I have always had a pioneering spirit. Maybe it’s because I’m a New Zealander; there’s a joke that we can fix anything with a bit of no. 8 fencing wire.

After completing a degree in educational psychology and Maori,  I worked as a software developer in the 80s.

I came to the UK in 1986 and got freelance contracting work as an Assembler and C++ programmer. I worked mainly at British Airways, in the banking sector and at a software house.

I started training as a therapist in 1993. I’ve worked with clients since 1997 and full time since 2000, when I moved away completely from my software work.

I trained at Spectrum and am a BACP-registered and accredited psychotherapist. I am also trained in EMDR, a trauma technology.

After learning to have confidence in my mind and my heart, I learned to trust my body and my senses as a somatic practitioner in the 00s. A big part of my training as an accredited therapist has been in Formative Psychology, a somatic-based methodology.

Since 2010 I have learned to trust awareness itself – the perspective within which everything arises. I have been attending regular retreats and am trained to deliver the Mondo Zen protocol, the brainchild – or heartchild – of Junpo Denis Kelly Roshi.

If even opinions and judgements arise within this awareness, then clearly there is an aspect of mind above the thinking mind. It’s the subject, so can’t be seen as an object. But it can be rested in.

In these last five years I have learned to trust my own essential nature – that bit of all of us that we often learn to deny in our formative years.

When we can hold mind, body and the wave of experience – observer, particle and wave – as one, we supports the registering of an experience of wholeness that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

We can learn to make conscious, and manage, the unconscious reactions of fight, flight and freeze.

By practicing staying present, embodied and emotionally available, regardless of provocative events or personal habits, you will learn with me how to reconnect to and register this essential nature in you.

It’s what I am most passionate about.

As we reorganise these behaviours of contraction, rigidity, collapse or disconnection, we are not ‘getting over’ or ending the feelings of anger, fear and shame. We are transforming them. The voltage that we have experienced as these ‘negative’ feelings, is the voltage of our very being.

We can then experience fear as excitement, shame as courage and anger as deep caring.

This is what Formative Psychology and Mondo Zen are all about.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. ~ T.S. Eliot.

We need to learn to trust the life in each of us like our lives depend on it.
Because they do. The life in us is the map.

We can each learn to notice what triggers us and to pay close attention to the experience we are not allowing. This requires practice – to stay physically present, emotionally available and mentally awake. But it’s worth it.

I want nothing less than to help you cultivate this conversation between awareness, bodily form and life force and then to be what emerges, without hesitation.

E = MC squared. The energy in you that you’ve been not listening to is equivalent to your mass x the speed of light squared. That’s apparently about a zillion times more powerful than an atom bomb. Thats how much we’ve been ignoring, preferring an outdated (but necessary) story about being crap.