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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Parklife
I got off the bus and walked back along the pavement. It was late afternoon towards the end of January. Seven Sisters Road was a line of idling traffic heading out of the city, a tunnel of headlamps. I turned through a side-gate in the fence and stepped into Finsbury Park. The lights from the …
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