Warmest greetings and welcome.
I live with my wife and our young dog in the West Country, the beautiful south-west of England, a land of rivers, moor and woodland, cliffs, beaches and ocean.
How did I find the Diamond Approach - or rather, how did it find me?
In the summer of 1990, I was travelling down the west coast of the United States, and for a short while I stayed in California's Bay Area to visit family. While I was there I met a student of the Diamond Approach, who pointed me towards Hameed's books.
I was already beginning to develop a deep interest in both psychology and spirituality, but back then these two worlds seemed very separate. Hameed's work, as we know, unites these seemingly different disciplines, or more accurately, shows that they are a single whole, a unity.
I quickly realised that this teaching was what I had been looking for. My inner flame had found its home, and in 1991 I joined the first group to meet in Europe. The Diamond Approach has been at the centre of my life ever since.
I have been working in the UK as a psychotherapist for about twenty years now. More recently the Diamond Approach teacher training called me, and I joined the European RISNG seminary in 2012.
I have been ordained to teach since 2022, and I'm working both in person and online with students. Please get in touch if you think you'd like to have an initial conversation about our working together.
If you'd like to know more about me and my background, please visit my psychotherapy website, which will give you more of a sense of what has shaped my own path and training.
If you think you might like to work with me, I always offer a short free meeting, online or in person. Don't hesitate to contact me to arrange this first meeting.
Because I was a student in a group that met in Germany, it was there that I first became aware of the work of Jean Gebser.
Gebser (1905-1973) was a brilliant philosopher, poet, translator, traveller, and much more. He is well-known in Germany, in academic and spiritual circles, and more widely too.
For example, Universitas, an influential German state-funded academic review, once selected its three most important German-speaking thinkers of the twentieth century.
You will have heard of the first two people chosen - Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud.
Jean Gebser was the third person on the list.
Yet in the English-speaking world, few of us know much if anything about him.
It was only in 2011 that I started to read his work more closely. Back then I wrote an introductory article about Gebser and his work, recently edited and expanded, and I have now posted it on Medium.