The following is an edited extract from chapter2 of my book ‘Waking Dreams’: Everyone is imaginative. To imagine is an innate ability that can be enhanced with the appropriate care and attention. What creates the belief of not being an imaginative person is usually the assumption that imagining is a kind of alternate realm separated …
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Image-Centric Psychotherapy
The following is an edited extract from my book ‘Waking Dreams’: While the images found in memories, in-the-moment perceptions, and future fantasies constitute the raw material of any psychotherapy, conventional approaches often treat images as of only secondary importance. Typically, after a brief description of any such imagery, the therapist will focus upon the feeling …
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Childhood Enchantment
An edited extract from my book ‘Waking Dreams’, from chapter 5 ‘Animistic Imagination’: Animism is the attribution of human qualities and status to non-human creatures, places, and things. While the original coinage by Victorian anthropologists was a pejorative description of the spirit beliefs of so-called primitive people, in recent times animism has been having something …
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The Imagined World
-an extract from my book ‘Waking Dreams’, p52 To walk down any street is an effortless immersion within a fully imagined world. The surrounding image environment appears without any conscious effort to “stand back” and “see what is really there”. Spindly dark lines in the middle distance, a pale blue expanse overhead, and a nearby …
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Modern Alienation and Ancestral Sanity
I recall an encounter with a sheep, the end of my meditation career and take an evolutionary psychology perspective to discuss why spending time in nature is such a healing antidote to the alienating effects of rapid cultural change. Part 1. the touch of the world The same little sheep family came back each night. …
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Embodied and Embedded: Interview
The following is an interview I did with the Psychosynthesis Trust late summer 2018, about a series of three talks and a day workshop that i curated on the theme of ‘Embodied and Embedded’. The interview touches on the ‘wild imagination’ approach i took in the talk, ‘The Inner Child Breaks Out’ and the workshop, …
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Embodied and Embedded: Q&A
The following Q&A is an interview I did early autumn 2018 with the Psychosynthesis Trust about a series of three talks and a day event i curated under the theme of ‘Embodied and Embedded’. I touch on the theme and go on to describe something of the ‘wild imagination’ approach i’ve taken towards it …
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A fairy tale of forgotten stories
The Little Bird
My first steps towards wild imagination were literally that: a walk taken across dirt and scrub to sooth an addled mind. It was also the beginnings of a way back to my earlier life as a dog walker. I walked in long straight lines. A favourite was between Hyde Park Corner and Kensington Gardens where …
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The Bird Feeder
Birds feasted on a litter of breads around the pond. Canadian geese, mallard ducks, song thrushes, magpies and contented, cooing pigeons. Too many birds and too many species together in one place, as though I had walked onto the set of a Hitchcock movie. A crow stood on a loaf, head-butting a hole into it. …
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