Blog
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
A fairy tale of forgotten stories
Once upon a time all stories were local and spoken stories. And then one day a great transformation spread out across the kingdom. The spoken stories were written down. And this changed the stories and it changed the people too. Stitched into books, the 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...
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...
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...
