About me
This section is designed to give you an idea of who I am and where I'm coming from which I hope will help you decide that you'd love to meet me and that we will have an opportunity to share the adventure of these 'Great Turning Times'. In April, I gathered with some of the people offering 'The Work that Reconnects' here and in Europe to spend a weekend training with Fran and Joanna Macy. It was such an inspirational weekend and has lead into the latest batch of workshops on different aspects of the work that reconnects.
The Goodwill Patterns lie at the heart of all I do because they are so central to who I am. I imagined when I set up this website that I would be teaching these and have published my book about them but actually what's happened is that beautiful people have connected with me through this website and we share our experiences of working with these exercises. If you'd like to join us, please get in touch.
The Goodwill Patterns are the tools I use to help me wrap my head around the challenges I face. I was diagnosed with CFS/ME in September and have been on quite a journey learning to understand the condition and manage my life within the boundaries it creates. Looking for the good in being ill (yet again) has been challenging but working with the Goodwill Patterns has helped enormously. I have come to see that the gift this time is that I am forced lead a life that is more balanced, to take care of myself in a way that still goes against the grain somewhat. I'm learning to play the piano and to love gardening.
My background is in counselling but I am convinced now that the skills I taught counsellors are human, not specialist skills. We all need to learn to relate to ourselves and others with greater insight and compassion. I left counselling because I want to 'melt the walls'. I think there is a real danger of professionalising human compassion. In the Autumn, I'm piloting a course on communicating in situations of conflict. My approach is based on the assumption that the other person is totally uncooperative, which I find is generally a safe assumption to make. My intention is to develop another manual similar to 'The Goodwill Patterns' on handling conflict in the real world.
When I left Northern Ireland, I left behind my identity as 'counsellor' and in the last five years have learnt a great deal about why I chose this career and its benefits and drawbacks for my growth as a 'self-actualising individual' (the goal of the person-centred therapy I trained in). I was, at the time, disillusioned with the profession and pretty well burnt out. In the twenty years I worked as a counsellor, I went from working mainly with drug users to specialising in counselling abuse survivors and then people bereaved by murder and suicide. I have benefited enormously from the years of training I've undertaken and all the different approaches to working with people in distress that I've had the opportunities to explore. I always feel particularly blessed to have worked with the team at Durham University where I was trained to work to the highest standards.
As a counsellor, I used the reservoir of my own experiences of grief and pain to help others. I had my first child adopted; a decision I took believing that it offered him the best possible chance of growing up loved and celebrated as every child deserves to be. I could not change how the pain of that loss threaded through every day of my life, but it meant that whatever distress a client expressed, I was with them on their journey into the depths of themselves. I loved my work, witnessed and participated in many amazing journeys towards integration, wholeness and happiness.
But I had become 'the wounded healer, who through compassion and empathy can heal others yet who cannot heal his own hurt' and this was reflected in developing a goitre, representing, I reckon, the fact that a counsellor listens and reflects back but does not say their 'piece'. We are not there to advice. I now think I hid somewhere in the silence of the counsellor, learnt not to speak my truth. There are many factors that fed into my decision to stop working as a counsellor but I am convinced that the famous core conditions of Rogerian counselling, authenticity, empathy and 'unconditional positive regard' (why do we shy away from the word love?) are a way of being in the world, not skills to be exercised only by a counsellor in the safety of a counselling room. And it is how I want to be.
The shifts I've been through in the last few years have lead me from the position of the counsellor who stays silent to that of the Bard who speaks out. No-one could feel the honour of being chaired as the 'Chief Bard of Ynys Witrin' last year more deeply than I did. It's been a powerful initiation and as I look now at how my life has developed since I left counselling I am affirmed in the decision and delighted to have found other ways of serving that satisfy my spirit even more deeply. The most powerful experience of performing I've had since winning the Gorsedd with 'The Power of Nine' was the first time I said 'Weep and Pray' as part of the Strange Sisters inaugural performance. I can feel over-exposed when I say my poems because they come straight from the heart. But in that moment, I felt like everyone in the room was with me as I spoke. It was an initiation into my power, into speaking my truth and being heard. These people really wanted to hear what I have to say.
My work is still about helping people become more truly themselves. But now rather than framing this as remedial work for the wounded, I see it as working with others in circles of equals so we can align with inner truth and then, as self-actualising people, do the work for which we are on the planet at this time of crisis. We face such huge challenges in the years ahead. I pray that we all become the effective agents of change the world needs at this time. Whatever part I can play in that process, I ask the angels to grant me the opportunity to play it. May you, who read this, be called to participate in the circles that serve your highest good. Blessings on your path.
