Body
Energy & matter
Hi.
Welcome to my website.
I’ve decided to put all my content here, rather than write a book, because I want to disrupt the way we approach spirituality. Rather than write a book with one cohesive idea that progresses in a logical order, I wanted to create something that was more interactive and distributed – kind of like an invitation to weave your own tapestry of spiritual practice.
This feels more representative of the spiritual path to me. Everyone is on their own unique journey and has their own personal desires and challenges to face. As far as I’m concerned the objective is to become more intimately in touch with your full experience of and expression in the world.
My content is here to help you to learn to be radically present in your own experience.
What do I mean by radically present? I mean showing up whole-heartedly in validating, loving and respecting your own experience while also embracing a humility that allows you to accept that experience may not be what you first think it is.
To get clarity on your experience both in a broad social and cosmic sense and in a refined phenomenological sense.
To give yourself permission to embrace the mystery and go on a journey of exploration where you can uncover new parts of yourself, of experience and of the cosmos. To stop categorising parts of yourself into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and start connecting with what’s honest, real, impactful, alive and mysterious in a truly joyful way.
This page is here to give you some guidance about where to start with all this content and how to navigate it.
At its core, my teaching is about choosing connection and inclusion, of your own experience and others, rather than transcendence. It’s about finding beauty in the full range of human and cosmic experience. It’s an invitation to connect more deeply with all aspects of experience, in service of cultivating more joyful presence.
One of the strongest philosophical threads you will find running throughout everything here is that it is through facing our challenges, vulnerabilities and darkness with a strong and open heart that we create clarity and this capacity for joyful presence in life. Life is hard; there is no final way to escape this but we can live in radically more meaningful and rewarding ways than most people believe is possible.
Everyone has some sadness and anger in them, most people have quite a lot, and the one thing I have learned without fail from teaching is that you can’t open to the depths of experience until you’ve opened to grief.
A lot of my content is about cultivating the self-respect and self-love you need to be able to show up fully in your life and for your experience. Coming from a place of wholeness and moving towards a place of generosity and care for yourself and others.
The best way to engage with this website is as an invitation to connect with the full spectrum of your being. To learn to meet experience with courage, compassion, clarity and joy; for the benefit of you, the people you love and all beings.
“Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.” Khalil Gibran
The Structure
Everything I share is created on the foundation that each of us is a body-heart-mind-soul, and that we exist in symbiosis with our environment.
From a technical viewpoint of experience, all of these aspects of ourselves and our experience arise interdependently together. In simple terms, this means that if you took one of these parts out, our experience as humans would no longer exist.
It’s not possible to experience a mind without a body. It’s not possible to experience a heart without a soul etc. Every part relies on every other part to arise in experience.
A good place to start with this is by feeling into the different parts of you and getting an understanding and felt-sense of what each of them means. To really start to grok these aspects of your being. This will give you an intuitive and conceptual base from which to work with the content that it is here and this will allow you to go much deeper, much quicker.
As a general overview, the body is about our physicality.
The heart is about how we feel and connect to things.
The mind is to do with clarity and how we perceive and understand life and ourselves.
The soul is the story and meaning that holds our experience together.
And the collective is the environment we find ourselves in.
The purpose of my content is to help you feel into and connect with these different parts of yourself and the world with more clarity, sensitivity and depth.
This structure is here to represent the building blocks of experience. As you feel into this model, you may start to discover synergies with existing models you interact with.
One that I resonate most deeply with and that informed a lot of my thinking is the elements:
- Body – Earth
- Heart – Fire
- Mind – Air
- Soul – Water
- Collective – Ether
Another one that helps me feel into the archetypal qualities of these parts and use them in coaching is the Shadow Work Four Quarter Model:
- Body – Warrior
- Heart – Lover
- Mind – Magician
- Soul – Sovereign
- Collective – Collective Conscious
Another framework that a lot of people are familiar and that demonstrates the importance of working with all the different aspects of ourselves is Ken Wilber’s:
- Body – Show Up
- Heart – Grow Up
- Mind – Wake Up
- Soul – Clean Up
Throughout my website I have organised the content according to these parts – body, heart, mind, soul and ‘more’. I have used ‘more’ to describe our collective space and environment to represent the infinite and ethereal nature of the Universe we find ourselves in.
Where to Start
My framework can be a bit difficult to get your head around at first. This is somewhat intentional, in that it’s designed to break the idea that experience can be fully comprehended by our minds.
