Having been a member of the UK Deep Ecology core group in the 1990s, I trained with Joanna at two intensives: one at Schumacher College in the late 1990s and one that I organised for her at Plas Taliaris, in Carmarthenshire in West Wales in 2000. At Plas Taliaris I also arranged and attended an intensive with John Seed who developed, with others, the Council of All Beings activity.
I have facilitated the Work that Reconnects both in Wales, and in Devon, UK, where I now live, the last time in 2014. As a youth and community worker I was the principal founder of the Meanwood Valley Urban Farm in Leeds. Through that I discovered Earth Education, and continued practising environmental education while working subsequently as a forestry manager, latterly as a Forest School leader. My interest and involvement in ecoliteracy led me to a Master’s degree in Education by Research (2012/13).
As a burnt out community worker I needed psychotherapy, then trained and practised in Reichian Character Analysis and Bodywork.. Having retired from land-based work – I was until recently running a Social and Therapeutic Horticulture project – I am returning to therapy and healing, having retrained as a healer, and advertising myself as an Ecotherapist1 I am currently training in both Touch for Health and Systemic Family Constellations; and have done nature constellations workshops with both Jenny Mackewn and Melisa Roussopoulos and .
What else? I have Buddhist training, for nearly 12 years as a student of John Garrie Roshi. I enjoy cycling and walking. I am making more time now for storytelling, and drama, and am currently developing some work with people in later life, having done some work already using a form for story-making with people with a dementia.
Why I am called to facilitate the Work
Ever since I first encountered this work, I have felt that it reaches the parts that other practices do not, including our largely forgotten need for collective ritual and for remembering our largely forgotten membership of the Earth Community - our own true nature. When I was first involved, when the work was called Despair and Empowerment, the emphasis was more on the grief; now this has been balanced, rightly, expressing our gratitude also.
I am setting up again as a therapist and healer, having not practised for a number of years, and making it clear that I am coming from a perspective of ecopsychology/ecotherapy. Included in my new publicity is Joanna’s account of the Shambhala Warriors legend, which … resonates. If it is not too great a claim, it is to this that I am called.
‘As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of being.’ Mother Julian of Norwich (1342 – c.1416).
World servers are nothing new. What is new is the urgency of the situation.
How I see the Work serving the Great Turning
In addition to Nature Connection, I particularly love the deep time work that counters the speeding up of time in the 24/7 marketplace, and redresses the paradoxically restless ‘eternal present’ of consumerism’s bright lights.
I am currently training in Systemic Family Constellations, whose founder, Bert Hellinger, likened collective trauma to boulders disturbing the flow of the river of love from generation to generation. This is soul work, removing or dissolving these boulders - and slow work-as is the Work that Reconnects.
I appreciate the systems thinking, which offers a comprehensive understanding of cultural change, hopefully of the evolution of human consciousness from adolescence to adulthood! In systems terms we are seeing what we all glibly expected, that things will get worse before they get better. What tWtR and the systems perspective gives us is an overview, which helps us to carry on…!
In terms of Transformative Learning Theory, these changes of perspective are changing minds, restoring core values and expanding self-concepts and identities towards embracing the ecological self, beyond the ‘skin-encapsulated ego. This is all the more possible because this is participatory learning. (I once attended a staged conversation between Joanna and Arne Naess at Dartington Hall, the latter, or rather his flowers, for all his brilliance, being much more in their heads.)
Audiences I work with
I have worked with young people most of my life, in addition to adults. Now I am developing work with people in later life, including those living with a dementia, incorporating the perspective of the Work that Reconnects, as in everything, into storying and drama activities and programmes. My therapy and counselling work comes from ecopsychology and ecotherapy: healing, i.e. working towards wholeness, is effected by recognising and re-building the relationship of interdependence and interconnection with the natural world, remembering our own true nature; the corollary is that human psychological distress is (always, inevitably, to a degree) currently bound up with the environmental crisis, with ecological destruction and climate change down to human agency.
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