About

I’ve always loved learning, and I’ve always loved teaching. Whilst there is obviously some information shared in teaching, the discovery of innate talents and the embodiment of what has been learnt are way more interesting. I used to tell my massage students that my three tiers of a pass were ‘safe’, ‘effective’, and ‘competent’. And that can apply to learning most anything. Safe is having enough information to not do anything stupid. Effective is the applying of that information to do good. And competent is when the information has been absorbed and made our own. When we’re young, we learn by immersion, questions, and experimenting. As adults, we often lose the habit of asking, “But why?” I think I was one of the annoying kids who never grew out of that question. I’ll work things out, the hard way, from the ground up. Which has served me well throughout life. In my corporate IT career, I was the problem-solver. My methods were often considered radical, but they always came from a sound logic – and they delivered. Taking the long-overdue offer of redundancy, I was able to grow my second career in bodywork – massage, teaching massage and teaching Pilates. These reinforced for me the inward path of taking information and making it my own at every level. Intellectual knowledge is vital in this field, but it had to become how my body moved, and how I responded to the world. I loved helping people feel better and handle life more easily. But I noticed that there was a common theme amongst my clients when they were struggling. And that was a belief system that looked outward, rather than inward. They were intelligent people, but they had lost touch with their gut instinct. So, the timing was perfect for me when a friend introduced me to the Three Principles in 2014. At first, I thought this was just a nice community to hang out with. Without really meaning to, I slowly started coaching. But I knew that the changes I saw in my clients didn’t come from what I was saying – any more than the expansion I felt had come from the words I’d been taught. It was a natural step for me into studying nonduality. It was here I found the answers to questions that no one had been able to answer for me before. It explained why I’ve been a pretty happy person regardless of circumstances, and it explained what was going on when I wasn’t. The biggest thing was that it brought me home to my actual experience of reality – and gave me the conceptual understanding to help me describe it. In many ways, it was an adventure back to my roots. Through an intense three months in the Summer of 2018, I devoured the work of Rupert Spira and others, and I rediscovered my love of writing poetry. My collection of nondual poems, quintessence, was published by River Grove in April 2019. The advent of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020 brought interesting changes. I’d been working online for five years by then, including completing my most recent post-grad (this time in Psychology). So, I was lucky enough that my business continued, just without my favourite annual retreats, and with a lot less travelling. The extra time allowed me to study both the scientific work in the awakening field, and the wider spiritual arena. I’ve found a wonderful balance in the simplicity of teaching nonduality, and exploring modalities that offer practical support for my clients. The nondual understanding opens us up to exploring all of life, without believing that there is any particular way the exploration has to go. These days I hang out with my little cat colony, drink a lot of coffee, help clients solve life problems, support people who have been hurt by cult-like groups, host my local poetry society’s online gatherings, read, write, teach nonduality, and play with this expanded understanding of who we are and how it shows up. Even my long-standing business name, Living Life Sideways, now feels like a touch of anachronistic serendipity – when you see the reality of how the movie sets were constructed, you can’t be fooled by the façade, but you can still immerse yourself in the movie. What it all comes down to is that we can feel at ease, regardless of what is going on for us. And it’s so simple. But simple doesn’t always come easy when we have a lifetime of conditioning on top. So, I’m here to help clients uncover the simplicity, and reconnect with life. My books are part of that.