My Journey
A Path Well Travelled
Welcome … here is my story of how I ended up here …!
People often ask how I came to do the work I do today.
Like many meaningful journeys, it did not begin with a clear plan. It began with a crisis.
The Dark Wood
Around the year 2000, after the breakdown of my marriage, I found myself at one of the lowest points of my life. I was 38 years old and, if I am honest, I had no real sense of who I was anymore.
My self-worth had disappeared and I felt like a failure in many areas of life. For a while I played the familiar blame game, wanting to point the finger anywhere but at myself. Yet beneath all of that I knew something deeper was happening.
I had reached a crossroads.
The words of Dante captured exactly how I felt:
“In the middle of the road of my life
I awoke in a dark wood
where the true way was wholly lost.”
I had well and truly lost my bearings.
Yet what I did not realise at the time was that this moment marked the beginning of a very different journey — one of deep personal growth and awakening.
The Call
Not long after, two unexpected things happened.
First, I came across an old business card tucked away in the back of a bedside drawer, which led me to my first teacher and guide.
The second moment was even more striking.
While sitting in bed on holiday at a friend’s house in Spain, I opened a magazine and saw an advert for a journey to Peru — to the Andes, Machu Picchu and the Amazon — led by Dr Alberto Villoldo.
The moment I saw the image something extraordinary happened. Every hair on my body stood on end. It felt like an electric charge running through me.
In that moment, I knew without understanding why, that I just had to go.
At the time, I had no idea how such a journey would ever happen — yet somehow it did. And that journey opened the door to an entirely new way of seeing life.
I had received a call.
The Long Road of Learning
Over the years that followed I began exploring many different paths of personal development, healing and spiritual practice.
Along the way I had to face my own shadow — my struggles with self-worth, patterns of self-denial, alcohol, and the tendency to pretend everything was fine when it clearly was not.
There were many apparent wrong turns and dead ends, and many moments when I felt lost or wanted to give up altogether.
However, over time, I began to understand something important:
Those detours were not failures.
They were part of the teaching.
With the support of teachers, mentors and the steady encouragement of my wife, I gradually began to find a deeper sense of who I was and what life was asking of me.
What had begun as a personal crisis slowly became a rite of passage.
The Journey Through Four Phases
Looking back now, I can see that this journey moved through four distinct phases — a pattern I have since recognised in many deep life transitions and rites of passage.
The first was Endings — when the structures of my life began to fall away. My marriage ended, my old identity could no longer hold, and much of what I had relied upon began to unravel.
The second was Separation — being drawn away from the familiar world I had known. What had once seemed certain no longer fitted, and I found myself standing between an old life that was ending and a new one not yet visible.
The third was the long middle phase — a time of searching, learning and transformation. It was often uncertain and uncomfortable, yet it became the place where something deeper in me slowly began to take shape.
The fourth was Return — not a return to the life I had lived before, but an arrival into a different way of being: more grounded, more authentic, and more able to bring what I had learned into my relationships, my work and my place in the world.
The Work Today
Over the past three decades this journey has continued to shape the work I now offer.
My path has included:
- Training in hands-on healing through the British Alliance of Healing Associations
- A year exploring cross-cultural shamanic traditions and healing practices
- Training in Life Alignment, a system exploring subconscious patterns and energetic balance
- Long-term exploration of initiation work and rites of passage
- Nature-based practices reconnecting people with the wisdom of the natural world
- Facilitator training in Gender Reconciliation, supporting deeper understanding between men and women
My perspective has also been shaped by time spent living and travelling in different parts of the world.
I lived for fifteen years in Southern Africa, where I was immersed in African cultures and spiritual traditions. I have also spent time in Peru, learning from shamans in the Andes and Amazon, plus time with the San Bushman of the Kalahari, as well as participating in practices such as wilderness vigils, vision fasts and other rites of passage.
Through these experiences, I have come to see that many of the challenges we face in life — especially in midlife — are not signs that something has gone wrong.
Often, they are signs that something deeper is trying to emerge.
Walking With Others
Today I work with people who find themselves at similar crossroads in life — moments when the old ways no longer work and something new is asking to take shape.
These transitions can feel confusing, unsettling and even overwhelming.
Yet they can also become powerful gateways to deeper authenticity, clarity and renewed direction.
My role is simply to walk alongside others through these thresholds, offering guidance, reflection and the benefit of a path that I have walked myself.
Because sometimes what appears to be falling apart…
…may actually be something beginning to fall into place.