ‘undone’ by all of that, as well as managing the emotional chaos — internal and external — of the household that has to contain it all, changed me in the best, hardest way. The trainings gave me incredible tools. Family life (and my client work) carved out my capacity.
“Magic is science we don’t understand”. My good fortune has been to experience some in-your-face, unequivocal, unexplainable stuff early on, that created a strong appetite for more of that. As you know, if you’re looking for something, you’ll find it. So I’ve seen some things over the years and have absolutely no doubt that this reality is full of magic we don’t, yet, understand.
“Magic includes charlatanism and baloney!” I’ve also fallen into cults, the thrall of group-think, and had some painful, costly encounters with the universal human capacity for self-deception, illusion and delusion.
All of this qualifies me as a good guide on the path. The perspective I like to bring is that of the natural scientist: open enquiry, body as laboratory, experience over belief. We have extraordinary capacities beyond our minds — intuition, feeling, somatic intelligence, the pull of ancestral and knowing fields, muses, genius — and an incredible array of tools and techniques to develop them. It’s the work of the evolving human and it’s what I love to do.
I work with individuals and small groups, in person and online. I run events and retreats — in the UK and Europe, and write a monthly newsletter. Amid all the horror and dire news, there is a tremendous counter current of inspired, determined people doing all manner of things. I want to be among them.
To book a tune-in call, make contact now.
Training
Systemic work:
Systemic coaching 1 & 2: The Whole Partnership
Systemic Ritual: Daan Van Kampenhout
Family Constellations Practitioner: Centre for Systemic Constellations UK
Other training:
Non Violent Communication: Foundation and Findhorn Intensive
Process, Shadow work and emotional fluency, 4 year development group: Deep Soul Connection
Chi Kung, yoga and meditation: many week-long, fortnight & 4 week trainings over 25 years
Dedicated pursuits:
Healing foods and natural lifestyle
Somatics, body intelligence, natural movement
Sexual energy cultivation
Breathwork
Grief work
Men's circles and retreats
Progressive parenting
Shamanism, ceremony & sweat lodge
Permacultural design