Teaching

I teach ways to use everything that happens, joyful and disastrous, as fuel help you to live a more meaningful, peaceful and fulfilling life. Meditation is our central training ground for this.

My teaching comes from many spiritual traditions, philosophies, religions, therapeutic approaches, books and trees climbs. It of course comes from my life experiences, including all my successes, failures, mistakes, losses, joys, depressions and everything in-between. I only teach what is true for me, tried, tested and lived.

I have been called the “Ted Lasso of meditation”. I’m not sure what that means. I’ve never seen it.

Training and Experience

While I have trained with some established organisations I don’t associate my teaching with any single approach. 

About Me (Photos – so the story checks out)

When I was a kid, maybe 11 years old, I always had the question in my head, “how do I know that I am me?” I couldn’t work out why I was conscious of myself.  This might have been the beginning of my curiosity that there could be more to this human life than meets the eye.

My spiritual search really began in my early 20s. As a young adult I found myself pursuing my dream of becoming a rock star. Music has been a passion and a thread that has run throughout my life. It began with learning to play the drums age 11 and after that magical discovery I never wanted to do anything else. After studying music at the only university that would accept me (I didn’t get great grades) I went to a drum school (yes they exist) and immersed myself in practice with the aim to become a session drummer. As luck and perseverance would have it, I got my dream job of becoming a rock star age 23.

My band signed a record deal with a major label and we were whisked of into a whirlwind of music industry madness. I toured the world, played huge venues, recorded in some legendary studios, and met some of my music heroes (Daniel Lanois, Slash, Peter Gabriel). I lived the dream but it soon wore off.  I began to feel really depleted and empty as now I’d found my dream job and there was nowhere to go from there.  I turned to philosophy, yoga and self help books and joined a local Buddhist centre who would send me cassette tapes of talks and meditations to listen to on tour buses.

The music dream ended abruptly as often happens in the music industry. Then I really wasn’t happy. After a week of it ending, I had a job in a call centre selling baby accessories.  A few months later and I was suffering from anxiety and depression and really hit the ground. I stepped up my meditation practice a few notches desperate to feel better. I meditated every day. This woke up my curious 12-year-old self again and the question of ‘how do I know I am me’ became ‘how can I feel at ease regardless of external circumstances?’. Eventually I moved through the depression (with the help of meditation) and my anxiety softened greatly. There was no magic fix, moment of awakening but rather a gradually letting life be with a deeper kindness towards myself.

In 2010, I decided to begin teaching what I had discovered. Over the years my teaching and practice has grown and evolved, as it should. I’m always learning, always a student.

Side Note

All that you’ve read above is just my story. One I’ve told many times and in many different ways. It is a  (sometimes) helpful map to see where I’ve been. But it can be a precarious and limiting thing to live by your story, one that can be interpreted in a million different ways. It is much more freeing and exciting to live from this moment, without the narrative, where anything is possible. 

What would you do today if there was no story?