It’s an experience to be embodied, felt, sensed, expressed and understood.
It is, however, important that we take our heads along on the journey with us and having a conceptual understanding can help us engage with things more deeply.
This map lays out the layers of relating to awakening and experience in this way and has been designed to make sense to the mind, so it can be a good place to start.
For working with your own practice, I’d always recommend starting with an intention setting exercise. This helps you tune-in to what is important to you in life and practice and move from the inside-out, rather than towards an unrealistic or unattainable expectation of what practice can create.
I would also recommend reading my short dictionary. It has some brief definitions of words that I use a lot in very specific ways that will help you understand my writing with more depth and clarity.
If you’d like to know more about me and my journey, I’d recommend reading my poetry book, which tells the story of my awakening.
Understanding
If you’d like to get an understanding of the context and frameworks that will help you be more present in life, then I’d recommend reading through my writing.
It is presented in an order that I think will be most helpful to read it in and the posts are numbered so that you can work your way through it, more like a book.
But each post is also written to stand alone with a clear and descriptive title, so you can also follow your intuition around and just read what feels important to you at the moment if you prefer.
Awakening
If you want to get an understanding of the different aspects of your being and what it means to awaken them, then you can look at my whole being framework.
If you want to find out which area of experience you are most drawn to, there is a quiz to help you identify which area of awakening to focus on.
Practicing
If you want to focus on practicing and becoming a healthy and embodied version of yourself in the world, then start with the practice guides.
If you’re looking for somewhere to start your practice, there’s a quiz to help you identify which area of practice would be most beneficial for you.
Darkness and Sincerity
Shadows can be incredibly deeply-rooted and hard to shift. Especially when you are reading content, rather than working with someone one-to-one or face-to-face.
We hold ideas that certain parts of ourselves or experience aren’t welcome and at least some of this is usually so ingrained that we can’t even see it within ourselves. These beliefs will shape how we interpret everything. It is worth bearing this in mind when you are reading my content.
Know that your darkness is very welcome here. Depression, anger, hatred, pain, disdain, anxiety, stress, fear, violent thoughts and feelings and all the other aspects of ourselves that we often hide away or repress are all parts of the human experience.
We need to learn to connect with these parts, as well as our more beautiful parts, so that we can be whole and real, with ourselves and each other. Not from a place of self-hatred and blame, but from a place of self-respect and a deep compassion for how hard life is. Acknowledging that all these things are part of our survival mechanisms and the ways we’ve learned to be less than whole in the world, when we were just doing our best to get along.
Underneath or inside every shadow is a little bit of gold – a healthy part of us that wants to come home and be integrated into a heartful way of being and it is through going to these places that we are able to uncover and connect with it.
It is through this process that we are able to unlock deep and lasting states of pleasure, connection, clarity and resilience in life, to become more full, expressive versions of ourselves.
It’s also just more real and honest and that, in and of itself, is a relief.
Group Work
I’m a huge believer in the importance of friendship and working in groups to complement our contemplative practice.
Learning to communicate openly and sincerely with people about the full spectrum of your experience from a place of owning your own projections is one of the most powerful things you can do for coming into presence.
Being welcomed into a more spacious and accepting environment can also create a lot of ease and ability to go deeper with practice, much faster.
Also, life is collaborative and we only exist in our relationships, so bringing this aspect into practice means we are more likely to make lasting and meaningful changes that carry into our daily lives.
Group work can be within a formal practice environment, but it can also just be done with friends.
I have collated and created a wide range of practices for helping people to learn and practice connecting in this way.
Teachers
I’d recommend building your spiritual library as if you are collating a team to support you in your growth.
The content that you read and listen to is like an extension of the people you engage with in the real world. Find people that feel inspiring in a real-life way, the sort of people you would like to be around, rather than some authority figure who is telling you what to do with your life.
Hopefully I can be one of these to you.
Remember to Have Fun
The path can be hard and taking it too seriously is incredibly counter-productive. If you can find some people and practices where you can engage with the path seriously while also having some fun with it, then you are onto a winner.
Enjoying the process of spiritual growth and finding it rewarding is half the point anyway.
“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Albert Camus
Good luck and Godspeed.
Donate
All my content is available for free. If you have found it useful, please consider donating the cost of a book through Paypal (£10 – 20). I really appreciate your support.